For decades, people across Florida have reported seeing something large, hairy and foul-smelling moving through the swamps, mangroves and forests of the state.

They call it the Skunk Ape.

In this episode of The Southern Blueprint, we head into the Florida wilderness to trace the strange history of one of the South’s most famous cryptids. We’ll look at the terrifying 1977 encounters that drove the Stoeckman family from their home in Key Largo, a bizarre 1974 incident along U.S. 27, police encounters, the Florida legislator who actually tried to protect the creature, and the man who has spent most of his life searching Big Cypress for it.

We’ll also dig into the 1997 wave of sightings, Dave Shealy and the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, the mysterious Myakka photographs, possible escaped primates, black bears, modern videos and the question that has followed the legend for more than fifty years:

Is the Skunk Ape simply one of Florida’s greatest pieces of folklore?

Or is there really something out there in the swamp?

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Few names are as deeply woven into the history and folklore of New Orleans as Marie Laveau.

She was a real woman who became something much larger: a Voudou leader, healer, devout Catholic, confidante, and eventually the legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Nearly 150 years after her death, stories still surround her—secret ceremonies, gris-gris, Grand Zombi, courtroom magic, mysterious disappearances, ghostly encounters, and a tomb where generations of people have gone to ask Marie for help.

But where does the real Marie Laveau end and the legend begin?

In this Spooky Season episode of The Southern Blueprint Podcast, we go back to nineteenth-century New Orleans to follow Marie’s life, the rise of New Orleans Voudou, the strange stories that followed her while she was alive, and the even stranger ones that began after she died.

And maybe the biggest question of all: What if at least some of the stories about Marie Laveau were true?

🎃 Spooky Season has officially begun at The Southern Blueprint.

If you enjoy Southern history, folklore, strange stories, books, travel, bourbon, the outdoors and everything else we explore here, come join us inside The Hidden Pine Lodge, the private club of The Southern Blueprint. Membership is just $4/month and includes exclusive Patreon content plus access to our private Discord and the community we’re building around all of this.

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In July of 1987, 42-year-old Ann Robertson Jones was found murdered inside her home in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

At the time, Pigeon Forge was becoming one of the South’s most familiar family vacation destinations. Dollywood had opened the year before. Tourism was booming. Families were pouring into Sevier County for cabins, souvenir shops, mountain views, and the promise of a Smoky Mountain getaway.

But beneath that bright image of Pigeon Forge is one of the darkest cases in the town’s history.

Ann was a mother and local business owner who ran the Wild Hare T-shirt Shop in Settler’s Village. Her murder would lead investigators into a disturbing story involving Gary June Caughron, a 27-year-old man working near the shopping center, and April Ward, a 14-year-old girl whose testimony would become central to the case.

This true crime episode follows the full story: the events leading up to Ann’s murder, the brutal crime scene, the nearly year-long investigation, April Ward’s statements, the evidence against Gary Caughron, the questions raised by the defense, the trial, the death sentence, the later appeals, and the parole fight decades later.

This is a difficult and disturbing case, but it is also one that deserves to be told carefully, with Ann Robertson Jones kept at the center of the story.