IT WAS LATE WHEN WE PULLED INTO the Trail Lakes Campground. My friend Sarah and I had driven from her home in Arcadia, Florida, to Naples, where we picked up her friend Elette. From there we began cruising into the Everglades on the Tamiami Trail, a passageway that starts in Tampa and turns into a two-lane highway that connects Naples on the west coast of Florida with Miami on the east. A chorus of chirping insects filled the night sky as we cruised through the saw grass lining the roads. Not a lot was out here—an occasional crab shack or billboard for an airboat tour. Our destination was Ochopee, a small, unincorporated community close to Everglades City, a town of less than five hundred people.
Arriving at Ochopee, we followed a road down into the campground and found the “night office,” a trailer where a heavyset, mustached man in a baseball cap was smoking a cigarette and leaning on the trailer’s small wooden porch. He introduced himself as Kelly, “but folks call me Kell.”
I explained to him that my friends were dropping me off and that I wanted a site to set up my tent so I could camp out for two nights. Kell jumped on a four-wheeler and led us deeper into the campground. There were giant piles of dirt and construction machinery everywhere—a bulldozer and a backhoe with a bumper sticker slapped on it, inviting the reader to ASK ME ABOUT THE SKUNK APE. It was a mix between a campground and a construction zone.
“This is a good one,” he said, pointing to a site near a palm tree and a giant fern plant. “High ground, won’t flood. The bathrooms are over there,” he said, pointing into the complete darkness. “Make sure you shine your flashlight on the ground in front of you. There’s potholes and piles of dirt and sometimes snakes.”
“Snakes?” I said.
“Rattlesnakes, sometimes, yeah. Look out for them.”
“Any other animals I should look out for?”
“Naw,” Kell said, thinking a moment. “I haven’t seen any gators here in a while.”
I quickly set up my tent in the headlights of Sarah’s car. Hundreds of bugs were descending, attracted by the light. I started a fire, and then Sarah and Elette wished me luck and took off. I sat down by the fire. Now I was alone in the swamp.
The next morning I woke early, along with the hot sun, and stumbled toward the bathroom, keeping a bleary eye open for snakes.
“Mornin’!” I heard someone call, and saw a bald man wearing mirrored sunglasses, jeans, knee-high rubber fishing boots, and no shirt walking up the path behind me. I waved and kept walking.
As I approached the bathroom, it dawned on me who I had just encountered. Dave Shealy: Skunk Ape expert.
People report Bigfoot-like creatures all over the United States and the world. They’re also commonly known as Sasquatch, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. In the Himalaya Mountains, they’re called Yetis. Australians call them Yowies. In China they are Yerens, and in South America, they’re known as Mapinguaris.
Bigfoot is also spotted in the American South, where he is known by a variety of names. Some Southerners call him Wood Booger or the Stink Ape or the Swamp Ape. In the Everglades region and other parts of Florida, the creatures are most commonly called the Skunk Ape. As explained in Cryptozoology A to Z, the Skunk Ape gets his name from his “distinct and far-ranging aroma redolent of an unholy mixture of skunk, rotten eggs, and cow manure.” The guide says spottings have occurred throughout Florida for a long time, dating back to the 1950s, with a wave of sighting and interest in the 1970s, followed by another wave in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Loren Coleman, who has been to Florida several times to search for the Skunk Ape and interview witnesses, was also an investigator in a key piece of alleged Skunk Ape evidence: the Myakka Ape Photographs of 2000. The pictures depict a hairy, grimacing cryptid and were sent with an anonymous letter to the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. The letter reported that the creature was frequenting the person’s backyard, poaching apples from a basket on the porch.
Inevitably, speculation on what the photos depicted varied quite a bit. Some suggested the photos were a hoax, perhaps a cardboard cutout. Experts studied the photos, weighing in on the eyeshine, pupil contraction, and facial expression. Coleman suggested that the creature could be an escaped or feral Pongo pygmaeus abelii, a Sumatran orangutan.
Dave Shealy is a native of the Everglades. His grandfather and father grew up in Miami. In the 1930s and ’40s, Shealy’s father and his friends would spend their spare time hunting in the Everglades.
As the 1960s approached, Shealy’s father grew tired of city living and wanted to establish some land out in the Everglades. In 1961 he bought the land that the Trail Lakes Campground currently stands on. Dave Shealy was born in 1963.
Shealy said his father “fell into” the campground business. People would stop by and pay or barter something to set up tents on the land to do some hunting. “It got kind of popular,” Shealy said. In the late 1960s the land was officially licensed as a campground.
Shealy and his brother Jack took over the business after their father died at the age of fifty. They originally billed their business as the Florida Panther Gift Shop—a gigantic fiberglass panther still lurks by the side of the road near the campground—but in the late 1990s they switched the top billing from panthers to Skunk Apes.
The switch coincided with a string of Skunk Ape sightings in the Ochopee area that were the talk of the town. Among others, a busload of tourists spotted a “large, apelike creature” ambling through the swamp in 1997. Soon Shealy stepped in to declare himself a Skunk Ape expert. Shealy and Jack renamed their establishment the Skunk Ape Headquarters and Trail Lakes Campground.
Shealy claimed he actually first spotted the smelly creature at a young age. “The first time I saw the Skunk Ape, I was just ten years old and I was out hunting with my brother,” Shealy said in an interview for a 2008 PBS documentary, Escape to Dreamland: The Story of the Tamiami Trail.
“We had a rule in the house that if we could kill a deer before the school bus came, we got to stay home and package the meat, so we were always eager to get out early in the morning and see if we couldn’t bag a deer. That particular morning it was raining, just drizzling a little bit. We walked on back, and my brother saw something in the distance, but I couldn’t see it because I couldn’t see over the grass. So he had to pick me up, and when he picked me up, there it was, a hundred yards out, definitely a Skunk Ape. We had heard about them growing up, and we were like ten years old, but there it was right in front of us. It was amazing.”
After he established his Skunk Ape Research Center, fortune again smiled on Shealy, he claimed. He said he spent an hour or two every evening in a tree stand he set up, just a short distance from my tent, every day for eight months. Finally, on September 8, 1998, he spotted a Skunk Ape strolling through the grasslands in the distance, and Shealy began shooting pictures. He took a roll of twenty-seven somewhat blurry pictures altogether. One of these photos is the center of a small display in the Skunk Ape Research Center.
“I dozed off for a little while, and when I woke up I saw it coming straight at me. At first I thought it was a man, but then I realized it was the Skunk Ape,” Shealy said days after the sighting.
Shealy has tried to get support for his cause. In 1999 he attempted to get a $44,000 tourist-tax-dollar grant from the Collier County Commission. His breakdown was $20,000 to fund two expeditions to search for the elusive Skunk Apes, with the remainder financing Shealy’s public appearances and a “Skunk Ape hotline” with operators who could answer Skunk Ape and general tourist questions in English, Spanish, and German.
Shealy’s grant proposal was denied.
But Shealy began to get attention from far and wide with his Skunk Ape stories, and he started making media appearances. In some of those appearances, he was dressed rather like Crocodile Dundee, in a safari shirt and a hat adorned with a gator tooth. He was a mix of cryptozoologist, big-game hunter, and charismatic southern big fish storyteller.
He became the go-to guy when shows wanted to do a Skunk Ape story and get a quirky news bit. He continued to pop up regularly, particularly on the “strange travel” type of shows popular on cable. The night before I arrived in Ochopee, he had been featured on the Travel Channel’s Weird Travels program.
After waking up, seeing Shealy, and going to the bathroom, I headed up to the Skunk Ape Research Center to pay for my campsite and introduce myself. Shealy was sitting on a bench outside, the sun beating down on him, a pint glass of iced coffee in his hand.
“I’m just going to sit here and talk to people about Skunk Apes for a little while,” Shealy called over to his brother Jack. Then he spotted me approaching and stood up to shake my hand.
“Good mornin’!” he said. “Got in late last night, huh? What brings you here?” he asked, smiling. I told him I was there to learn about Skunk Apes.
“Well, you came at a great time!” Shealy said, while Jack smiled in the background. “I got a show, a new show that they shot here, about to be on the Discovery Channel! October 8,” he said. That date was about ten days away.
“Great!” I told him. “I’ll be sure to check that out. Yeah, I’m actually working on a book where I’m traveling around meeting different monster hunters and writing about them …”
I immediately saw some sort of alarm bells going off with Shealy. He was now giving me a wary, suspicious look. He looked at his brother Jack, and the two passed communication to each other through facial expressions. I read Jack’s face as saying, Who is this guy? Be careful what you say. Dave’s cool expression in response was Roger that, good buddy.
I don’t usually drop in unannounced on people, but in this case, it had seemed like the best option. I had tried to e-mail a couple times, with no reply. Maybe they don’t have a lot of Internet time in the swamp, I surmised. Next, I tried calling. After the phone rang a dozen times, someone picked up.
“Yeah,” a voice said.
“Uh … is this the Skunk Ape Research Center?”
“Yep.”
“I’m traveling down there in late September, and I’d like to reserve a campsite.”
“Don’t need no reservation that time of year.”
“Oh, OK. I’m working on a book about monsters—like the Skunk Ape—and people that study them. I’d like to talk to Dave Shealy about them …”
“Yep. He’s the Skunk Ape guy. And he’s here all the time, so he’ll be here. OK, then?”
I decided it was best to just take a gamble and show up and see what happened. And now I was standing in front of Dave Shealy, Skunk Ape expert, trying to explain myself. I realized my Midwestern accent clearly pointing to the fact I was a Yankee wasn’t helping my case, so I made a note to slow down my speech and try to filter that twang, try to drop the nasally “-ing” sound on my present participles.
“So,” I continued, “I hope you don’t mind me hangin’ ’round here and listenin’ to what you have to say about Skunk Apes.”
“Yeah,” Shealy said. I could see him calculating his next step with me.
“Yeah. OK. That’s great. And we’re glad to have you here …” He said that in a weird tone, like someone trying to back out of a hostage situation. He backed away from me and shot a glance to his brother, who was smiling politely and remaining quiet.
“And you … why don’t you come with me? You can meet Rick! He’s our reptile expert!”
We walked through the Skunk Ape Research Center, which was actually just a souvenir shop with a small shrine dedicated to the Skunk Ape in a corner. The display had a photo and a plaster cast of a Skunk Ape footprint. There was a giant, red-eyed statue of a gorilla in the middle of the shop, a popular photo op for the tourists. The shop offered a variety of stuffed alligator heads and merchandise—T-shirts, shot glasses, beer cozies—that featured a Skunk Ape on it. We walked through the shop into what looked like a remodeled airboat hanger-style garage. There were a couple dozen giant tanks and a large cage in the middle of the space.
“Rick? Rick!” Shealy called, looking around. A bald man in a tank top and shorts appeared in an open garage door leading to a small outdoor enclosure, where the squawking of parrots could be heard.
“Oh, there you are! This here … this—gentleman—is here … he’s workin’ on writin’ a—book—and here, Rick’ll show you around here and tell you all about our reptiles.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, Rick.”
“OK, then,” Shealy said, backing away from me. “I got a bunch of dirt here—you probably seen all the piles of it. I got a guy comin’ in, gonna help me with movin’ it around. I can talk to you maybe an hour, but it’ll be ten minutes here, a few minutes there, whenever I get a few minutes. You just come and find me.”
“OK,” I said. “Sure. Whatever works for you.”
And then Shealy retreated and I was alone with Rick.
Rick began leading me through his reptile zoo, starting by plopping a baby alligator in my arms. It felt like a cold leather bag. He called out the window of the hanger to the full-grown alligators in an enclosed pen with a small pond in it. He told me the gators’ names were “Lumpy, Grumpy, and the Other One.” Grumpy was getting some sun while the other two lurked in the pond. He showed me a snapping turtle and some rat snakes. Most impressive in the collection was the biggest snake I had ever seen—a huge, fat reticulated python named Goldie. Rick said it was about thirty-two feet long and 250 to 300 pounds. We walked outside to the enclosed area.
“Most of these animals are rescues. They’ve been given to me by people who either didn’t want them or weren’t in a position to take care of them,” Rick told me, offering a pair of tortoises an apple. He placed a noisy cockatoo named Dodo on my shoulder while a macaw screeched nearby. After the tour, I stopped back in the Skunk Ape Research Center, where I picked out a T-shirt and Shealy’s guidebook, Everglades Skunk Ape Research Field Guide, a seventeen-page photocopied booklet written by Shealy and illustrated by Kell, sold in the gift shop for $4.95. It featured a variety of tips for tracking the highly elusive Skunk Ape as well as facts on the lives of Skunk Apes that Shealy appeared to have collected through unknown methods. For example, he claimed in his guide that “7 to 9 Skunk Apes make the Everglades their home.” He also said Skunk Apes probably got their foul odor from hiding out in alligator caves.
“Evidence suggests that Skunk Apes spend a great deal of time in these underground caverns. Many people believe that methane gas, emitted by decaying matter in these low-lying areas are what gives the Skunk Ape its unique skunky/rotten egg odor,” the guide said.
Shealy’s brother—heavy, red-faced, sweaty—rang up my purchase.
“I don’t know nothing about monsters,” he said. “You’ll have to ask Dave about that. He’ll be glad to autograph your book, here, too. Just ask him.”
I left the gift shop and headed back to camp to eat. Later in the morning I walked around and looked for Shealy. I didn’t see him anywhere. Hours later, early in the afternoon, I spotted him with his hands resting on the top of a car. I walked toward him.
“He should be here in a couple hours, and then we’re goin’ to work,” Shealy was telling the man in the driver’s seat. “We’re goin’ to work until dark! Today’s my birthday. I’m fifty. Yeah, fifty right now. We’re getting old, Donald! October 8, yep,” he said, and the car drove off.
“Well, happy birthday!” I told him. I found out later it was a significant milestone for him. Shealy’s father had died at the age of fifty. His mom died around the same age, too.
“Thanks,” he said.
“So what’s going on here?” I asked, gesturing to a row of dirt piles.
“That’s the state making up for some wrongdoing,” he told me. “I just put a truck of asphalt on the parking lot. I’m making some sites, expanding my tenting area. I’m not putting cabins on all of them, but I’m just making them nice, landscaping. I got to have them all done in thirty days!” Shealy gestured toward his campground in general.
“My son is fixin’ to take over the business soon, and I don’t want to work so hard anymore, so I’ve been double-timin’ it. I’ve only had one day off in a hundred days. One day! One hundred days. It’s my birthday today and I’m workin’!” Now appraising me again, Shealy started to back up.
“Well, Jerome is not here—he’s the guy running equipment…. But when he’s here, that’s when we can sit down and talk a minute,” he said, turning and walking up the dirt road out of the campground.
It was early afternoon by now and despite being the end of September, it was intensely hot. It was too hot to be inside my tent, so I dragged a blanket out, put it in the shade, and took a fitful nap. I woke up sweating, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a couple of buzzards circling above me.
Well, that’s an ominous sign, I thought.
I got up and walked around the campground. I didn’t see Shealy anywhere. In fact, the whole place seemed deserted. I took a short walk through the swamp but didn’t see—or smell—anything skunky.
My notes on the day after the reptile zoo tour had one entry: “No sign of Dave.”
As the sun set, I made a campfire. Then I reached into my cooler and grabbed a beer. I had brought the beer along as bait for Shealy to talk to me. Through various sources, I had gleaned that the man liked to drink, and there is nothing that will get someone to start telling his life story and deepest confessions like a steady supply of alcohol.
A few beers in and I was deeply reflecting on just what I was doing here in the middle of the Everglades when I saw headlights roll into the campground and then heard heated voices. One was Shealy, intoxicated and arguing with someone.
“You and your people—that’s the reason these damn trails got ruined! So get the fuck out!” he screamed at someone, slamming a door.
“Whatever, Dave,” I heard a disgusted voice respond, then a door slamming.
I stoked the fire and opened another beer. Probably not a good time to approach Shealy, I thought. I began to cook up some lima beans I had brought along. The lima beans were something of an inside joke. I chose lima beans for dinner because that was what Shealy recommended as bait for Skunk Apes.
From the Everglades Skunk Ape Research Field Guide: “Black eye peas, pinto, and kidney beans all work well, however large lima beans are the recommended bait and should be considered your first choice.”
But the joke of the lima beans now fell a little flat with me. Before I even pulled into the campground, I was pretty much 100 percent certain that the Skunk Ape—well, Shealy’s alleged Skunk Apes, at least—were fake.
“What do you know about Dave and his claims?” Loren Coleman had asked me at the International Cryptozoology Museum. I had told him that the Skunk Ape Research Center was my next stop after I visited him.
“Well,” I said, “I hear a lot of claims that he’s a hoaxer.”
“Oh, he’s all but admitted it!” Coleman replied. “It was his brother in a suit.”
Coleman continued, “The thing about David—it’s like a lot of people you meet in this field—one-to-one, he’s a wonderful guy. He’s nice, he donated a statue that he sent up with a guy from Connecticut, he’s always said good things about me, and I want to say good things about him. He was arrested for marijuana trafficking [and got] three years—I don’t hold that against him.
“What’s wrong with David is he is so interested in attention seeking that he’ll hoax these films. My whole notion about the Skunk Ape of Florida is that they are chimpanzee-sized creatures that go down on all fours. David is the focal point for so many journalists going down to talk about Skunk Ape and his museum roadside attraction, and his descriptions of the Skunk Ape are that it is six or seven feet tall and always upright, because that’s the suit he has.
“It’s not so much about David but what he’s done to the field down there; he’s polluted it so much that it’s now distracted in the wrong direction. Even though I’ve been investigating these things since the ’60s, if I get on a program and say they are littler, they go down on all fours, people say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ because they got the mythical Skunk Ape in their head now.”
The Internet seems to be in agreement about Shealy being a hoaxer.
On the forum Above Top Secret, an author using the name “maxhile” posted an entry on November 2, 2010, that claimed his mother was an old friend of Shealy’s and had told him (along with others) that Dave and Jack had hoaxed the Skunk Ape photos. Maxhile writes: “I eventually got the courage to ask Dave Shealy himself if it was just a hoax. Expecting a defensive rant he surprisingly started laughing hysterically and admitted to the scam. He said that he and his brother, along with some friends had conjured up the elaborate scheme while having a few tall ones around a fire on his campground, ultimately trying to get a rise out of the government and media.”
This posting is from an administrator at the Mid-America Bigfoot Research forums: “After travelling to Ochopee many times, I had determined that anything happening in this area are hoaxes perpetrated by David, and probably his brother. Their agenda seemed obvious; getting tourists into their Gift Shop and Campsite.”
I read several comments from people saying they were members of the Bigfoot community and the Ochopee community, and they all seemed to agree on one thing: Shealy and his brother Jack had concocted the Skunk Ape appearance at the Trail Lakes Campground as a publicity-grabbing hoax to boost business.
I encountered another well-publicized hoax while writing this book. Rick Dyer, self-proclaimed “Best Bigfoot Tracker in the World,” is a cowboy hat–wearing, soul patch–sporting used-car salesman who claimed he had lured a Bigfoot he dubbed Hank into his camp with a side of pork ribs, then shot him. After a lot of hoopla, Dyer announced he was taking Hank, stuffed and on display in a glass case, out on the road to give the public the chance to throw down some cash to take a look at him.
Bigfooters had already come to view Dyer as a four-letter word, a name that drew as much revulsion as Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort. Dyer, along with his friend sheriff’s deputy Matt Whitton, had already pulled a similar stunt in 2008, known as the Georgia Hoax. The duo came up with pictures of a Bigfoot body stored in a large refrigerator.
The case was reviewed at length by Matt Moneymaker on BFRO’s website. Moneymaker said the two paired up with “infamous hoaxer” and Las Vegas showman Carmine “Tom” Biscardi. They then had the perfect trifecta for a con: Whitton’s credibility as a deputy sheriff, Biscardi’s hoaxing experience, and Dyer’s ability to talk out of both sides of his face at once. The goal: to make money.
On August 15, 2008, Biscardi, Dyer, and Whitton held a press conference in Palo Alto, California, that received a tremendous amount of coverage. Meanwhile, BFRO had already identified what was in the Bigfoot pictures. “The ‘body’ was a widely available Halloween costume stuffed into a large cooler and filled with rotting animal entrails,” Moneymaker reported.
But the public has a short memory for such things, so when Dyer returned with claims of a new Bigfoot body and set off on his Time to Believe tour in 2014, a lot of media fell for the story hook, line, and sinker. “Fool us twice,” they begged him.
I almost encountered Dyer and Hank. The tour had approached the International UFO Congress, asking to set up shop as part of the conference. As I power-walked around the convention floor with Maureen Elsberry, she told me that after Open Minds staffers discussed it, they decided to pass. “We talked about it for a minute,” she told me, standing still for a second. “We thought about potential publicity and media for the conference but then determined we had a lot of good media already and didn’t want to be associated with what is a pretty obvious hoax.”
Despite rejection in Arizona, the tour went on to have success elsewhere, and one source puts Dyer’s tour earnings at about $60,000. For reasons unknown, Dyer admitted the hoax on his Facebook page in April 2014, and it soon came out that this time, instead of relying on a commercially manufactured Bigfoot suit, he had paid a costume and prop maker to create the body out of latex and fake hair.
“Dyer is a bump in the road, one we have experienced too often,” Loren Coleman wrote in a blog post. “But he is not cryptozoology. That is for certain and those that wish to dig deeper will soon discover that fact.”
Hoaxing is still a pastime for some, one greatly aided by the gullibility of the Internet. Fake or doctored videos and pictures spring up all the time and circulate through social media. A simple download of a phone app can help insert UFOs and ghosts into a photo with a flick of a fingertip.
I thought about all this as I stared at my fire in the campground. I had been hoping to get a chance to talk to Shealy and try to see what he had to say, but it looked like it was a bust.
I awoke with the sun again the next day and again made my first destination the bathroom. I was walking back toward my tent when I heard Shealy’s voice say, “Hey, how long are you around for today?”
I looked around and saw Shealy standing in the screen door of his trailer. I had immediately figured that this was his house. A carved sign that read EAGLE’S NEST was posted above the door. Centrally located, Shealy’s trailer was elevated and overlooked a small pond, giving him a grand view of his campground kingdom and the Everglades beyond.
“I’m gettin’ picked up around eleven or twelve today,” I said.
“Well, I got to make a run to the Circle K in Everglades City. You want to ride along?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” I said. He told me he’d pick me up from my site in fifteen minutes.
When Shealy pulled up in his truck, I hopped in the passenger seat. He immediately began laying out the story of his land and the struggle he had had with it.
“The government stepped in and built five campgrounds around me twenty-five years ago,” Shealy explained, growing bitter at the memory. “If you go in their visitor’s center and ask them where to camp, they won’t even tell you I exist! They told my son they are trying to stop ‘socially transmitted behavior.’ That means ‘Don’t grow up to be like your old man, or we’re going to treat you like we treated him,’” Shealy said, staring at me as he wheeled his truck around. “That’s fucked up!”
He continued, “If you look at my financial records over the last twenty-five years, I’ve lived in poverty. Less than $12,000 a year went into my pocket for food and stuff because I sacrificed everything. My whole life I’ve sacrificed to hold on to this place. And they”—Shealy always means the government in some form when he says “they”—“they’ve taken my airboat trails—illegally—and put them into their campgrounds, my swamp buggy trails. It’s all been illegally taken!”
We pulled into a site where a couple of tents were set up next to some trucks. Shealy explained that some young people had come out to celebrate one of their twenty-first birthdays. I had heard them partying the night before.
“We’re going to Circle K in Everglade. You need anythin’?” Shealy asked a shirtless young man who looked badly hungover. He shook his head no.
“OK. That drink knocked me on the ground. I don’t know if it was the shots or the drink, but I went out like a light!” Shealy laughed, then pulled out.
“So last night I ran into this guy named Nate—he made my Skunk Ape video, and he works, but his work…. He’s got this big house in Naples with a big yard and a barn, and his work is music, and he has a studio and friends over and parties and going to this tavern and this cigar bar and this hotel and having fun! Sometimes when he talks to me, when I tell him I’ve been living in poverty for twenty-five years, he just sees what’s in front of him.
“‘Oh, how can you say that? This isn’t poverty,’” Shealy said, imitating a stupid, whiny voice. “I do without food. I do without food to pay the light bill! So I said, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker!’ We got in a fight. Not a fistfight—he just don’t see.” That explained the argument I had heard in the dark.
We stopped to check in with Kell on our way out of the campground.
“Those kids still out there?” Kell asked, puffing on a cigarette.
“Yeah. They give you any trouble last night?” Shealy asked.
“No, no problem. They went out and I was just wonderin’ if they came back.”
“Those are some sweet little girls,” Shealy told him, grinning devilishly. It soon became clear to me that Shealy’s libido had been cooking out here in the hot sun. “He told me they would have brought me a sweet little girl out, but they were heading this way when I told them I was looking for one. I think on my fiftieth birthday a nineteen-year-old girl would probably kill me anyhow!” Shealy chortled.
Realizing a writer was sitting next to him in his truck, Shealy decided further clarification was in order. “His birthday is the same birthday as mine. Young people come in here to have parties, and I ain’t never had any problems. And I never screwed any teenybopper, never even thought about it, believe it or not, even though I’m a horndog…. I know my age limits.” Later in Everglades City, Shealy pointed out a club where he said a manager was “a lush. She’s got big tits.” And another spot where an employee “has big titties.”
Next we stopped by the parking lot outside of the Skunk Ape Research Center.
“Hey, Jack!” Shealy called out. “I’m riding over to Circle K. You need anything? No? OK. Good morning.”
“You got someone in there with you?” Jack asked suspiciously.
“Yeah, guy back from the tent area. I didn’t get a chance to talk with him much yesterday, so we’re just going to shoot the bull and go for a quick ride.”
Now on the Tamiami Trail, I asked Shealy about the history of the land and his father’s decision to buy undeveloped Everglades property.
“The government sold it to him knowing there was no way he could pay for the land, no way he could come up with that money. My dad …” Shealy paused. “He was a hard worker. He had a lot of friends, and he wasn’t afraid to bend the law if he had to. So before he developed the land, he made a foot trail from 41 to the back of the property, and he built a giant moonshine still back there.
“He brought in this guy named Mousey, who wore these big Coke-bottle glasses. Loved Chihuahuas. Mousey produced thousands of gallons of jugs of moonshine, rum. They had a wagon with what looked like a fuel tank, but there was moonshine in it, and they shipped it up to Miami and Liberty City. They made a lot of money. So the land was paid for. My dad worked, too. While Mousey was making moonshine, my dad was doing equipment repair.
“They finally got my dad with the moonshine still, but that was quite a few years later, because I remember it. There was a bunch of cars that pulled in back where our trailer was, and they got out and knocked on our door. My dad said, ‘I don’t know nothing about it.’ They destroyed the still but didn’t arrest him.”
Like father, like son they say. Shealy got in trouble for his own illegal dealings in the 1980s. “Rum running, feather plume hunting, alligator hunting, and then marijuana running was my generation. I went to prison for that. You knew that, right?” he asked, looking sideways at me before turning his attention back to the road.
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw a video on YouTube where you talked a little about it.”
“I spent three years in prison on an air force base. I was maybe going to get sixty-five years, but I got three years for it, 1987. I got caught moving four tons of weed—that’s over eight thousand pounds. There were two hundred of us arrested. We were arrested by Bush Sr.’s presidential task force. They had all the roads sealed up here,” Shealy said, gesturing to an intersection ahead of us. “I was arrested in what was called Operation Peacemaker, which was the final pickup of a three-part drug raid that lasted a couple years. There was a lot of people in jail and a lot of people that didn’t want to go to jail. Well, things started to get violent. And what happened was, there was an investigation, and a key witness started to point fingers. He said, ‘Yeah, Dave was there, I saw him.’ A car exploded; he got killed with a car bomb. And so I became a suspect, because here was this guy that was going to testify against me, and all of a sudden his car blows up. Of course I didn’t do it.”
Though cleared of the car bombing, Shealy still faced his marijuana smuggling charges. “I got up and pleaded guilty. I said, ‘I made a bad decision, I’m sorry…’” Shealy took a long pause, staring at the road, thinking of that day long ago in court. “I apologize. I’m guilty.”
The judge was lenient and gave him three years.
After buying a coffee and a few packs of cigarettes at the Circle K, Shealy decided to head over to the docks to say hi to some fishermen he knew.
“I got my television series gonna start October 8 on Discovery,” he told them. “They’re gonna do a one-hour special. I was on Travel Channel last night.” After chatting with them, we stopped in a bait and tackle store for a chat with the employees.
“I told your brother to order me some Skunk Ape golf shirts,” one of the shopkeepers told Shealy. “Collared ones. I’ll buy half a dozen to send out to people.”
“OK, I’ll get you some. We’re going to be getting that stuff in probably sixty days. I got my series starting on Discovery Channel—October 8.” Shealy bought us both a can of Coke and a handful of Slim Jims. Then we cruised around Everglades City a little bit, and I asked him about his upcoming reality show.
“I would say in about ten days I’ll get offered a million dollars. So it’ll all come to an end. Thank God! I’ll finally get my life back. But I’ll probably have to do twenty more episodes. Each one takes a week, so twenty weeks. I’m cruisin’ for a bruisin’! But I need the money.”
But with fame comes certain headaches, and Shealy had already begun to feel the hardships of being the Skunk Ape expert. “It’s … everyone wants to be the man, everyone wants to be the guy. When you walk in the bar, everyone is like, ‘Hell yeah! Whoa! Woo woo!’” Shealy explained, whooping it up while he drove. He grabbed the wheel with one hand and ripped a Slim Jim package open with his teeth.
“You know, you get what you ask for, but it’s hard being a public figure like that, because you always got to be on your game,” he said. Shealy’s fame had also made him a target of various other Bigfooters, who derided him as being a scam artist.
“There is a lot of jealousy in the Bigfoot community. It was really awful in the beginning when I decided I was going to go public with it,” Shealy told me. “They saw me as a threat to them. Because Bigfoot was talked about, they would call me up, belittling me, giving me a hard time.”
“Did that surprise you? Did it piss you off?” I asked him.
Shealy thought about it, then said, “It’s something I’ll never forget. Because I know who they are.”
Shealy has also had troubles with relationships, due in no small part to his pursuit of the Skunk Apes and his Everglades lifestyle. A 2010 short student documentary titled They Live in Trees featured Shealy, and he explained to the documentarians the personal troubles he’s faced: “There’s a lot of things I should have done that I haven’t done. It’s been a roller coaster ride. Bad relationship after bad relationship. I was on television one time, and the girl left me over it. I was on The Daily Show, Comedy Central, Talk Soup. She said all her friends at the office said I looked like an idiot,” Shealy told the camera, raising his eyebrows. “And she left me! After, like, seven years! Let me tell you somethin,’ shit flows downhill, and I live at the bottom of the hill.”
“The more ratings, the more likely they are to send me an immediate payment to get it to go to series,” he told me, as the road led us back to his world-famous Skunk Ape Research Center. “I hope it happens. I need the money.”
On October 8, Discovery Channel did air the first two episodes of Skunk Ape, back-to-back. The promo for the program shows Shealy inspecting the ground in the swamp just behind his campground, dressed in a camouflage windbreaker.
“I smelled that, right now,” Shealy says, looking over his shoulder at the camera. “There’s been a Skunk Ape here! Recently. Do you smell it?”
The camera follows him into the swamp in pursuit of the cryptid. Or maybe just in pursuit of fame and the money to be had from it.
“Yeah! There’s definitely been a big animal in here,” he says, examining the ground.
Unfortunately for Shealy, his quarry would elude him. After the episodes aired, Skunk Ape was dropped and did not go to series.