Download or read book Ghosts of Chokoloskee written by Rick Magers and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 100 year old Smallwood Trading Post/Museum on Chokoloskee Island, Florida is a 20 mile trek that begins in Naples, crosses the Everglades on Tamiami Trail (US 41) and turns south on Highway 29. You will go through Everglades City, the infamous little fishing village where, arguably, one hundred thousand tons of marijuana was brought in by local smugglers during the 70s and 80s. Once you arrive in Chokoloskee, no longer an island, since a causeway brought the inhabitants into a modern world they had no use for. A book by Peter Matthiessen: Killing Mister Watson, the true account of the local vigilantes that had been bullied by Edgar Watson since he arrived from Oklahoma Territory. While there, he and Belle Starr developed a hate for one another. One night, after Belle was paid a very large sum for her part in a bank robbery, she was found dead from a shotgun blast, and the money was gone. Very small boot prints led straight to Edgar's cabin. It was well known that for a tall, stout man, with more muscles than most, Edgar had extremely small feet. There was no eye witness, so the sheriff was forced to free him. Edgar walked out of the jail, and left his wife and children to fend for themselves, as he headed south. There have been many claims over the years, after Watson was gunned down for killing the help on his small plantation, 20 miles east of the Smallwood Trading Post, that he killed them rather than pay them. Ghosts are regularly seen inside, under, and throughout the vicinity. Letters have been sent by tourists who visited the Museum to take photos, that stated they would never return because, "We can see ghosts in every photograph." Were they simply hysterical people who wanted badly to see the ghost of Edgar Watson, Ted Smallwood, Green, Big Hannah, numerous black men, and a few foolish men who challenged the deadly killer, Mister Watson. Professional ghost seekers have received permission from the Smallwood owners of the museum, to come inside and use their search equipment, and also photograph ghosts. Some said they recorded several ghosts, and photographed some of them. Others said, "There is so much paranormal activity in here, no doubt due to so much killing done by Edgar Watson, and the killing of him, that one day something bad will happen at this museum, so we are never coming back. Read this first, and then alter next year's itinerary, and visit Everglades City and Chokoloskee. Bring your camera, and you just might take a ghost home with you.
Download or read book The Ghost People of The Everglades written by Barbara Tyner Hall and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last frontier is no more. Commercial fishing has been banned in Everglades National Park, and the locals were forced to find other means of work, but no one expected drug-smuggling to become big business in a small sleepy fishing village with less than one thousand people in population called Everglades City, Florida, and an island called Chokoloskee. The intertwined and dense mangrove system of the Ten Thousand Islands that surrounded the area and with remote locations provided a perfect environment for smugglers to bring and hide their drugs until they could deliver them for big profits. The Daniels family knew the backcountry of the Everglades and the complicated waterways of the area and knew how to travel through the shallow and treacherous waters and go through other passages unknown to anybody else. The Daniels family were sought after and hired to bring in large loads of drugs from South and Central America, as well as a few other countries. This family was born in the area and knew it like the backs of their hands. The Daniels crew was dubbed the "Saltwater Cowboys" because of their daring and reckless style and the "Ghost People of the Everglades" because they could disappear at a blink of an eye. Their wild and daring stunts happened on the high seas as well as in the complicated waterways of the Ten Thousand Islands. These boys could turn into a cluster of mangroves and disappear into another waterway just behind it. This adventurous family that turned outlaw became the largest importer of drugs into the United States that ran throughout our country. This area was world-renowned to some of the largest cartels or drug-smuggling rings around today and now call Everglades National Park their home.
Download or read book Ghosthunting Florida written by Dave Lapham and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On this leg of the journey youll explore the scariest spots in the Sunshine State. Author David Lapham visits more than 30 legendary haunted places, all of which are open to the public-so you can test your own ghost hunting skills, if you dare. Join David as he visits each site, snooping around eerie rooms and dark corners, talking to people who swear to their paranormal experiences, and giving you a first-hand account. Enjoy Ghost hunting Florida from the safety of your armchair or hit the road, using the maps, ''Haunted Places ''travel guide with 50 more spooky sites and ''Ghostly Resources. ''Buckle up and get ready for the spookiest ride of your life.
Download or read book The Past Is Never written by Tiffany Quay Tyson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water. Until the day six-year-old Pansy disappears. Not drowned, not lost . . . simply gone. After years with no sign, no hope of ever finding Pansy alive, Bert and Willet have tried to move on. But as surely as their mother died of a broken heart, they can't let go. So when clues surface drawing them to the remote tip of Florida, they drop everything and drive south. Deep in the murky depths of the Florida Everglades they may find the answer to Pansy's mysterious disappearance . . . but truth, like the past, is sometimes better left where it lies. Perfect for fans of Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Allison, The Past Is Never is an atmospheric, haunting story of myths, legends, and the good and evil we carry in our hearts.
Download or read book Lost Man s River written by Peter Matthiessen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When his novel Killing Mister Watson was published in 1990, the reviews were extraordinary. It was heralded as "a marvel of invention . . . a virtuoso performance" (The New York Times Book Review) and a "novel [that] stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now Peter Matthiessen brings us the second novel in his Watson trilogy, a project that has been nearly twenty years in the writing. A story of epic scope and ambition, Lost Man's River confronts the primal relationship between a dangerous father and his desperate sons and the ways in which his death has shaped their lives. Lucius Watson is obsessed with learning the truth about his father. Who was E. J. Watson? Was he a devoted family man, an inspired farmer, a man of progress and vision? Or was he a cold-blooded murderer and amoral opportunist? Were his neighbors driven to kill him out of fear? Or was it envy? And if Watson was a killer, should the neighbors fear the obsessed Lucius when he returns to live among them and ask questions? The characters in this tale are men and women molded by the harsh elements of the Florida Everglades--an isolated breed, descendants of renegades and pioneers, who have only their grit, instinct, and tradition to wield against the obliterating forces of twentieth-century progress: Speck Daniels, moonshiner and alligator poacher turned gunrunner; Sally Brown, who struggles to escape the racism and shame of her local family; R. B. Collins, known as Chicken, crippled by drink and rage, who is the custodian of Watson secrets; Watson Dyer, the unacknowledged namesake with designs on the remote Watson homestead hidden in the wild rivers; and Henry Short, a black man and unwilling member of the group of armed island men who awaited E. J. Watson in the silent twilight. Only a storyteller of Peter Matthiessen's dazzling artistry could capture the beauty and strangeness of life on this lawless frontier while probing deeply into its underlying tragedy: the brutal destruction of the land in the name of progress, and the racism that infects the heart of New World history.
Download or read book Totch written by Loren G. Brown and published by . This book was released on 2018-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Totch Brown's memoirs of vanished days in the Ten Thousand Islands and the Everglades--the last real frontier in Florida, and even today the greatest roadless wilderness in the United States--are invaluable as well as vivid and entertaining, for Totch is a natural-born story-teller, and his accounts of fishing and gator hunting as well as his life beyond the law as gator poacher and drug runner are evocative and colorful, fresh and exciting."--from the foreword by Peter Matthiessen In the mysterious wilderness of swamps, marshes, and rivers that conceals life in the Florida Everglades, Totch Brown hung up his career as alligator hunter and commercial fisherman to become a self-confessed pot smuggler. Before the marijuana money rolled in, he survived excruciating poverty in one of the most primitive and beautiful spots on earth, Chokoloskee Island, in the mangrove keys known as the Ten Thousand Islands located at the western gateway to the Everglades National Park. Until he wrote this memoir--recollections from his childhood in the twenties that merge with reflections on a way of life dying at the hands of progress in the nineties--Totch had never read a book in his life. Still, his writing conveys the tension he experienced from trying to live off the land and within the laws of the land. Told with energy and authenticity, his story begins with the handful of souls who came to the area a hundred years ago to homestead on the high ground formed from oyster mounds built and left by the Calusa Indians. They lived close to nature in shacks built of tin or palmetto fans; they ate wild meat, Chokoloskee chicken (white ibis), swamp cabbage, even--when they were desperate--manatee; and they weathered all manner of natural disaster from hurricanes to swarms of "swamp angels" (mosquitoes). In his grandpa's day, Totch writes, outlaws and cutthroats would "shoot a man down just as quick as they'd knock down an egret, especially if he came between them and the plume birds." His grandparents were both contemporaries of Ed J. Watson, the subject of Peter Matthiessen's best-selling Killing Mr. Watson, and Totch is featured in the recent award-winning PBS film Lost Man's River: An Everglades Adventure with Peter Matthiessen. He also appeared in Wind Across the Everglades, the 1957 Budd Schulberg movie in which Totch and Burl Ives sing some of Totch's Florida cracker songs. Loren G. "Totch" Brown was born in Chokoloskee, Florida, in 1920. After purchasing his first motorboat at the age of thirteen (and retiring from formal schooling after the seventh grade) he worked as an alligator hunter, commercial fisherman, crabber, professional guide, poacher, marijuana runner, singer, and songwriter.
Download or read book The Ghost Orchid Ghost written by Doug Alderson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florida's famous swamps—from the Everglades to Mosquito Lagoon to Tate's Hell—serve as fitting backdrops for these chilling original stories. Maybe it's because they are often wet, shadowy places of wild beauty where few people dare to penetrate. They are havens for snakes, alligators, black bears, wildcats, and who knows what. People on the run have often hidden in swamps, while others have gotten lost in the watery expanses; the swamp can be a refuge or a nightmare. Mysterious things just happen in swamps. Maybe it's because they are often wet, shadowy places of wild beauty where few people dare to penetrate. They are havens for snakes, alligators, black bears, wildcats, and who knows what. People on the run have often hidden in swamps, while others have gotten lost in the watery expanses; the swamp can be a refuge or a nightmare. Where else can you find a ghost baby, or an angry specter, or a lost soul? How about a ghost who is obsessed with the ghost orchid, or an alluring snake woman? Throw in a skunk ape or two and you've got the ingredients for many entertaining hours sharing these stories around a campfire or reading them to yourself or out loud. From the Author's Notes at the end of each story, you can learn a thing or two about Florida's swamps, creatures, and history, along with storytelling tips. Florida is rich in history, natural beauty, and ecological and cultural diversity. To protect what is special about our state it is important to educate the people who live here and our visitors. In this unique book you'll find tales of mystery and intrigue interwoven with important facts and lessons of natural history. Who but a naturalist can really scare you about what lurks in the swamp? Doug Alderson has been there and knows. In writing tales for this book, Doug Alderson drew upon many years of entertaining young people as a summer camp counselor and storyteller, and also from decades as a swamp explorer. He is a former associate editor of Florida Wildlife magazine. To learn more about his writing and photography, check out his website at www.dougalderson.net.
Download or read book Shadow Country written by Peter Matthiessen and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2008-08-19 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.”—Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone—Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century—were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country “Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watson’s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate.”—Los Angeles Times “Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. It’s the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes.”—Don DeLillo “The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone’s highest expectations for great writing.” —Richard Ford “Shadow Country, Matthiessen’s distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.”—W. S. Merwin “[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel.”—The Miami Herald
Download or read book River of Hidden Dreams written by Connie May Fowler and published by . This book was released on 1995-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Haunting Sunshine written by Jack Powell and published by Pineapple Press Inc. This book was released on 2001 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectral visions, footsteps in the attic, thumps in the night. Who hasn't witnessed or heard such things and not thought of ghosts? Join your guide, author Jack Powell, on a wild ride from Pensacola to Jacksonville and down to Key West, touring Florida's places and history through some of its best ghost stories. Powell has woven together a creepy collection of tales. Explore the darker side of the Sunshine State. What horrible fate awalted the pirates lover in Pensacola? Care to check out the last crop Edgar Watson planted on his farm in the Everglades? When will the ghost leave baby Carlys room?
Download or read book Saltwater Cowboy written by Tim McBride and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands. Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him. McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out. A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.
Download or read book Killing Mister Watson written by Peter Matthiessen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of The Snow Leopard, The Tree Where Man Was Born and On the River Styx, this novel is based around the circumstances of the death of a man in Florida 1910, who had terrorized his community in the Florida Everglades. It explores whether it was murder, exorcism or sacrifice.
Download or read book Hoot written by Carl Hiaasen and published by Ember. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Newbery Honor winner and #1 New York Times bestseller is a beloved modern classic. Hoot features a new kid and his new bully, alligators, some burrowing owls, a renegade eco-avenger, and several extremely poisonous snakes. Everybody loves Mother Paula's pancakes. Everybody, that is, except the colony of cute but endangered owls that live on the building site of the new restaurant. Can the awkward new kid and his feral friend prank the pancake people out of town? Or is the owls' fate cemented in pancake batter? Welcome to Carl Hiaasen's Florida—where the creatures are wild and the people are wilder!
Download or read book Aerial Geology written by Mary Caperton Morton and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2017-10-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Get your head into the clouds with Aerial Geology.” —The New York Times Book Review Aerial Geology is an up-in-the-sky exploration of North America’s 100 most spectacular geological formations. Crisscrossing the continent from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to the Great Salt Lake in Utah and to the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico, Mary Caperton Morton brings you on a fantastic tour, sharing aerial and satellite photography, explanations on how each site was formed, and details on what makes each landform noteworthy. Maps and diagrams help illustrate the geological processes and clarify scientific concepts. Fact-filled, curious, and way more fun than the geology you remember from grade school, Aerial Geology is a must-have for the insatiably curious, armchair geologists, million-mile travelers, and anyone who has stared out the window of a plane and wondered what was below.
Download or read book In the Shadows of the Ghost People written by Barbara Tyner Hall and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Florida Keys are so coveted for its beauty, and the tourists seem to flock to its small island paradise, giving them a transit feel for the people going in and out of the area. Marathon, Florida, is a small island town located midway down the chain of islands housed a dark and dangerous secret in the hidden world of drug smuggling that dominated the waters from the Florida Keys to the Ten Thousand Islands off Everglades National Park. The setting is in the 1970s where people were carefree and daring and contributed to the recreational use of drugs and the party lifestyle. This story embarks on the glitz and glamorous lifestyle that the commercial fishermen grew accustomed to but endured during a decade of drug smuggling for the largest and most dangerous cartel housed inside of Miami's dark world.
Download or read book Haunted Hikes written by Maren Horjus and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strange things happen in the woods—vanishing figures along backcountry paths, eerie noises half-heard near urban pathways, pungent and undefined smells blanketing forest trails. Science falls short of explaining these phenomena… Haunted Hikes tells the stories behind 100 spooky and sinister areas across the country—from the Ghost House Trail in Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee, where photographs of the cemetery yield silhouettes of families laid to rest there, to the Transept Trail at Grand Canyon National Park, where a wailing woman in a white dress with blue flowers is often seen pacing the rim. This book pinpoints the trails and reveals their unnerving histories. Within these pages are also basic hike specifications like distance and difficulty, as well as the trailhead GPS where applicable. The book won’t take you on a mile-by-mile journey—you’re on your own for that one, if you dare…
Download or read book Escape from the Everglades written by Tim Shoemaker and published by Focus on the Family. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Escape from the Everglades is the first book in the High Water series and blends contemporary mystery and suspense, dramatic situations, and high adventure that both boys and girls will love. A park ranger’s son hates the Everglades, and he thinks he’ll just die if he doesn't escape Southern Florida soon . . . and he’s right. After Parker Buckman is mauled and nearly killed by an alligator, he sees the glades as a place of death. All he wants to do is get out of the area, and he’s convinced he won’t truly be okay until he does. But he can’t leave until he finds a friend who goes missing. Escaping a bad situation isn’t a matter of a geographical change. Sometimes the best way to a brighter future is to face the darkness of your past.
