Protect Rural Florida

10/10/2026

The Santa Fe at Worthington Springs is a little high after all this rain ⛈️💧💚

10/10/2026

10/09/2026

Y'all go vote for my girl 💚 She would be a hell of a host!

Will Darlene Seay be a guest on an episode of On Air with Ryan Seacrest, win $25,000, and lead a podcast produced by iHeartRadio?

10/07/2026

PRF: Tales of the Piney Woods | Tale 03
WHEN THE WOODS GO QUIET
The stories don’t always start with somebody seeing something. Sometimes the turkey simply quits calling. Sometimes the dogs start raising hell at the edge of the yard. Sometimes there is a smell where there shouldn’t be one — wet dog, body odor, something rotten. Sometimes a hunter who has walked those woods his entire life suddenly gets the unmistakable feeling that he is not alone. Across North Florida, people have been telling stories like these for generations. Around Taylor in Baker County, they called one of those things the Taylor Wild Man. Sampson City had a Wild Man of its own. Other communities had different names, but the accounts themselves often begin in strangely similar ways: something heard before it is seen, something smelled before it steps into view, or the woods suddenly behaving differently. In 1986, a lifelong hunter north of Lake Butler was sitting near a hog wallow surrounded by grass about six feet tall when he began hearing deep guttural grunts and heavy breathing only yards away. He initially thought hogs were moving nearby, but later found unusually large tracks in the mud. What stayed with him most was what happened afterward. He said he became disoriented in woods he normally knew how to navigate and felt so strongly that something was watching him that the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Near Taylor years later, a hunter and his father-in-law were working their way toward a gobbling turkey on a foggy morning. They knew the bird was there. It had been answering them. Then it suddenly stopped. No more gobbles. No response to their calls. On the walk back they found a huge barefoot-looking track in the mud headed toward the same area where the turkey had gone silent. In Black Creek, two fishermen encountered something they never clearly saw at all. First came the smell. One described it as a musky dog smell; the other compared it to body odor mixed with a filthy wet dog. Then came heavy footsteps moving through woods too thick to see into and splashing in shallow water along the bank. They eased closer with their trolling motor. The footsteps stopped. They waited. When they finally began backing away, something heavy hit the water near their boat with a loud splash, and the footsteps started again farther back in the woods. Near Middleburg, one teenager reported getting close enough to see large brown eyes watching him through palmettos before hearing a low warning growl. He said the thing then rose upright in front of him and that the smell was so strong it burned his nose. At Camp Blanding, a hunter with decades of experience in the woods reported hearing guttural growls, grunts and long calls so loud and strange that the hair on his neck stood up and he physically shuddered. He did not think whatever was making the sounds was threatening him. He thought it sounded more like something calling to something else. Other reports mention dogs going wild before anyone heard anything unusual, horses becoming agitated, knocks that sounded like wood striking wood, long screams coming from places where no person should have been, and footsteps moving through brush without whatever made them ever stepping into sight. One woman who remembered an encounter outside Gainesville as a child in the 1960s said what she remembered most before seeing anything was the silence. She was jogging a dirt road at dusk with woods on both sides and could hear nothing but her own feet hitting the gravel. Then something large stepped out ahead of her. She stopped. It stopped. For several seconds, they simply stared at each other. Decades later, near Connor Bridge in Union County, a driver reported seeing a massive dark figure cross the road in only a few strides and vanish into the timber. He slowed down and looked toward where it had gone. There was no trail. Nothing standing at the edge of the woods. Just bushes still moving where something had passed through. None of these stories proves there is some unknown creature roaming North Florida. They are eyewitness accounts, campfire stories, old memories and things people still argue about today. But there is something unsettling about how often the experience surrounding them sounds the same. The sudden quiet. Animals reacting before people know why. Heavy movement just beyond sight. A foul smell carried out of the timber. The feeling of being watched. And always the same kind of country surrounding it: cow pastures fading into planted pine, swamp hidden behind dry ground, creek bottoms, palmetto, hunting land and miles of timber sitting behind the gates we pass every day. Maybe there is a perfectly ordinary explanation for every one of these stories. But if you have spent much time in the North Florida woods, you probably already know there is a particular kind of silence that makes you stop what you are doing and listen. The birds quit. The frogs quit. Even the woods seem to be waiting. And sometimes, according to the people who have been there when it happened, something moves just beyond the tree line.

10/07/2026

New River is UP!! After seeing so many of our rivers and creeks running low, it was good to see this today. The water is moving back through the floodplain and New River is looking a whole lot different than it has lately.

10/06/2026

I’m excited to share something new that Harlee Hutchinson and I are getting ready to start called The Old Ways. We want to sit down with older Bradford County residents and record the stories, memories and everyday ways of life that are slowly disappearing. To start, we are looking for three completely different people. Three people from different backgrounds, different parts of the county, and different kinds of lives so we can preserve three different pieces of Bradford County history. Honestly, we are probably looking for the people who don't think they have anything important to tell. Maybe you remember farming, to***co, cattle, timber or turpentine. Maybe you remember canning, home remedies, wash days, old schools, churches, businesses that are gone, community traditions, old skills, or simply the way everyday life used to work. We are not looking for the biggest or most impressive stories. We want the things that felt completely ordinary then but are disappearing now. If this sounds like you, I would love to hear from you. You do not have to be a historian or a storyteller. You just have to remember. And if someone immediately comes to mind while you are reading this, feel free to share it with them too. If you are interested, send me a message. Some of the most important history was never written down because nobody realized it was history yet.

10/03/2026

PRF: Tales of the Piney Woods | Tale 02
THE LAKE CITY TOMBS
Columbia County, Florida
On June 15, 1927, a company known as K.V.S. was drilling a 16-inch well about two miles south of Lake City when a boring tool disappeared underground. According to a Lake City Reporter story published just a couple of weeks later, workers lowered a gasoline lantern into the hole trying to find it, but about 63 feet below the surface they believed they saw something else instead: the head and shoulders of a man. A few feet farther down was the head of a woman, and below that, part of another woman. News spread quickly, and three days after the discovery a man identified as Eugene Volvick, Ph.D., arrived to investigate. His description was strangely detailed. He wrote about the man’s face, the women’s features, and what he believed looked like masonry around one of the remains. He even used the word “sarcophagus.” But there was one pretty major problem with all of this: everything was being viewed through a hole only sixteen inches wide, more than sixty feet underground, by lantern light. Even Volvick admitted that someone unfamiliar with fossils might look down there and simply see decaying, sponge-like rock. Two weeks later, another letter appeared in the Reporter saying K.V.S. intended to continue drilling the well, which would have covered the supposed remains back up. The writer begged Lake City officials and the Chamber of Commerce to convince the company to preserve the discovery instead, arguing that people would come from all over to see it. Apparently somebody listened, because less than a year later that little 16-inch well had turned into something much bigger. On March 30, 1928, the Lake City Reporter put the Tombs back on its front page and reported that hundreds of people were visiting the site. There was now a 63-foot shaft with lighting, and visitors were accompanied by a “conductor” who explained what they were looking at. The paper said the face of a man could still be seen below, another body lay about eight feet farther down, and a cavern extending east and south supposedly contained 23 more bodies. Somehow, the original three had become twenty-five. Southeast of the shaft was another opening, and the owners claimed they lowered a 240-foot rope into it without ever reaching the bottom. The newspaper acknowledged that plenty of people were questioning whether the whole thing was fake, but it also reported that scientists and geologists had supposedly gone into the cave, examined the remains and pronounced them genuine. I have not found the names or reports of those scientists, so for now that remains exactly what it was in 1928: a claim. And this is where the story gets even stranger. The man later identified as the person behind the Lake City Tombs was Edmund Du Mazuel, and Du Mazuel was not just some random roadside attraction owner. Years before the Tombs were discovered, he had worked in engineering and written an entire technical book on reinforced concrete. His 1910 Manual of Reenforced Concrete Construction ran more than 160 pages, and the company that published it even advertised a concrete reinforcement system carrying his name. None of that proves the bodies beneath Lake City were made of concrete. But when one of the biggest questions surrounding the Tombs has always been whether the “petrified people” were natural formations, genuine remains or something manufactured, the fact that the man behind the attraction happened to be an expert in reinforced concrete is one hell of a detail. K.V.S. certainly knew how to use the attention. They advertised the place as “Florida’s Petrified Remains of Prehistoric People,” called visitors “Pilgrims to the Well,” offered free admission to children accompanied by their parents and even operated a private filling station on the grounds. What had started with a lost drilling tool had become one of the strangest roadside attractions North Florida probably ever had. Then, somehow, the Lake City Tombs faded away. Some people believed the remains were real, others said the entire thing was a hoax, and eventually the story slipped into local folklore. Later accounts placed the site along US 41/441 South near present-day Columbia High School, just north of the old S&S store, and Reporter owner Herbert L. Dodd was later quoted as saying he had inspected the site himself and was convinced there was “no fake” concerning the supposed petrified bodies. Dodd died suddenly later that same year, but the Tombs story did not completely disappear with him. Nearly a century later, Columbia County’s own historic-resource records still contain a place called The Tombs. In a 2013 county inventory, its type was listed simply as “Not Known.” In a later archaeological inventory, that description had changed to something much more specific: “Prehistoric burial(s).” That doesn't prove there were twenty-five petrified people beneath Lake City in 1928, and it certainly does not prove every wild claim made by K.V.S. or the newspapers was true. But it leaves one hell of a question behind. Somewhere south of Lake City, a 16-inch well became a lighted shaft where hundreds of people once stood and looked sixty-three feet into the ground at something they believed had a human face. They were told there were more bodies below it, a cavern stretching away beneath the earth, and another opening so deep that 240 feet of rope supposedly never touched bottom. The man behind the attraction just happened to be an expert in reinforced concrete, the scientists who supposedly declared the remains genuine seem to have left no reports we can find, and then the whole place simply disappeared from public view. We do not know if the shaft was filled, collapsed, excavated, covered by development or if somebody already figured out exactly what was down there and the answer simply never made it into the story most of us know. But decades later, an official archaeological inventory still carried a site called The Tombs, and somewhere along the way its description changed from “Not Known” to “Prehistoric burial(s).” So maybe the figures were rock. Maybe they were concrete. Maybe the whole thing was one of the strangest hoaxes Florida ever pulled off. Or maybe almost one hundred years ago, people really did stand over a hole south of Lake City and look down at something human. Whatever the answer is, the creepiest part may be that the hole, the cavern and whatever those people were staring at did not necessarily disappear when the roadside attraction did. We just stopped knowing where to look.

10/02/2026

❤️❤️❤️

10/01/2026

Welcome to PRF: Tales of the Piney Woods.
TALE 01: THE WEIRD ABYSS
Bradford County, Florida
In March of 1898, a newspaper published a story about a place in Bradford County that sounds like something somebody made up for Halloween. The reporter placed it about twelve miles southwest of Starke and said Bradford County people simply called it “the sink.” According to the article, the opening was nearly round and about 210 feet across, with the water roughly 60 feet below the rim. The water itself was said to be only about 80 feet across at that level, and nobody seemed to know how deep it actually went. Some people apparently believed it was bottomless. That alone would have been enough to get my attention, but then the story got weird. The newspaper described a narrow ledge, only about eight inches wide, running around the inside of the sink a couple of feet above the water. Local tradition said ghosts walked that ledge at night. Two underground streams were said to feed the sink, and on one side there was supposedly a natural path leading down to a little six-by-eight-foot area the reporter actually called a “basement.” People were said to have gone down there and held dinner parties. The sink also had old stories attached to it about murders, people being thrown into the water and others disappearing into it. I haven’t found anything proving those stories actually happened, and even in 1898 they were being repeated as legends connected to the place. What really got me was one little detail in the article: it said hundreds of people visited this place every year. So if this giant, supposedly bottomless, haunted sink was that well known in Bradford County, where was it? There is one place that is very hard to ignore....Brooks Sink. I cannot confirm that Brooks Sink is the “Weird Abyss” described in 1898, and I don’t want to pretend that I can. But there are enough similarities that it stands out as the strongest candidate I’ve found. Brooks Sink is in the right general part of Bradford County, later scientific descriptions put it at roughly the same enormous size, it has steep exposed walls and water entering it from more than one direction, and early geological records describe a deep sink in that area before the name “Brooks Sink” seems to have become commonly used. And somehow, the strange stories didn’t disappear with time. More than a century later, local stories about Brooks Sink still included claims that things swallowed by it could somehow turn up in Lake Sampson or even the Gulf of Mexico, along with other stories about strange things happening around the sink. None of that proves anything, but it is pretty wild that the same kind of “nobody really knows what happens down there” folklore was still attached to a Bradford County sink generations later. So was the Weird Abyss of 1898 actually Brooks Sink? I don’t know. I still haven’t found anything that directly connects the newspaper story to Brooks Sink by name, and I can’t explain the ghost ledge, the little underground “basement,” the dinner parties or any of the old death stories. But if Brooks Sink was the place they were writing about, Bradford County has apparently been telling strange stories about the same giant hole in the ground for well over a hundred years. And if it wasn’t Brooks Sink, then somewhere around here there was another massive, famous, supposedly haunted sink that hundreds of people once visited and we still have to account for. Honestly, I’m not sure which option is stranger. Before y'all even ask, Brooks Sink is on private property and is not open to the public.