339: The Skunk Ape

I know that you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a duurzame keuze, can ASR maybe help? I think, how then? Well, for example, when you're doing something to do with the things you love to do with Schade. Will you know more about the instructions where a duurzaam schade-restal can be? Go to asr.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. This does ASR for you and a duurzame community. ASR does it. So, then you can now listen to your podcast. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. all right matt so you remember uh decades ago we sent out a we as in the the earth sent out a satellite that had a disc on it uh explaining to the aliens that found it what we look like and had like new drawings of us and then some music and everything nasa is actually going to launch a satellite to say sorry for that to the aliens, they're actually going to call it Apollo G. Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the graveyard. Thank you for joining us tonight. My name is Adam. And my name's Matt. Now, pull up a tombstone or settle into your casket and get comfortable, because this is Graveyard Tales. All right, everybody. Here we are again. Matt, how you doing tonight, brother? I'm doing all right, man. Good, good. So before we get into the episode, we'll say go over to patreon.com slash graveyard tales. You can sign up to become a patron. We have multiple different levels, and we promise you, you're going to like what you find over on Patreon. We have years of back catalog bonus episodes that all of the levels get, you know, ranging in topics. It depends. Do we find this interesting? Did we find an interesting article? Is it something that we like but wouldn't make a full episode? All of that goes into our Patreon bonus episodes that all of our patrons get. Then if you want to move up to the $5 level, you can get those bonus episodes. Plus you get the audio and video ad free versions of the main episodes. then if you want to step up from there and go to our ten dollar a month which is basically two cups of coffee from starbucks a month just skip it twice and you've got a patreon subscription for graveyard tales you get all of that plus you get our second show side quest which is usually nothing like graveyard tales it's me and matt in a different light matt likes to make me look dumb with trivia. I like to tell Matt some crazy stories. Sometimes we play games, we've eaten some crazy stuff, drank some crazy stuff, and it's just a fun place. Like if you were hanging out with me and Matt on the weekend, that's what SideQuest is like, and we think you will enjoy it. matt we haven't told people i think in a couple episodes that we need them to share the show yeah right share it but go it go and share graveyard tales yeah i don't care who you share it to if you've got our stickers go put them on the wall in in the bathroom at a club somebody's going to look us up. Yeah, that's right. If you want us to stick a sticker on your favorite club, tell us what it is. And if we're by it, we'll do it. But share the show. Yeah. Get us out there by wearing one of our t-shirts that you get off of our merch store, which Matt and I don't really get any money from that at all. So we're not profiting except in the fact that you guys are getting Graveyard Tales out there. So let's make 2026 a year of growth for Graveyard Tales. We would appreciate it, bring new members into the graveyard, and that helps us get more stories at the end of the year for our listener stories episodes. That's right. Not like we're not flooded with them anyway. You guys are great when it comes to that, but the more the merrier. absolutely so on that note matt why don't you tell us what are we talking about tonight brother all right so tonight uh we are gonna head down to florida and when adam asked me about home away from home yeah adam asked me i said we've done this he's like i don't think we have said well maybe not and we we have it but we've talked about it an awful lot but we've never dedicated to show to it and now's as good a time as any you know as much as as adam loves cryptids and i i enjoy cryptids not not to adam's level but i do i do um we decided that we would do a deeper dive on florida's version of bigfoot so tonight adam and i are going to discuss the skunk ape oh yeah and the skunk ape is it is it is a it is a different kind of creature okay and uh it's it's i'm gonna talk more about this but it's like bigfoot it's not like bigfoot it's its own unique thing you know and uh we're gonna i think i think this is gonna be this is going to be fun because i i knew a little about the skunk ape i mean we've talked about it before just never done a deep dive when i started digging up these eyewitness accounts i was like they were they were coming out of the wood i was like there's more you gotta be kidding me there's more yeah i mean there's a lot and and very well documented by the way oh yeah so uh so i i think you're going to be surprised you may have heard i remember um back i amanda and i got into watching this show and if i remember right it was called lost girl you ever heard of that show i haven't Anyway, just not to delay us talking about this, but it does pertain. This show was about the Fae. Oh, yeah. I think you have told me about that. And, you know, they kind of played loose and fast with what was Fae and what wasn't. But so many things that Adam and I have discussed were kind of lumped in with the Fae. And the lead character was a succubus. You know, she's, she's Faye, you know, um, they had recurring people that would be on the show and they were, somebody would be standing around and, and like these guys were like EMTs and they're dragging, you know, some, some big, some big sucker out of a, out of an apartment building to get them to the, in an ambulance. And people are going, God, what's that smell? they're like they're they're skunk apes you know yeah and these guys these emts were like how you doing you know and i was like oh my god so skunk apes were part of the fae you know in this in this universe but uh but yeah i mean you know we like i said we brought it up before um but i think you're gonna be surprised at what we talk about tonight yeah well dude the more i And the more I get into the research that we do and the longer I've been looking into it, we've said before, we think it's all connected in one way or another, like it's different sides of the same coin. Maybe it's a die with multiple sides that just depending on what you roll is what you get. I am not opposed at all to Bigfoot or any cryptid being a fae. Yeah. I think fae could encompass a majority, if not all of what we see. I think so too. I'm not opposed to it. But I think it's funny that it took some, I don't know that this was a Hollywood show. I think it was a Canadian show. so canadian writers you know lumping it in there together you know just to kind of keep because obviously you you know you're doing some research to be a writer for a show like this you're looking into a lot of different things that maybe you think well wouldn't it be cool if we could incorporate skunk apes into this show well let's just make them a part of the fae you know some some variation you know that they they appear human to live a a human type life but in reality you know they're they're skunk apes you know right right well as we always say go check our sources down in the bottom of the show notes you can find where we found all the information everything we talk about in this episode is sourced and referenced down there in the bottom of our show notes so check it out now i think before i get into my notes man i think my my favorite way of describing the skunk ape would be it is bigfoot's redneck cousin yeah yeah there you go you know you got you got bigfoot and then you got jim bob the skunk ape Yeah, so I look at it as like, you know that old gag where you take your birth date and you put in Florida man, and there's always a Florida man headline that's ridiculous that is associated with the birth. That is what Bigfoot does. So skunk apes are the Florida man for Bigfoot. Okay. There you go. So Bigfoot up in the Pacific Northwest, you know, looks up, put in skunk ape in your birthday, dude. i can't believe he did that man that's crazy well reports converge on how to describe the skunk ape and usually it's a heavy built hair-covered primate with a somewhat hunched posture and long arms so the height is usually given in the five to seven foot range in southeastern folklore with a lot of modern Florida accounts pushing it into the seven to eight foot bracket. So it's a little bit smaller on average than the Pacific Northwest Sasquatch, but still in kind of the same, same height range, maybe just a foot or two shorter. now the weight estimates they say run between 300 pounds up to 4 or 450 and it suggests a massive but slightly smaller frame than the bigfoot sasquatch that we talk about most of the time now the hair is described as shaggy or matted which would make sense if when we talk about where they live, shaggy and matted, you'd go, oh, well, yeah, of course. If it wasn't, I would think there was some kind of skunk ape beauty parlor that they had to go to all the time. But the colors range from mottled reddish brown or orangey kind of look to the hair to dark brown or nearly black, often dirty from swamp water or mud. So even if they had kind of a reddish brown or orangish tone, if they're wading around in the swamp, they're going to get darker or black from the mud. The body is often compared to an orangutan or like a gorilla standing upright. So sounds a lot like Sasquatch. It's got broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and long powerful arms that they say swing quite noticeably when it's walking. Now, witnesses say it's like a mix of human-like and ape-like features, but always framed by heavy hair. So the face is typically said to be dark, leathery, and kind of flat, set in like a mask, quote-unquote, of hair with deep set eyes and a heavy brow ridge reminiscent of an ape. So if you look at people's faces, we have very pronounced chins, noses, cheekbones. Usually what they're saying is that the skunk ape is like a flattened face. So the nose is flatter and wider. The eyes are sunk in more. the chin is not as pronounced and the brow ridge is a very heavy brow ridge like we would see on drawings of neanderthal and stuff like that now some accounts mention the wide nose large mouth like i was saying others have an expression of a strong jaw but details often are pretty vague because the encounters happen at night or they happen so briefly that the witness doesn't get to sit there and draw out a sketch of the skunk ape's face. The hands are usually said to be large and human-like, but covered in hair on the backs with long fingers that they say are capable of grasping branches and manipulating food and different objects. so very dexterous hands and long fingers now the footprints are an important part of the description they say casts associated with the skunk ape are often about 18 inches long and show four toes instead of five that are commonly reported in bigfoot tracks up north which believers present as a key distinguishing trait. And perhaps because this is Florida man or redneck cousin, he blew it off with a firework somewhere. Yeah. I don't know. I've known those people. Now, the smell and vocalizations are key to the description of the skunk ape. so the stench is repeatedly described as one of the most intense aspects of the encounters it's a nauseating blend of a skunk must moldy cheese rotten eggs decaying meat and stagnant swamp water and they say it lingers on vegetation and your clothes and gear if it gets close to you I think one of those drinks that we had on SideQuest that night probably qualifies to be like, you could say this is skunk ape juice, you know. You're right. I still can remember that one, and it was bad. but Matt will probably talk about it in his stories but many of stories say the smell is noticed before any sighting or sound like the creature's presence arrives with the wind especially when it's humid because as we all know when it's humid there's more moisture in the air and the smell actually gets trapped in this moisture and you can smell it better. If you don't believe me, take a really hot shower and fart. It's going to stay around more. I promise. This is something that Adam does routinely. Well, it's science. Yeah, for science. Testing things. um but a lot of what i've seen on like if you if you watch these bigfoot shows where people go out and hunt bigfoot or hunt the skunk ape a lot of times they'll just be standing there and get a whiff of this skunk smell a lot of people say well it's it's just a skunk but these witnesses say, no, it's different. I know a skunk. This is something different. It's got other, you know, moldy cheese tones in it. But it's fascinating to me that it has a musk like that. Now, some witnesses also report heavy crashing through the underbrush and, you know, splashes in the water, low growling noises and stuff when they smell it. But that's all for Matt to talk about in a minute. Now, the skunk ape is described as bipedal, walking upright like a human, but it's often first seen moving like a large animal through brush before it rears up on two legs, and they say that heightens the intimidation factor. So what they're saying is that you'll see it kind of hunched over, maybe down on all fours, muddling around in the brush, and then you startle it and it'll stand up straight going to the seven foot range. It's often said that it's omnivorous and it'll raid food stores or garbage or campsites, and occasionally it will stalk along shorelines where fishermen and hunters later report encounters much like so it's like florida man exactly exactly and you never know when you're camping out there was it skunk ape or florida man that just raided my camp for food right it's if the beer is gone then it's probably florida man there you go and if the you got to learn to differentiate the smell because i would assume they both smell but you just got to figure out which one which smell equates to which entity florida man has a distinct patchouli you know lingering smell along with the rest of it matt says that because i used to wear patchouli so now many accounts say it can move surprisingly fast and it'll slip back into dense vegetation or deeper swamp water in seconds and it leaves only that fading smell behind sometimes you'll see tracks but it it disappears super fast which to me adds some credence to the fae yeah part of this if it can disappear like that maybe it is fate i don't know well unlike the classic mountain Bigfoot, skunk ape is often said to be capable of climbing trees and very good at it. They use trees to avoid deep water and to stay out of sight above flooded terrain. So if this is true, then it is a adaptation to the swampy landscape where it would need to swing in trees and climb through trees to get over maybe gator infested water or something that's too deep or something like that. Now, they say that the physical description is tightly connected to Florida's landscape and older local lore. The Skunk Cave is primarily associated with the Everglades and other forested swamplands of southern and central Florida, but they say some stories can extend into southern Georgia and into Alabama and stuff like that. But the Skunk Cape is said to favor warm, wet, densely vegetated lowlands in Florida and the broader southeastern United States, especially the Everglades and similar swamp and marsh systems in other states. But stories consistently place it in areas where water cover and food sources overlap. So slow-moving wetlands, pine flatwoods, edges, and remote rivers or canal corridors, they say, are the place to find them rather than the dry uplands like you would Sasquatch. Anywhere that you could camp out and be comfortable while you looking for a skunk ape they not going to be there Right You going to have to suffer a little bit if you going to really get out there and park it in hopes of coming across a skunk ape. If you don't have to have a mosquito net and a firearm for the gators and stuff like that, then you're not going to find a skunk ape. A good set of waders and all that other, yeah, you're not going to find one. If you haven't picked a leech off of a body part, you're not going to find a skunk ape. Now, most modern accounts center on South Florida, particularly the 1.5 million acre Everglades ecosystem, the sawgrass marshes, cypress domes, mangrove swamps, and coastal estuaries of the Everglades, which makes sense matt if you were going to want to hide a large primate where would you do it i'd put it in the everglades i mean i mean there's just there's so much um life in the everglades that you know and along with that you've got a lot of things that have adapted to that ecosystem so a primate that would be there you would assume would adapt just like all the other living things there you know plant or animal and you know if the stories are to be believed then the skunk ape has done so right and a lot of other reports will cluster around the protected or sparsely developed wildlands such as the Miyaka River State Park and other swampy preserves where human access is limited. But the alleged range aligns most perfectly, like I said, with subtropical kind of humid climate zones. And the habitat descriptions frequently portray the creature near water that's rich in fish, amphibian snakes, and wading birds that, again, suggest it's an opportunistic omnivore that could exploit many different forms of food. Now, Although it's framed as deeply elusive, the skunk ape is repeatedly located in the, quote, backyard wild of Florida. So just beyond highways, levees, and airboat routes in the thin buffer between development and protected wetland. What this tells me, Matt, is like you and I have talked before about different animals. they're not necessarily moving to us we're moving to them yeah because as we expand then yeah we're going to find them in our quote backyards or that area between the everglades and your house because you moved out a little further now the areas that the skunk ape is witnessed are very biodiverse so let's quickly look at the known animals that live there too so we can kind of, when we hear Matt's stories, we can kind of say, oh, well, this doesn't fit into any of these, or maybe it does. But some of the large mammals that live in the same areas as the skunk ape are Florida panther, which is critically endangered, the swamp-adapted cougar using cypress and marsh edges for hunting and bedding, and white-tailed deer, feral hogs, marsh rabbits, raccoons, bobcats, river otter, and Florida black bear in some of the areas. But there's not a lot of Florida black bear. There are more than you think when you think about Florida, but there's not a ton of them. now the american alligator is the signature swamp predator of all these areas um and they live in the brackish everglades where the skunk ape does too and numerous snakes turtles uh water snakes swamp snakes which i i didn't know there was a difference But apparently there are snakes and swamp snakes. I just see a snake and I'm like, well, that's a snake. Hey, that's a snake on dry land. Hey, that's a snake running through mud. It doesn't matter to me. But there are various rattlesnakes and the eastern indigo snakes. They're aquatic turtles and the invasive Burmese python, which is now common in the Everglades wetlands. I don't know how much our listeners know, but they actually have python hunts every year where you go out and you, as groups or solo, go out into the Everglades and try to bag these pythons. And you bring them back to be put in captivity or whatever, and you get paid for the pythons. I ain't doing that. I'm not afraid of pythons like I am venomous snakes. Right. But I'm not trudging through the Everglades to go try to find a 10-foot long python and put it in a pillowcase to bring back. Right. That just seems dumb. Apparently, it pays pretty well. I guess, but I don't want to do it. I remember talking to a guy who owned an exotic pet store and he said, we've got an anaconda. And I was like, excuse me. What? No, you don't. I thought he was full of it. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, it's, it's a small, like baby anaconda. And I'm like, why? Who's going to, who's going to buy these? He said, they don't all grow to these enormous amounts. I said, they all grow bigger than anything we have around here. Yep. But, you know, I say this because he said, let me tell you how these people find them. They stomp around in these areas, in these riverbeds, and they step on them. And I'm like, they are stupid. Yes. I mean, they are stupid. Why do you want to find one that bad? Yeah, right. I mean, I guess they sell them. You know, they make boots out of them. I don't know. I don't want to find one. I don't want to find one. If I'm not in a helicopter, I don't want to find one, period. I sure am not going to go stomping around in my bare feet looking for one. Yep, and step on one. So real quick before Matt gets into the encounters, Let's look at some of the smaller fauna and aquatic life that the skunk ape could take advantage of for food sources and stuff in these areas. There's common mammals around the swamp edges and in the campsites and stuff, and that's possums, striped skunks, squirrels, and armadillos. And there's hundreds of fish species and abundant invertebrates like crayfish, snails, insect larvae, stuff like that. And there's fish and birds and amphibians all over the place. And so there's always food out there where a lot of people say, well, why would Bigfoot live here? The food source doesn't seem to be enough. That is not the case with the Skunk Cape. if the skunk ape is real living in the everglades they have abundant food sources and abundant places to hide oh yeah yeah so before we get into all of these eyewitness accounts and and like i said there are plenty of them we need to address the fact that even though as adam said there are many similarities between the skunk ape and bigfoot it does not appear to be the same thing bigfoot sightings have occurred all across north america mostly in heavy forested or mountainous regions but the skunk ape appears to be content with this swampy everglades region also if real it would seem that there could be hundreds or even thousands of bigfoots okay yeah but I had to include this because when I came across it, I was shocked. It says, statements regarding the population of skunk apes. Estimate around 7 to 9. 7 to 9. Not 7 to 900. Or 1,000. Yeah, just 7 to 9, like a basketball team. Okay? That's wild. It's like a big family. I thought this cannot be accurate, but that is what it said. Seven to nine of them. So we're not talking about, you know, when you look at Bigfoot sightings and just, you know, when you go to the Bigfoot research page, you click on your state and just just take a gander you don't got to read any of them just look at how many bigfoot sightings have been reported these are the reported ones the people that actually took the time to report a bigfoot sighting and just you will just be in all of the total number of bigfoot sightings right there where you live they don't i was gonna say you could have seven to nine in your county does not matter yeah and you it'll break it down by counting i mean you will find tons okay so by that logic they they're either magic or they're everywhere yeah these are not you know so if bigfoot is this broad species that we cannot pin down the skunk ape is like you know a family of of this you know it's one family and they live in the everglades and they travel every so often but they always come back home basically yeah it's crazy um but let's look at the eyewitness accounts like i said we got a ton of them now we got to start with who would probably be the the authority on the skunk ape and i i say that loosely um dave shealy okay so the first time that dave shealy saw a skunk ape he says he was about 10 years old it was 1974 it was a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by this creature and dave said that he was out deer hunting with his older brother jack in the swamp behind his house and that is what is now big cypress national preserve and they encountered a skunk ape and this is a quote from dave it says i was walking across the swamp and my brother spotted it first but i couldn't see it over the grass i wasn't tall enough my brother picked me up and i saw it about 100 yards away we were just kids but we'd heard about it and knew for sure what we were looking at it looked like a man but completely covered with hair which that's interesting because you know bigfoot is always so much larger you know they the the the descriptions rarely say it looks like a man you know it will say it looks humanoid or or gorilla like you know large primate it rarely will you'll hear it look like a man yeah i've heard it well it looked human enough that i didn't want to shoot it yeah but i've never heard someone say it looked like a man covered in hair so you know the skunk ape may not necessarily be as tall may not also be as broad um yeah shealy established the skunk ape research headquarters on his property where visitors can learn all about the legendary creature in july of 2000 he captured one of his encounters on video oh i thought she's gonna say he captured one of the and it's right there i'm like why did i not know in a cage and you can pay money to come back and see it well matt this episode's over i'm going to see a skunk ape sorry you can finish it without me right hey listen i well well i'll tell you this in a minute let's finish this i'll tell you this story in in in this grainy footage it was shot during the daytime uh but it was about a hundred feet hundreds of feet away the creature spends a minute or so just walking around in a in like a cluster of palm trees then shortly after it starts to stride across the open swamp And then it breaks into this run, what it describes as a long-limbed run, although it was like it was suddenly aware that somebody was looking at it. And it gets into a grove of palm trees. now she lee says that at the time the swamp was covered with over a foot of water making the animal speed which he estimated to be about 22 miles an hour that would be impossible for a human to achieve yeah dude running in a foot of water just do that at the beach try to run yeah try in the shallow area of the yeah no you know yeah look i couldn't run 22 miles an hour ever yeah in my life flat land yeah i mean we're talking like you know this is usain bolt speeds okay and this thing is apparently doing it in a foot of water okay I'm assuming that, you know, with my limited understanding of physics, that, you know, the resistance that your feet would bring about in the water would give it that odd long-limbed run, you know, where it's bringing its feet up to take those larger steps to pick up speed in the water. I don't know. well um again go in the shallows of at the beach try to run you're gonna look like a fool too yeah i mean that's right you do some weird stuff yeah but um but the the impression is concerning because according to you know any respected biologist the skunk ape doesn't exist i mean they don't really want to believe in Bigfoot. They sure don't want to believe in the skunk ape. Okay. People report seeing this mythical creature from time to time, and this is a statement from Bob DeGross, who is a public affairs officer with the Big Cypress Reserve, National Preserve. um who you know if you read on him and him and dave shealy aren't like the biggest fans of one another yeah um you know but we won't get into that um he says there's never been a substantiated sighting of the skunk ape that was verified by national park service wildlife staff okay all right i'm like yeah that doesn't that that doesn't necessarily do anything it's just like your your bunch over there has never seen a skunk ape yeah that doesn't mean a hill of beans to me i'm kind of like okay you know i guess what if you're comparing this to the number of park rangers in national forests that actually have bigfoot sightings yeah i mean it it might be you you might consider that but again we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of sightings as opposed to you know more than i thought there would be but definitely nowhere near thousands right now critics point out that despite the dozens of unrelated ongoing research projects conducted in the everglades that use motion activated trail cameras no one has ever captured indisputable proof of the skunk ape or come up with the remains of one now okay now truth be told along the the big cypress national preserve there are there are constantly research projects going on okay whether it's on just the land itself um the the flora and fauna the the wildlife there there's constantly somebody researching something and so you know these basically motion activated trail cams that are placed out there to to try to catch whatever it is they're looking for. They say they've never caught, and this is the key right here, they've never caught indisputable proof. That tells me they've caught something. Yeah. They just don't know what it is, and they don't want to say that it could be a skunk ape. Right. Now, you may say, Matt, you are nuts for thinking this, but I mean, come on. Mm-hmm. I mean, how much of a pigeonhole do you got to put this into to make your statement truthful? Right. Never found indisputable proof. We've never found indisputable proof of a lot of things. Right. You know, so, okay, that does, again, to me, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that it does, but it certainly doesn't mean that it doesn't. Right. And Matt, I'm going to talk about this more when we get to my side quest tonight. But here's my thing is researchers like that, scientists like that should, what they're supposed to do is if they get stories and stuff like this of creatures, they should be going out and looking for proof or proof that it doesn't exist. And then basing it on that rather than somebody tells you something, they go, well, that doesn't really fit with what we think the biological life is here. So we're just going to say you're crazy and not put any effort into looking for it. Yeah. And it bothers me because I understand that's going to take some money to go research this. but how much money do you put into other research efforts for years before you find anything? Exactly. So don't poo-poo it until you go look for it. That's it. Don't dismiss it yet. Okay? You are allowed to be skeptical. Sure. In fact, you're allowed to believe whatever you want. but you know there are a lot of people that have reported seeing something like this that could or couldn't be a skunk ape and they've reported it they know what they saw don't just don't completely dismiss it right i mean there's there's really only you know a couple of people that are out there actually working at this and don't have a big financial backing exactly exactly i mean there's bigfoot researchers all over the world you know we've got a handful of people that are actually trying to to to see if this skunk ape is real now truth be told they believe that it's 100 yeah um but they're just trying to capture that proof so that they can say listen we told you people we're not nuts you know look at this look what we've gotten you know sharon hill she's another one she's a researcher and a columnist for the committee for the skeptical inquiry okay um but she's written about bigfoot and the skunk ape and a lot of other mythical creatures she says that it's almost entirely eyewitness testimony which you know miss hill says that's the most unreliable evidence you can have you know that and that understandable you know if all your If all you basing the existence of this thing on is people saying they seen it you like well that just not that's not enough evidence to to support it i mean i and and i i completely understand where she's coming from but but i'm just like just don't just 100 dismiss it with without without you know putting forth a little bit more effort to go okay we we have we have hunted and searched we have you know done you know testing you know it's it's impossible or maybe it's possible but we can't find one and leave it at that you know and but that's the thing like what i can't remember the name of the animal, but over in Asia, there was a large quadruped animal that's in the same family. I think it's the Bovedae family. And it's that like three-toned, it's got stripes on the back legs. The body is black and the head's like a reddish brown color. And all they had was eyewitness testimony of the people who lived there. So the scientists were like, no, no, no. and then finally one day they saw it yeah and now they're like oh hey it does exist yeah why does anybody have to believe their eyewitness testimony right i'm like did you catch it you know did you get some dna what did you know you just saw it so now it's okay yeah what's the difference your eyewitness and the people who live there constantly's eyewitness exactly now you know Sheely responds to this. I mean, he don't just sit there and take it. I mean, he says, look, he said, you know, I've lived in this area observing things that decompose remarkably fast in this swamp. Absolutely. You know, and at 2.2 million acres, it's the largest area of protected land east of the Mississippi. Most of it is rarely visited. it's easy to imagine that a handful of reclusive animals could live in it essentially unnoticed and leave virtually no evidence he's right i know he says i know what i've seen for someone who hasn't come here and put in the time to say otherwise doesn't really matter to me yeah okay i mean i look i can take dave shealy's point just as well as i can take sharon hills yep now Sheely says that his second sighting occurred in 1998 after spending the better part of a year sitting in tree stands situated across his property and he finally caught sight of the elusive skunk ape. He says, I heard something splashing in the water. At first, I thought it was a person, but then from about 100 yards away, I saw it coming toward me. It was a skunk ape, the same as I saw when I was a kid. As it walked by, unaware of being observed, he shot several photos of it, watching it disappear into the nearby trees. Later, he returned and made a concrete cast of its footprint, which still sits in the gift shop at the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters. This is what I was going to talk about earlier. So the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, so i went and looked this place up and i sent this to adam last night um man it is crazy looking honestly it is exactly what i want it to look like okay 100 yeah i mean it literally if you're if you're driving you know through like one of those weird florida beach towns not like panama city if you're driving through like some little beach town and you see these buildings that you know they're selling you know petrified alligators and stuff okay that's what it looks like and it's perfect it i would rather it it needs to look like this period there's no other way it's it's ideal and they've got a gift shop that includes an online gift shop i'm sending adam stuff from this gift shop check out this you know what about this over here you know i want the hunting permit yes oh man it is great it is great if if i'm if i'm ever down in in that area i i'm going by there you know and i'm not 100 i'm not 100 sure that one of these days you're not going to look behind me and see something i've i've bought from there right now uh adam talked about the odor being a very unique thing she uh see uh sheely says the odor is a cross between a skunk and a wet dog he says it's strong and unmistakable he recalls catching the scent prior to his 2011 sighting he says he noticed the smell and then all of a sudden the large hairy creature emerged from a group of trees when it realized that sheely was standing there It took off. Okay. But this one didn't leave any evidence behind. Now it left a smell. You can, in the gift shop, you can purchase, like I said, trinkets, T-shirts. They have swamp tours and you can buy a Sheely skunk ape field guide for $9 and 75 cents. Nice. Now, because of this, a lot of Sheely's critics say that the fact that he profits from this legendary creature undermines his credibility. Now, in 2000, he applied for a grant from the Collier County Tourism Development Council to fund his research into the skunk ape. and some remarked that it was con there was a conveniently timed release of his skunk ape video footage right before the hearing okay so you know that some people kind of think that oh he just happened to capture this video of this skunk ape and now he wants some money to research it you know I don't know. I'm not on either side of this. I'm not wading into those waters. That's right. That's right. But it is easy for authorities to dismiss or even mock Dave Sheely, which he has been. And news articles have poked fun at his video saying that it looks remarkably like, quote, a guy in a monkey suit. um they've man i i can't take that seriously because they've said that about the patterson gimlin film exactly years and i think it's been thoroughly debunked that it's not a guy in a suit but whatever yeah but we're going to get into these numerous other sightings from the 60s all the way up to the late 90s and it is important when you hear these to remember one thing A tall swamp creature known as the Esty Capcacchi has been seen by the Seminoles in the Everglades for over 200 years. Yep. Okay. Now, how many other things have Adam and I talked about that were of Native American legend? Yeah. and here is this, this oddity, you know, this strange, mythical, cryptid, whatever you want to call it in the Everglades. And when you look at the Native American lore, they've been talking about it for 200 years. Okay? Okay, so don't dismiss all this you're about to hear as this is just a lot of funny and goofy and it's one dude's fight to prove that something exists. It's not. It's not just a tale from Florida, man. Yeah, it is really not. All right. So the earliest published report of a skunk ape was from Suwannee County, which is east of Tallahassee in 1942, when a man said that one of the creatures hitched a ride on the running board of his car for nearly half a mile before jumping off and racing into the woods. Holy smokes. Yeah. Another of the well-publicized sightings is a pair of hunters claimed that the ape invaded their camp in 1957. It's really unclear who coined this term skunk ape, but it appears to have surfaced sometime around the 60s. And during the 60s and 70s, the period when Sheely had his first sighting, more and more reports trickle in. as far as the north uh as far north as the panhandle but again most often in the everglades so 1957 these hunters they have this this weird encounter with what they think is a giant ape that just busts into their hunting camp okay and then in the 1960s we start seeing the uptick in these reports so you know it it all kind of follows a timeline here and remember at this time you know 1964 dave shealy was born okay so these sightings are older than him so it's not something that he just made up right now just after midnight on january 9th 1974, Richard Lee Smith slammed his car into something near the intersection of U.S. Route 27 and Hollywood Boulevard on the eastern edge of the Everglades in Pembroke Pines. Smith told the Florida Highway Patrol that he initially thought he'd hit a tall man in dark clothing, but was stunned when a seven or eight foot tall hairy creature lifted itself off the road, roared at him, and charged his car, Smith gunned his engine and took off. Yeah, I would too. You're going to tell this to a highway patrolman that you hit a seven or eight foot tall hairy creature. This is what you're going to say. Right. Okay. Even if you're drunk, you can come up with a better story than that. Okay. So I got to think that, you know, Mr. Smith probably realized what the heck did I just hit? Right. After this happened, over the next few hours, drivers in the area reported seeing a limping giant walking along US-27. officers were dispatched and at 2 12 a.m a hilea gardens patrolman reported a huge hairy creature limping along the road a few miles from the accident scene before it disappeared into the brush at dawn police searched the swamp with two helicopters but failed to find anything we know one thing skunk apes are tough they are tough man if it got hit by a car and is just limping right yes you get hit by a car you're gonna you're gonna be lucky to limp you know man so now that's crazy though that you had the one guy report it and then after it before they heard like it wasn't like he went and told everybody that i hit this thing he told one guy and then you get reports of a limping giant walking along the thing that it ties because those people that saw the limping giant went okay it's one thing to see a giant but why in the hell is it limping yeah you know it's a it's a period of about two hours in 1974 no no cell phones nothing you you would have had police radios maybe cbs um so these other drivers calling in and going you won't believe this but we've seen it not only that then you get a patrolman actually sees something like this in the span of about two hours and it's likely not a human because they would have had to go to the hospital yep or you know maybe see him limping but limping into the local er yeah it it wasn't no guy in a monkey suit because they would have been calling a corner you know right like we got a dead guy on highway 27 and he's wearing a monkey suit okay so and that's another unique thing because there's several of these where you have multiple witnesses over a period of time that see a skunk ape and that's one thing you don't see with bigfoot sightings bigfoot sightings are quick you know maybe a a minute or two at the longest with the exception of a few um but you don't get bigfoot sightings where you have multiple witnesses of the same creature okay right and in this case you do and we've got another one that's like this Now, in June of 1974, this was in January, June of 1974, Lake Worth farmer Buddy Sterrett said a skunk ape lifted one of his hogs, weighing over 100 pounds, and ripped it to pieces. Man. In September of 1974, Wellington security guard Kerry Cantor shot a skunk ape after it approached him from out of the woods and ignored his commands to stop. the wounded creature ran back into the brush hmm well i mean probably didn't understand english well that's you're probably right okay and didn't ignore him it just he's like what is that weird thing hollering at me now the hairless bigfoot he shot him yeah he shot him and he kept going yeah so you know even if you were you know even if it was a person you know it's like you would have found this guy i mean you you know he wasn't gonna get too far after you shot him tis but a flesh wound oh man he'd have been he'd have been hyped up on something if any got away all right now viped up on goofballs as they say damn pagans living on no does vietnam war veteran and former police officer charles stokeman and his wife leslie and their three children lived on the ocean side near mile marker 94 and a half on key largo On July 14th of 1977, Stokeman and his 13-year-old son Charlie were collecting bottles in the thick red mangroves behind their home when they caught sight of an enormous eight or nine foot tall skunk ape. Stockman said it had a huge head and shoulders, long fur all over, and it stank like a dirty wet dog. The noise he made was a high-pitched wailing. hmm stokeman cleared 30 feet of brush from around his home to discourage a return visit but the overpowering stench of the skunk ape persisted over several nights which made them assume it was still around then local law enforcement received a call about a massive creature crouched beneath the cover of a shed on the stokeman property monroe county sheriff Monroe County Sheriff Deputy Bill Haas, Florida Marine Patrol Captain Jack Gillen, and Sergeant Randall Chen from the Plantation Key substation investigated. Officer Chen reported, There is definitely a problem here. These people are truly scared to death. Mrs. Stokeman fled to Homestead with their three children after catching a glimpse of the creature 30 feet outside of her bedroom window. Although no trace of the skunk ape was found, Charles Stokeman slept alone with his shotgun for almost a month before joining his family in Dade County. So, I mean, you know, again, over a period of time, you know, these people kind of feel terrorized, you know, by this skunk ape. Now, you know, whether it meant them any harm or not, It was just kind of there. They could smell it. They couldn't get the smell to go away. And then Mrs. Stokeman sees one outside of her bedroom window. You know, which would freak you out. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it all started when, when Mr. Stokeman and, and his son, Charlie saw one coming up out when they were out there picking up bottles. So, you know, these are people that they packed up and moved. Okay. They just, it scared them enough. And that's why the officer was like, these people are really scared. So they saw something. You don't get terrified by something that, eh, whatever. Right. That doesn't, I mean, no. Or that you made up or something. Yeah. The only other time I've heard that is remember in the Falk monster, there was the story of that family who they got attacked outside their cabin. Yep. And they ended up moving because some people believed them, but it didn't matter to them. Exactly. They were like, I'm not staying here. Yeah. This, no, I'm not. Yeah. And it's not easy. If you've never moved, if you're younger and still live with your parents and hadn't moved, it's not easy to move. Yeah, right. Especially when you've got a whole family and you're trying to move the whole family and the whole house and all this stuff. Financially, it's not easy. It's not easy to get everything packed up and moved. So you wouldn't do that on a whim or just because. We want to move real quickly for some reason. So let's make this story up. Can you imagine? Well, why are you selling this place? Take a whiff. You know, you smell that. Yeah. I'm not. Oh, is there a bacon cookies? You know? Yeah. Is there a dump around here? No. Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that thing out there. Mm hmm. So the skunk ape eventually attracted mainstream attention after all these sightings, including a bill that was introduced, not passed, in the Florida legislature in 77 that would have made it illegal to, quote, take, possess, harm, or molest anthropoid or humanoid animals. So somebody was trying to, you know, pass legislation that would protect these things. I think it should have passed. Yeah, why not? I mean, because, A, we've got stupider laws. If you've ever read laws on the books, there are stupider laws than that. And B, pass it. That way in the future, if something does happen, there's already law in the books that, hey, no molesting of these bipedal hominids out in the swamps or whatever. You're like, well, there's already a law that says I can't bathe my moose in a kiddie pool in the front yard on Thursday. you know so what next you know yeah might as well keep me from killing a bipedal hominid yeah right too much chance that it could be a human you know really yeah i mean if you think about it yeah oh it's a skunk cake wow oh no it was joe oh man poor joe well i told him he needed to shave you know yeah see i i thought it was a skunk cape so there's no law against that joe needed a bath in a shave so bad but you know this right about this time 77 it was around this time that shealy as a teenager spotted evidence of the creature for the second time in the form of the four-toed footprints left right near his hunting camp deep in the big cypress interior and you can and and the the casts are there at the skunk ape research headquarters you know in fact there's pictures of dave holding them up occasional sightings continued on for years and the skunk ape hit the news again when passengers on a tour bus traveling through the preserve claimed they spotted one at 2 p.m on wednesday july 16th 1997 steve goodbread a guide for pelican tours was driving a bus with 30 tourists along Turner River Road in Big Cypress, just east of Ochopee. He was stopped at a wooden bridge when he observed a large creature standing erect behind some brush approximately 70 yards away It was about seven feet tall with thick brown hair covering its entire body The creature was rocking back and forth shaking the bushes and appeared irritated by their presence. What tipped you off to that? Yeah, right? Now, good bread. Was it the shaking or the rocking? Come on, man. Get out of here. Yeah. Tourist. but good bread and his passengers observed what they believed to be a skunk ape for at least 15 minutes. He tried to persuade one tourist with a telephoto lens on her camera to exit the bus and take photographs, but she refused. What? What you're trying to convince a woman to get off of the bus while you're all looking at this gigantic thing, shaking these bushes. it obviously is not happy that you're here hey lady why don't you get out there and take a picture of it with your zoom lens if you're that uh that set on doing it you borrow the camera that's exactly what i thought yeah i can't leave the bus ma'am you know i'm responsible for this bus and all the passengers on it so i can't leave so so you step you go now in retrospect good bread said it was probably a good idea that no one got off the bus yeah now he drove away but the creature was still in sight and even though good bread had always believed in the possibility that the skunk ape existed he said he was shaken by the experience and refused to advertise or exploit the skunk ape with his tours. He wouldn't say, hey, we're going on a skunk ape tour, which, you know, to his credit, you know, he didn't do it. Because probably around this time, he could have pocketed some, you know, some greenbacks for doing that. But whatever, he didn't do it. And, you know, kudos for him. But I mean, you know, just imagine you really believe in all this. You know, you've bought into the news stories and the sightings over the last 20 years. And then here you are driving a tour bus through Big Cypress. And then there is one standing there shaking the bushes, looking at you, not running away, standing there. Like, come get me. I mean, what would that do to you? I mean, it would shake me to my core. I mean, it would be like, you know, with my fascination with dead gum dragons, if I just walked up in the woods one day and there's like a little fire-breathing lizard, I don't know what I would do. Right. You know, but just here's this guy just looking at it and 30 witnesses with him. All saw the same thing. Now, less than a week after this happened, But Jan Brock, a real estate agent, and Vince Doerr, who is the chief of the Ochope Fire Control District, separately spotted a large hairy biped minutes apart while driving through the preserve on the morning of July 21st. 21st okay so the the bus the bus tour thing uh it happened on july 16th on july 21st um jan brock and vince door catch this thing uh separately they were not together uh jan brock says the thing just ran in front of my car it was shaggy looking and very tall maybe six and a half or seven feet tall now it was 15 minutes after jan brock saw this thing that achope fire chief vince dor photographed the same skunk ape after it entered the forest near his home and how do we know that it's the same i guess because of the the relative position of where they were but uh door says at first i thought it was a bear but bears don't stay up on two legs the way this thing was now you said everything's connected dig this turns out just two miles away from where vince uh vince door and jan brock had their encounter dave shealy had been working on finding a skunk ape and he baited the area with lima beans because the story is is that these omnivorous skunk apes loved lima beans and he was baiting his area with these lima beans and he was repeatedly finding the beans missing in the morning along with tracks that had been left in the night so here comes dave pitching out some lima beans he gets up the next day lima beans are missing there's tracks on the ground so he's trying to catch a good sight of one so he puts out these lima beans and so two miles away from where he's baiting this field is where jan brock and vince door have their sighting of this one that runs across in the front of her car and vince door gets a photograph of it running into the trees but you can go and look um none of these photographs none of them are remarkable in any way yeah you know they are all taken very quickly they are taken at a time before you know high-speed cameras and all that stuff were commonplace so i mean these people are essentially grabbing point and shoot cameras and you know trying to get a picture so right you know if you want to if you want to bash why couldn't you get out your cell phone well cell phones didn't have cameras till what like 2012 or something or and not really a decent one until after that you know so you but you can go and see all these photographs. Now on December 29, 2000, the Sarasota Sheriff's Department received an anonymous letter with two enclosed photos from a woman purporting to show what her husband believed was an escaped orangutan that had been stealing fruit from their back porch. She never mentioned anything about a skunk ape but the photo clearly shows a large primate that is definitely not an orangutan the letter began enclosed please find some pictures i took my husband thinks it's an orangutan is some is someone missing an orangutan i love that because people people do that they're like oh well it must be an escaped gorilla an escape is anyone missing how often yeah how often does that happen i love it i love it probably probably less frequently than skunk ape is this woman i want this woman to look like the the granny on courage the cowardly dog okay you know she she uh found this puppy that was just looked so sad on the side of the road brought it in take care of it it it's a coyote exactly and she's like this this puppy's really snappy i don't understand now the woman wrote that for two nights it had taken apples her daughter brought down from up north off of their back porch the photos were taken on the third night after she went outside to investigate a repetition of deep whomp noises whomps w-o-o-m-p whomp i like it whomp she aimed her camera at something that moved in the darkness behind the saw palmetto bushes at the rear of their property after quickly snapping two photos each accompanied by a blinding flash the creature retreated into the woods didn't even turn the flash off yeah the woman wrote that its awful smell lasted long after it left the area she leased their dog in the backyard and it never returned i mean put it all together i mean this thing is not an orangutan okay they they they i don't know they were just like hey someone missing theirs we got one and then in the picture it's obvious this thing is way bigger you know this is not clyde from the clint eastwood movies okay this thing is way bigger um and it's making some odd noises and then then she comes back at the end is like and the smell oh the smell yeah well i mean you know if that's not skunk ape i don't know what is orangutan smell a lot worse than i thought they did the woman signed off with god bless i prefer to remain anonymous so she wouldn't give her name but wrote that in case it's not an orangutan don't tell my name i don't want to sound dumb yeah but she wrote in her letter that the incident occurred on their property near I-75 east of Sarasota in an area that includes the Mayaka River and the Mayaka State Park. The creature has since become known as the Mayaka skunk ape. Yeah. So what do you make of all this, Adam? I mean, you know, there's a lot of these, there's a lot of these, um, these sightings and they're, they're pretty amazing. I mean, the, the first thing I would, I would say is I would reiterate what I said earlier is that I'm very disappointed in researchers and scientists out there who say, well, all we have is eyewitness accounts so you're dumb yeah we're not looking into that because it doesn't fit into what we think the biology of this area should be instead of oh there are a lot of corroborating eyewitness accounts of something maybe it's not a giant primate but it's something out there. Why don't we look into it and see if we can figure out what everybody's seeing? I think to me, that's the way you do it. You don't go into it as a researcher with the thought, oh, this is a giant new species of primate living out in the woods. You go into it saying, people are seeing something. Let's figure out what it is that they're seeing. And maybe it's a new scientific discovery but i am with you know i'm with you yeah i'm fully fascinated by my favorite story of the night was the one you told about the guy hitting the big foot and it limped yeah because of how early it was like you said there was no internet there was no way to post it real quick and then other people see it and start making up the same accounts. Two, there were three or four other people who saw a giant that was limping. Why would they make up the limp part? If they were making up seeing a giant, why would they all make up a limp if it wasn't actually doing it? And there's no way it was a person because, like we said, a person would go to the hospital little or be dead. So those corroborating stories within a short timeframe of people who had no knowledge of the other one is very, very fascinating. Yep. And it, it says something to me that there was something. Yeah. There was some large creature that was hit what it is. I don't know. I mean, I have had theories about Bigfoot in the past, which all of those theories could be the same for Skunk Ape. But I also wonder if there's other explanations for large, hairy, bipedal, primate looking. I know. It's just, you know, I don't know. It just blows me away. I mean, these sightings are so fascinating. And I look at this as like, okay, remember what I said about there not being that many, at least speculating that there's not that many? um so if there's not that many of them that would be a reason that we have this huge variance in the time between sightings you know we see clusters of sightings and then a big gap where nobody really sees one you combine that with the fact that the everglades is so large um you know i i think it makes much more sense but the sightings that we do have are amazing and and right now i am looking at they're better than some big way better and right now i am looking at the photos that this lady sent in the mayaka skunk ape and we'll we'll post these um when the when the episode drops we'll post these in the group um i mean it it has it has an orangutan ish appearance i remember seeing these um i didn't realize this was the myaka one but yeah it has that appearance but it is obviously not one okay i don't know what it is but i could certainly see that if i looked out my window at night and saw this eating some fruit on my back patio that may be what i think it is but i'm honestly i mean i might as well go is that a unicorn hopping through my driveway going outside what are the odds yeah i'm not going outside for one uh if i if i see that and for two i might move too if i got like small kids or something i might be moving too the only and i love this one the only thing that gives me any pause on this is that this one more so than any of the other ones could be a hoax with the fact that you know they just anonymously sent it to the sheriff's department and it's like hey let's have some fun so that's the only thing about this one that that that gets to me but i you know i don't know that for sure i mean it could be 100 real and this lady's like i don't want a bunch of police at my house you know but there's something out here and they might want to look around i don't want to talk to them about it and i don't want them knocking on my door but i feel like i need to let them know because this thing might could hurt somebody um and so that's what she did i want to believe that's exactly what happened i don't know that for sure you know it could have been somebody going hey you want to have some fun you know put on this suit and go out there and get in the bushes um but you know i hope not but the other ones i mean the 30 people on that tour bus that saw that thing i mean what what kind of hoax is that i mean it's not i mean it just i just don't see where it could be um it's one of those things in broad daylight if you're going to stand up there for 15 minutes in front of a tourist bus what are the you're taking a really big risk that somebody there doesn't have a gun right okay you know and then you're a dead hoaxer so you you gotta take that into consideration too you know there's a really good chance if you go traipsing around in the swamp wearing a monkey suit somebody's gonna shoot you oh sure so you know i don't think these are hoaxes i you know i don't think that that dave shealy is a complete nut job i think he's passionate about what he's doing i think he knows what he has seen you know he may not be able to prove it to another individual, but he doesn't have, I mean, he knows what he saw, you know, he does. He wants to find out more about what's going on and shoot, I don't blame him. I would too, if I was in that position. So, I mean, I think, I think it's, I think it's amazing that this, that, you know, we're even talking about this. Yeah. Well, and you got people that say, well, you can't believe him because he profits. Well, maybe he profits so that he can continue his research because it's not cheap. It's not free. And if nobody else is going out there to look for the skunk ape and he's the one doing it, why not sell some merch so that you can get a new camera or something like that to investigate the skunk ape? I would probably do the same thing. Get a field cam. Hey, I'll tell you this. I didn't see anything on their gift shop that, you know, I was like, oh, nobody would pay that much. I'm like, it's in line probably a lot cheaper than most of the stuff you buy when you go to these little tourist places. A lot cheaper. So, you know, like I said, y'all may be looking over here and see Matt in his official Skunk Ape Research headquarters hoodie. So you never know. It's all in my price range. Right. And if it's in my price range, it's good. Yeah. Because I don't pay a lot. No joke. but what do you guys think? I know we've got tons of listeners in Florida, and you probably have heard these stories a lot more than Adam and we've been hearing them for years. What do you think? Is there really a chance that there's something running around the Everglades, maybe similar to Bigfoot, but not quite, you know, or do you think this is just one of these, you know, like an urban legend, you know, it's just, oh, there's a thing that lives out in the Everglades. You got to be careful. There's a lot of stuff that lives out in the Everglades. everglades you got to be careful of you know is is this one have you had this one of them experience yeah have you seen something have you know maybe maybe some of y'all have got you know family or you know your grandfather goes man i remember back in 1967 i was out there you know cutting up some wood and this i saw this thing i'm walking out of the tree line you know didn't know what it It was, but it was hairy and tall. Hey. Smelled real bad. Let us know. And the best place to do that is in our Facebook group. It's called The Graveyard. We've got thousands of members in there sharing stories, asking questions, making comments about the show, telling jokes. Look, it's just a great group of people, you know, that all just want to hear these really cool, amazing stories and experiences. Don't forget to check out our website, which is graveyardpodcast.com. Speaking of selling merch, okay, we aren't getting rich on our merch, but we appreciate you going and checking it out. You can find T-shirts. You can find coffee mugs, posters, stickers, all kinds of stuff. And it really helps us if you do this because maybe somebody will go, what's Graveyard Tales? What's that on your shirt? What's that on your bumper sticker? And you can share the show, and it just brings more people into the graveyard. Um, you can also become a patron on our website and, and you guys are our bread and butter. We appreciate you so much for donating to the work that Adam and I do. It, it truthfully keeps us going. And, you know, we've been doing that. We've been at this for eight years and we plan to be at it for a lot longer. And it's you guys that help us do that. Yep. So until next time, we'll save you a seat in the graveyard. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side.