Spook Hill, 1950

At some point Barney's Tavern in Lake Wales printed and handed out a pamphlet of local legends. One copy survives in the State Archives, dated 1956. The tavern opened in the 1930s and appears in the Florida Memory collection as a going concern through the 1950s.

It introduced Captain Gimme Sarsaparilla, a pirate who in the year 1511 retired from the sea to Lake Wales to pursue a quiet life of whale fishing in the inland lakes. His trusted lieutenant, Teniente Vanilla, was buried at the foot of a small hill on North Wales Drive. The captain himself went to Davy Jones' locker at the bottom of North Lake Wales.

The pamphlet was not presented as fiction.

The hill already had its name by then. The earliest documented use of Spook Hill is 1950. Who wrote it down first is not recorded.

Who Barney was — his full name, where he came from, how seriously he meant any of it — the record does not say. A National Park Service historian reviewing the site decades later described Spook Hill as an example of a community building a tourist attraction from scratch, and wrote that the legend grew more elaborate over time.

Another legend holds that a Native American chief named Cufcowellax fought a great bull alligator that had been raiding his village near the lake. Both died. A small lake formed where they fell, and the tribe called it Lake Ticowa. The chief's spirit, or the gator's, or both, is said to still move things on the hill.

Cufcowellax appears on the sign at Spook Hill and in no historical record the National Park Service could verify. No confirmed village. No confirmed battle. No confirmed Lake Ticowa. The legend appears to date from sometime in the twentieth century, and the record does not establish whether it came before or after the pirate story.

A third account has a fisherman, unnamed, watching his parked car begin to roll uphill in the 1930s with the engine off. He is said to have shouted something about spooks and fainted. Locals, the story goes, called the place Spook Hill after that.

The hill is on North Wales Drive, between Burns Avenue and Spook Hill Elementary School. Drivers pull to the marked line, shift into neutral, and the car rolls — uphill, or what looks like uphill.

Spook Hill is a gravity hill. The surrounding ridge hides the true horizon, and without a reliable reference point the eye reads a descent as a climb. The land slopes down. The car rolls downhill, as cars do.

In April 2019, the National Register of Historic Places added Spook Hill to its rolls.