What the Hill Says

Bok hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design the grounds. He commissioned a Gothic tower in coquina stone and pink marble, with a 60-bell carillon that could be heard for miles across the orange groves. On February 1, 1929, President Calvin Coolidge came to dedicate it.

After that, Lake Wales had something people drove toward.

Then the paper trail starts wandering.

At some point after Bok Tower opened — the exact year depends on which thread you pull — a restaurant on the edge of town began telling a different story about the ridge. Barney's Tavern, established in the 1930s and archived in the Florida Memory collection as a going concern through the 1950s, became the unofficial mythology department of Lake Wales.

Their 1956 pamphlet, which still survives in the State Archives, introduced the world to 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.

Who Barney was, exactly — his full name, where he came from, how seriously he meant any of this — the record does not say. A National Park Service historian, reviewing the site decades later, called Spook Hill "a good example of how a community created a tourist attraction from scratch," and noted that "the legend evolved over time, becoming more legendary and more fantastic."

This is the polite way of saying Barney made it up.

There are older-sounding legends, though "older-sounding" is not the same thing as old.

One says a Native American chief named Cufcowellax once battled a great bull alligator that had been raiding his village near the lake. Both died in the struggle. A small lake formed where they fell. The tribe called it Lake Ticowa. The chief's spirit, or the gator's, or both together, still moves things on the hill.

Cufcowellax is harder to hold onto. The name appears on the sign at Spook Hill, but not in any historical record the National Park Service could verify. No confirmed village. No confirmed battle. No confirmed Lake Ticowa. The legend seems to have arrived sometime in the twentieth century, though whether it came before or after the pirate story depends on which thread you pull.

There is also a story about a fisherman, unnamed, who in the 1930s watched his parked car begin to roll uphill without the engine running. He was so startled he yelled something like "them's spooks" and fainted. After that, locals called it Spook Hill.

This may be true. It may also be the kind of story a place tells after it already has the name.

The earliest documented use of "Spook Hill" is 1950. Who wrote it down first is not recorded.

The hill itself is on North Wales Drive, between Burns Avenue and Spook Hill Elementary School. You pull your car to the marked line, put it in neutral, and it rolls — uphill, or what looks like uphill.

The explanation is less haunted. Spook Hill is a gravity hill, an optical illusion caused by the surrounding ridge hiding the true horizon. The land slopes down. Your eyes, deprived of a reliable reference point, read the descent as a climb. Your car rolls downhill, as cars do, and the hill appears to push it up.

The illusion is real. The rest depends on who is telling the story.

In April 2019, the National Register of Historic Places added Spook Hill to its rolls — not because the legend is true, but because the legend is old enough and believed enough to count as history.

Bok Tower is there too, a quarter mile away, its carillon bells ringing on the hour across the same ridge Olmsted landscaped, the same ground Coolidge stood on, the same high Florida spine that drew a retired magazine editor to build something lasting out of pink marble and coquina stone.

Bok had a name. The hill mostly didn't.

Believe what you want about the alligator and the chief. Believe, if it suits you, in Captain Gimme Sarsaparilla and the whale fishermen of North Lake Wales. Barney wrote those down and the state kept them, which is one kind of permanence. The fisherman who fainted may have been real. The horses that labored downhill, straining against a grade that wasn't there, may have been real too.

The hill is real. The hill rolls your car and won't tell you why.