Florida python hunter stumbles upon creepy scene right out of The Blair Witch Project
Mike Kimmel is accustomed to wading into the blackness of the Everglades at night searching for invasive Burmese pythons as a paid bounty hunter for the South Florida Water Management District.
But something he stumbled upon last month gave even the hard-to-startle snake wrangler the creeps.
While hunting near the abandoned Aerojet Dade Rocket Facility north of Everglades National Park, he found piles of rocks with upside down crosses painted on them, spooky baby dolls with crosses marked in ash on their heads and what looked like a bloody gown in a room where “She was only 9” was spray painted on the wall.
“I was there a couple weeks earlier and none of that was there,” said Kimmel, who in March caught the landmark 2000th python as part of the district’s two-year-old bounty program. “I’m kind of used to finding creepy stuff but this was way over the top and seems real deal authentic.”
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Kimmel, of Indiantown, reported his scary find to his supervisor, and he took video eerily similar to jerky dark footage of the horror film The Blair Witch Project.
“I don’t think it was just some kids trying to scare people,” said Kimmel, who posted some of his experience on Instagram.
District officials said it’s not unusual for people to trespass at the unusual facility built in the 1960s to assemble and test rockets that could send people to the moon.
The rockets were so large a special canal was dug to connect the facility to the Atlantic Ocean so they could be transported by barge. It was abandoned when Aerojet lost a NASA contract and the land was eventually purchased by the South Florida Water Management District.
Some buildings are covered in graffiti, and there are photos online taken by people who skirted a locked gate to hike or bike into the area.
The buildings are crumbling and the Everglades is slowing taking them back, but the fascination of abandoned places remains a lure.
Kimmel said he believes his finds were the vestiges of a Satanic ritual.
“It is quite a hike back there and it would be a whole lot of work to go through just to try to be funny,” he said.
But he’s not deterred from trekking again into the dark, a time when the snakes are out after avoiding the heat of the day.
On Friday, he was headed south for another hunt.
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Originally Posted by Bogertophis
