Ever been someplace where you felt you shouldn't be??

Have you ever been someplace which just felt weird like you shouldn't be there?

My parents used to own some property in southern Florida on the Gulf side, they wanted to retire there. To get there we most always flew into Miami and drove from Miami across 41 the Tamiami Trail. About 3/4 of the way across there used to be this place out in the middle of the everglades called Remuda Ranch. We must have driven past this place a thousand times if we drove by it once. The place looked really cool, but it was in the middle of nowhere. It was some kind of a resort place, and I always wanted to stop there just to check it out. Dad would always say no because the place was some kind of a "Swinger weird sex place", so we never stopped there. At night this place was lit up like a Christmas tree in the middle of BFE, and hey, 'weird sex place' just made me want to go there even more!

Years and years went by and my parents decided to sell their property there and retire elsewhere. I flew down there one last time to pick up an old station wagon we had and tow our boat back with it. On my way to Marco I passed by this place and, seeing as how I didn't have anything better to do, I decided to stop in and maybe have dinner...and check it out, after all these years. Hey, you know, 'weird sex place' and all, right?

So I pulled in and went inside. Wow! This place was COOL! It was like walking into an old Spanish mission with a big atrium and balconies. The whole middle area was a combination easy room / dining area, and there were quite a few people there too. That was where the coolness ended.

Pretty much as soon as I walked in the whole room fell silent. People just whispering after that. I paid no mind and got seated for dinner. Pretty soon I felt like people were staring at me, and when I'd look up...they were! Not everyone all at the same time, but pretty much everyone at different times. Definitely had the 'Persona non Grata' vibe to it. So, me being me, I started to stare back trying to figure all these people out. Most of them were in their late 20's to early 30's, and it seemed like a large percentage of them were Cuban or Puerto Rican which was pretty common in FL. Were these all the 'weird sex freaks'? Maybe, but it seemed like they were all guys, except for a couple gals. Most everyone was pretty clean cut, and some really well dressed.

Anyway, after a while I started to get a really bad vibe about this place. Couldn't put my finger on it, but I was definitely an outsider and it was time for me to "Vamos!" (like pronto).

Finished my beer and my marginal dinner, paid the bill and left without incident.

The next morning I headed to 7-11 to get a coffee. While there I grabbed a copy of the Miami Herald. When I read the headlines I stopped in my tracks! The night before there had been a MAJOR drug bust...and you guessed it...right at the place I was. And it was a big one too complete with a shoot out and the whole deal! They seized a twin engine aircraft, about 700 kilos of coc aine and arrested about 30 people. Even more shocking was the time it all went down...8:30pm. Wow, when I got in the car the night before the clock said 8:15pm! I'd left just 15 minutes before. I must have walked right into the middle of a big federal sting operation and didn't know it. No one knew who I was, so nobody knew who's side I was on I guess.

So while I was sitting there having dinner, unbeknownst to me, there was a twin engine plane loaded with coc aine from Columbia parked right across the road, probably millions of dollars in cash, and the meeting place was this place in the middle of nowhere, right where I was sitting. Inside, they weren't Cubans and Puerto Ricans like I had thought...they were Columbian cartel members!

I would learn later that this particular place was quite famous, or 'infamous' as the case may be. Remuda Ranch was the location of one of the biggest real estate scams in US history back in the 60's. Some shifty developers from Maryland had built this fancy place as a front for selling hundreds of thousands of acres of swamp land they never intended to develop. They'd build miles and miles of roads, primarily as a means to drain the swampland as a guise for developing the property. After the deal folded, and the principal's fled or went to jail, the ownership of this place bounced all over the place for decades. And some less than savory characters (i.e. drug cartels) figured out this was a great rendezvous point in the middle of nowhere. The locals told stories about the cartels flying fully loaded DC-3's and landing on the roads the developers had built out in the everglades.

So, next time you get that 'Bad Ju-Ju' feeling in your gut...you might just be right!

Anyone else have a similar experience, or experiences?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Was taking this girl to prom in high school. So about a week before we went she invited me to a revival at her church.

We drive way, way, way out in the boonies. Walk through the woods for a while, and come up on a old dilapidated barn. In that barn is about 100 people, all chanting and falling over speaking in tongues.

I took one look and went back to the car.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
Have you ever been someplace which just felt weird like you shouldn't be there?

Do not ask. What i mean is do not F* ask!

But since you asked. Yep. Everywhere. Like my rented apartment right now. Some people would gladly call this a home. I do not. It is just some place from which i pay money every month to stay here and fail everything.

a reply to: Finspiracy

Sorry about that, man.

I really am.

a reply to: underwerks

Yep, that would be enough to make me go back to the car too!

Definitely pegged on the weird-o-meter!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I couldn’t shake the feeling I was the offering that day.



I wasn’t about to get done in my some backwoods cult.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

You talking about the old Port of the Islands Hotel? There's been rumors of it being a drug landing spot for decades, everyone who grew up south of the Tampa/Orlando mid-state line heard of it. Rumors, though, not fact, it's just urban legend at this point. Another urban legend, and a rather famous one in South Florida as a whole, is that Griselda Blanco or Pablo Escobar (take your pick here) ran the hotel personally (not a shred of proof to it, but it's a popular little legend)
Many spots in FL are like that -- prime drug trafficking points at first glance, but with little to no actual basis beyond just being rural or abandoned, and someone's "hunch" and/or "a friend of a friend said..."

Call it a blend of a little real life & the stuff of urban legends, there was probably at least a little traffic going through, much in the same way North Port up the coast north of Port Charlotte/Charlotte Harbor used to be infamous for being claimed to be a prime landing spot for small planes on the undeveloped back roads to drop off drug shipments, and a favored place to dump the marked dead (eerie thing was, that really WAS a thing, the boondocks of the town seemed to be full of bodies people kept stumbling on out in the woods there when I was a kid)
Well, it might not have been people dropping drug shipments, BUT there was a decently sized pot grow op out there in the woods that I stumbled on traipsing around with friends, so someone DID set up shop out there, and probably fueled the No Man's Land Zone rumors.

The dead people though, mostly were just dumped missing/murder victims. I think only one was linked to drug business, and the rest were missing/murdered people.

Fun times growing up in America's Australia, fun times.

a reply to: Nyiah

Well, there was definitely some drug traffic going on there the night I came through! No rumor about it.

Never heard anything about Pablo Escobar though. No idea who owned it.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: Nyiah

Well, there was definitely some drug traffic going on there the night I came through! No rumor about it.

Certainly could have been. Especially if it was the 70's or 80's when you were there, the Remuda Ranch development stuff was a quagmire of a bad scam and those scammers being mixed up with smugglers trying to pad any land sale losses wouldn't shock me any.

It was a good old fashioned "prime beachfront property on Mars" scam kind of bad sell. Land was only shown during dry season to potential buyers, usually only from a plane flying over the area, so people had zero idea they were buying useless swamp land that was under water most of the year.

The canal system was doing the trees and vegetation no favors, either, and I think the state eventually bought everything back from the landowners and it's now mostly within the Picayune Strand State Forest now.

It really had some minor Wild West elements to it down there in the 'Glades, and it wasn't even that long ago, lol.

a reply to: Nyiah

Fun times growing up in America's Australia, fun times.

What a perfect description of Florida.

I stopped into an "Banditos" bar once and felt like PeeWee in the Tequila scene but I was in the Union with a couple of the guys so it was all ok.

Back in my IBofT days.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

About a month ago, was walking in the forest, then i stepped on this weird pile of leaves, branches, and whatnot.

Then i noticed a deer leg sticking out from under the pile.

About a second later i understood that the deer had been killed and well hidden by a bear, so slowly walked away.

I came back to the spot an hour later, while keeping a good distance, i checked the area with binoculars and i could see that it had been dug up, rib cage torn, a leg and the head pulled out, guts everywhere.

I could not see the bear because it must have known i was near, and went hiding.


But it was pretty disturbing when i first came across the carcass, i know they can kill people in those situations.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I lived in Louisiana many moons ago. Somehow friends and I ended up in a bar in the swamp in the middle of BFE. The bar had a dirt floor. Gaming machines were on pallets. Some girl walks into the bar and she looked pretty good. I gave her a look and wasn't more than a minute later some guy walks up to me and says, you shouldn't look at another man's woman that way could get you in trouble. I looked at him and also noticed some of the people at the bar were giving me the stink eye. Needless to say, we got out of there right quick-like. On my way to the car I looked at the swamp water and thought to myself, it would be pretty easy to get disappeared in that neck of the woods.

There have been a number of times I have had bad vibes about places or people. But for the most part, I did like the people down there. It was a different world from where I grew up.

Yeah my ex and I used to pack the dogs up, rent a van and do 2 weeks of camping (wherein I would write articles about each campground and write the trip off). Well, we stopped at this one rustic campground where it looked like campsites were abandoned with pot, pans, dinners just left sitting there. There was a horse ranch nearby. Well, I was not comfortable but we stayed anyways. Hey, we had a Wolfhound that went after a mountain lion once. We're good.

At midnight or so a 4x4 with lights all over it rolls up to the tent (like 5 feet away) with great engine revving, shotguns blasting in the air and a lot of threatening stuff. Turns out the horse ranch wanted the property, state refused to sell so the ranch hands did their best to make the state sell. Turned out they pulled that stunt on a State cop after a while and the horse ranch lost. Badly.

As a result, for 25 years now, I wake up each and every single night at 12:30. I also never go to our cabin or camping without proper defense devices.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Going into the projects in the 70's to score I did not think we'd get out alive.

a reply to: Nyiah

As I understand it, you are correct, the state bought everything north of the road and have declared it a state park. Looking at some satellite photos it looks like they've build a dam of some sort just north of the road to keep the water in the swamp.

And yes, this was in the early 80's (80 - 81 as I recall).

a reply to: Nyiah

Oh, and I suspect you already figured this out, but yes, that was exactly the place!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I don't recall the details because I was very young at the time, but I was at the mall with my grandparents. I needed to go to the bathroom, so we went to the nearest one. I went in and there was the absolute weirdest vibe. My memory is spotty, but I think I remember seeing almost every stall occupied, and each one had dress shoes and slacks like they were all taking a crap. It could have only been on or two stalls, but there was someone basically standing guard by the door.

I seem to recall they they wanted me out of there really quickly, or my grandfather knew something was up, and, I think it was my grandfather who said, "There's some bad men in there." We quickly left.

I never knew what he meant, but the vibe was bad AF, and looking back I think it was some sort of mob stuff going down in there.

Never forget the little bit I recall about that experience.

Here's a weird one. This one wasn't me, but my sister was working at the Machus Red Fox as a waitress. And she was working the night Jimmy Hoffa was kidnapped from there! Seriously!

She didn't know who Jimmy Hoffa was, but she did know that a lot of organized crime figures frequented the restaurant.

She said she had a bad vibe that night too. She got interviewed by the FBI, but she didn't see anything...(or so she says).

Ah yes I was 14, recently moved with my mom to a tropical island paradise.
Live music was a favorite of mine, so I got taken along with her and her date to a great live music venue.
Transvestite Bar.
Site of the World Beauty Contest for such things.
The waitress peeing in the urinal was a shocker.

ganjoa