Sasquatch and Pedro and Voodoo, Oh My!

After a week of visiting relatives and studying history, we headed south to see more loved ones in Florida.  A nice farewell breakfast, and we were on the road by the crack of noon.  There were loads of things to stop and look at along the way.

Heading down I-95, the first quirky stop was the Cryptozoology and Paranormal Museum in Littleton, North Carolina.  This little museum is set up in a reportedly haunted house in a little town about 20 miles off the interstate.  Yes, we actually drove off for this.

This was a neat little house full of casts of huge footprints found in nearby Medoc Mountain State Park.  He also has dolls trapped in plastic cases.  These dolls are reportedly haunted, but there have apparently been no sightings of them moving.  There are also haunted items, such as a rope that supposedly caused someone to go crazy and some familiar shrunken heads that were sent up from Ecuador.  I think I saw them in a souvenir shop in Guayaquil a few years ago!

A bit further down the road, in Bowman, South Carolina, we made another foray off the beaten path to see the UFO Welcome Center.  It's a double-decker set of flying saucers made out of wood and other junk.  The guy who built this supposedly lives in these saucers part time, living the rest of the time in the mobile home behind it.  This one isn't worth going to see.  The yard is piled so full of junk and garbage that it really just looks like a heap.  But, since we were there, I took pictures.

Back on the road after the disappointing UFO Welcome Center, we crossed into South Carolina.  We stopped for dinner, shopping, and sight seeing at South of the Border.  You get a pretty solid idea of what's coming up when you drive in.

That's Pedro, over there, on the right, under the hat.  They have an elevator up to the sombrero where you can look at the area from up high.  The guy in the arcade said it was too windy, so we couldn't go up.

So we had fun playing around in the stores

We had dinner at the Hot Tamale.  I wouldn't recommend it.  The food wasn't good, even by fast food standards, and the counter help wanted to be anywhere but at work.  It's definitely a neat stop, though.  If we drive through there again, we'll stop again.  There's still a small reptile aquarium that was closing when we got there and several more options for eating.  Bruce drove around so I could get some video of some of the animal and Pedro sculptures.



The following day, we pulled into Savannah, Georgia.  Savannah is a beautiful town with the tree-lined streets hanging full of Spanish moss.

There were a lot of things to see, but downtown Savannah was packed with no parking.  Turns out, we came through during graduation day.  I don't know if it was just one great big graduating class or if every school in the area was graduating that day, but they had streets blocked off, and access to the trolley tours was even difficult.  So we just drove on out of town, past this awesome lion fountain

just a block over from the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist

and to the primary goal:  Bonaventure Cemetery, otherwise known as the Garden of Good and Evil.

Legend has it that voodoo done in this graveyard before midnight is good magic, but voodoo done in this graveyard after midnight is bad magic.  It is also key place in the book, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" about the murder of Danny Hansford, a local male prostitute, allegedly by a local wealthy, prominent member of society, antiques dealer, Jim Williams.   I liked the book better than the movie, but they were both very good.  Minerva, the voodoo priestess, figured much more prominently in the book than the movie, as did the cemetery, obviously.  We went all the way to the back of the cemetery, but like most people, we were unable to find Dr. Buzzard's grave, where Minerva is said to have worked her magic, which got Jim Williams acquitted.  All we found was the Wilmington River.

The cemetery is laid out in a grid, and the roads have names, often related to the families buried in that section.

There are some famous people buried here, like songwriter Johnny Mercer, and poet Conrad Aiken.  But others, including those whose names are forgotten are also notable.  It is a lovely cemetery as cemeteries go, even though the statue of the Bird Girl has been moved from the cemetery for fear of vandals since it was used on the cover of the book.

After exploring the cemetery for a little while, we had some lunch in a little out-of-the-way buffet, and headed into Florida, where we were stopping for a while to visit more family and friends.