Who would better know -- and appreciate -- the weirdness of this crazy-quilt state than a 10th-generation Floridian?

"Whooaaaa," you say. "No, way. Ain't no critter goes back that far."

Well, say howdy to Charlie Carlson, who dates his cracker roots to the mid-1700s.

Carlson, author of Weird Florida, offers authentic history as well as the wild rumors, myths and wacky legends that so aptly define the Sunshine State.

As a boy, Carlson sat for hours spellbound, listening to his grandma tell ghost stories. "She swore they were true."

From those early story sessions, Carlson developed an interest in exploring spiritualism and unexplained phenomena.

"I'm basically a historian," he says, actually folk historian and past president of the Seminole County Historical Society. He holds a master's in anthropology, and is retired as a sergeant major from the Army. Been to 52 countries, he tells you, but always returns to Florida. "I wouldn't live anywhere else," he declares. Today he lives in Edgewater, on Florida's east coast near New Smyrna Beach.

A colorful character, he's appeared in several TV documentaries and was cast as the folklore historian in the Curse of the Blair Witch on the Sci-Fi channel. Among fans, he's known as The Man in Black, for the top hat, black suit and pullover he dons for his offbeat folklore presentations.

For his more serious lectures, "I dress more like a medicine man, with a top hat, and a vest and a shirt with garters on the sleeves."

He's co-authored "at least 10 history books" and written scores of newspaper and magazine articles. "Over the years, I've interviewed a lot of credible people who tell incredible stories," he says.

The best of all -- the eerie and unexplained, the history that never made it into the high school texts -- is served up in Weird Florida, Your Travel Guide to Florida's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets, the latest entry in the Weird U.S. series.

For those who tend toward the more verifiable, there's the adventure of Carlson's "seventh-great grandfather" (on his mother's side), Col. William Williams of the East Florida Patriots, a militia group operating out of Georgia.

Captured by the Spanish in 1810, Williams was imprisoned at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine. He and a compatriot were to be garroted. But first there was a fiesta. Williams, a fiddler, was brought out to entertain the governor and his guests.

Williams found the more he fiddled, "the more rum the Spaniards drank."

As drunkenness and drowsiness set in, Williams bolted, making his way to "the old cow fort in Jacksonville" and then swimming the St. Johns River.

Despite this narrow escape, Williams eventually put down roots in Columbia County.

Among Carlson's favorite figures in Florida's bizarre history is Bone Mizell, "a cracker cowboy who roamed all over South Florida and Hillsborough County. He was a prankster, a rustler and a drunk. You name it and he was involved in it.

"He was also the model used by Frederic Remington for his painting A Cracker Cowboy," says Carlson.

Mizell died in 1921 at a train station in Arcadia waiting for the Lykes Brothers meat company to telegraph a reply to his plea for a loan. Moonshine was listed as the cause of death.

Carlson also has a special affection for the notorious Ashley gang, simply because they were such bumblers.

They "left a trail of crime from the Everglades to Jacksonville," committing everything from murder to robbery.

In 1915, John and Bob Ashley teamed up with a Chicago mobster named Kid Lowe to rob a Florida East Coast Railway passenger train.

"The robbery was less than successful, though, because the gang hadn't worked out who was to shake down the passengers and who was to rob the mail car," Carlson writes.

That same year, during a bank heist in Stuart, Lowe accidentally shot John Ashley in the jaw, blinding him in the right eye.

In 1924, the gang's reign of terror ended when John and three others were shot to death at a roadblock, following the robbery of a Pompano Beach bank. The men were buried in Gomez, near the Ashley family homestead, on a site that today sits in the middle of Mariner Sands, an exclusive residential development.

"They are buried in the back yards of homes owned by bankers and lawyers. Right in the middle of the people they used to rob," says Carlson, savoring the irony.

Even stranger than the sagas of notorious desperadoes are the legendary tales of skunk apes, ghosts and alarming apparitions.

Among the better documented are the odd occurrences at a Miami warehouse.

From December 1966 through January 1967, 225 poltergeist incidents were reported at the Tropication Arts warehouse. Boxes whizzed between shelves, objects crashed to the floor. Police, media and parapsychologists descended on the scene.

Some suspected that a teenage employee, said to possess psychic powers, was causing the disturbances.

"Poltergeist incidents, with few exceptions, have usually involved adolescents experiencing physical or emotional turmoil in their lives," writes Carlson.

Whatever the explanation, when the youth was fired the activities ceased.

The late comedian Jackie Gleason, reportedly a UFO buff, also receives mention in the book. Back in 1973, Carlson writes, Richard Nixon supposedly took Gleason "to see the preserved remains of space aliens at a secret facility at Homestead Air Force Base. According to the story, the aliens were recovered from a crashed flying saucer back in 1953."

More persistent than reports of space aliens are stories of encounters with skunk apes.

"I got stories all over Florida from people who would believe anything, and from anthropologists, archaeologists and good credible people telling me the same type of story about a big, hairy beast that looks half man and half animal."

Carlson admits he doesn't know what to make of the alleged sightings. "Somebody is seeing something and I don't think somebody is running around the Everglades -- as hot as it is -- in a gorilla suit."

Despite the lack of any hard physical evidence of the skunk ape's existence, Carlson notes, the Legislature in 1977 considered a bill to protect "the elusive man-ape."

It didn't pass.

The way Carlson sees it, the state is overlooking a remarkable opportunity. He proposes the skunk ape be declared the state's paranormal mascot. He envisions signs on the border proclaiming, Welcome to Skunk Ape Country.

"Yes," he says, imagining it all with deep satisfaction, "it'd be a proper mascot for strange and weird Florida."

A typical tale from Charlie Carlson's Weird Florida:

Imagine a penguin 15 feet tall -- on Clearwater Beach. In 1948, beachcombers and boaters claimed to have seen the creature. Others said it left huge tracks in the sand. Local papers carried stories, but no one ever determined what the creature was.

More unnerving than a giant penguin was the strange half-human monster Emily L. Bell encountered in the Fort Pierce area in the late 1800s. In her memoirs, she tells of going ashore at the Jupiter Inlet and trekking along the coast for eight miles. Hearing a rustle in the bushes, she called her husband over to investigate. Together, they watched as a green-black-yellowish creature, 30 feet long, reared up and, turning a human-like face toward them, slipped into the surf. Locals later told them the creature appeared in the area a couple of times a year.

Henry Flagler died in Palm Beach in 1913, but his body was taken to St. Augustine and put on display in the rotunda of his elegant Ponce de Leon Hotel. As Flagler's body was being moved to the burial site, the massive doors of the rotunda suddenly swung shut for no obvious reason. Later in the day, a janitor discovered in a small floor tile the image of Flagler's face. It's said that observant visitors can still find the image.

- THERE WERE GIANTS ON THE EARTH DEPARTMENT -

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