Welcome to the Farewell to Finder’s Fest geo-art, brought to you by the Forest Minions! This series celebrates weird and unusual things throughout the Sunshine State. Please do not go to the posted locations. Rather, solve the challenging quiz found at the bottom of each page, for the final location. For the letterbox caches, please leave the stamp in the cache. They are not trade items. For the discerning traveler, we’ve included the GPS coordinates for these bizarre locations, when we were able to establish them.
Bloody Bucket Road – Location 27.5407, -81.7918
Bloody Bucket Road isn’t the real name of this sinister road in Wauchula, but that’s what everybody calls it because of allegations of what happened there many years ago. Many years ago an ex-slave woman came down from Georgia with her husband and settled in Wauchula. She served as the midwife for the community and allegedly had delivered several hundred babies. Being concerned that some families already had too many children to feed, the woman decided to help out by eliminating a few right after birth. She would smother the babies and take them down to the bridge and bury them in the woods along the river. People became suspicious after so many babies had died while being delivered by her. Some said that she was deranged because she could not have children of her own or that her children had been taken from her while she was a slave.
After people refused to allow her to deliver any more babies the woman went crazy. Then the souls of the babies came back to haunt her. It is claimed that she could sit beside a bucket and it would fill with the blood of all the infants she had killed. She would empty the bucket and it would fill with blood again. She wore herself out carrying the blood filled buckets to the bridge where she would empty them in the river. One day while emptying a bloody bucket in the river, the old woman fell in and drowned. For several days following her demise the river ran red with blood. That is how the bridge became Bloody Bucket Bridge and I suppose the name carried-over to the road.
Here is the super duper, way challenging, really hard trivia question, which, if solved properly, will lead you to the final coordinates:
Question: What was missing from clocks, prior to 1577AD?
A: Yogurt = N29° 26.932' W81° 48.530'
B: Piston engines = N29° 26.922' W81° 48.530'
C: Minute hands = N29° 26.912' W81° 48.530'