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.
Spook Hill – Location 27.9086, -81.5812
Spook Hill is a long promoted gravity-defying hill in Lake Wales, Florida where you can park your car at the bottom and it will roll up hill. It has been mentioned in all kinds of publications including a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It is such a popular place for curiosity seekers that the City of Lake Wales has put up little brown direction signs all over town so you can find the mysterious hill.
There are several folk stories about Spook Hill and how it was discovered. The most popular account has to do with an African American man who parked his automobile at the base of the hill to do a little fishing in a nearby lake. He had hardly reached the lake when he turned and saw his car rolling up the hill. Thus began a tale that circulated within the community for years and eventually found its way into local folklore. Other accounts say that the hill was a sacred spot used by early Native American for religious ceremonies. One story even claimed that there was a huge magnetic rock buried within the hill which is similar to another tale blaming the weird effects on a magnetic meteorite that hit the earth at this spot and is still buried inside the hill. History speaks about early pioneers noticing that their horses had to labor hard to go down Spook Hill but found it easy going up the hill.
Here is the super duper, way challenging, really hard trivia question, which, if solved properly, will lead you to the final coordinates:
Question: In which US state is it legal to shoot a bear, but illegal to wake one up?
A: Mordor = N 29° 26.379 W 081° 48.565
B: Hogwarts = N 29° 26.379 W 081° 48.555
C: Alaska = N 29° 26.379 W 081° 48.545