The Night a Grieving Phantom in the Everglades Changed My Life

The land that was previously seen as harsh and brutal by colonial forces was actually a site of survival, new life, and renewal.

As the humming scourge of mosquitoes eased and the lush sawgrass swayed, a lull drifted over the Everglades. I was sitting with my girlfriend across from the Flamingo Visitor’s Center, watching the sun melt into a peach sorbet over the Florida Bay. It was a serene end to an already-dreamy day in late spring, and my first time camping in the largest tropical wetland in the United States, just a few miles away from home. The trip had come at the suggestion of my friends, and I took advantage to briefly escape from my tumultuous home life, where my mother’s disapproval of my new relationship forced me into a double life. But by midnight, the sweet silence would be shattered with a brief, panicked frenzy.

Two of my friends had purchased a Ouija board the weekend before at Toys“R”Us with innocent intentions. In the evening, after haphazard communal showers and eating snacks for dinner, we settled into our extra-large tent. When my friends brought out the Ouija board that night, my first instinct was refusal. I wedged my face deep into my girlfriend’s shoulder. Why would we open ourselves to an unknown portal? My mother always taught me not to mess with spirits. Some friends laughed, dismissing my fear as expected and unnecessary. “What’s the worst that can happen?” they assured me. I had wanted to leave and wait outside, watch the stars by the water, but my girlfriend persuaded me to stay; after all, she wanted to participate, and I would be safe with her.

The group sat around the board in a circle, surrounded by plush sleeping bags and blankets. It was a cozy seance. They followed the instructions that came with the board: warmed up the planchette by maneuvering it into a figure eight, created a dark atmosphere, and established one person who would be asking the questions to avoid any confusion. I closed my eyes as I heard them begin with simple questions: what the spirit’s name was, how she died, when she died, where she was from. It was polite enough. If it was a yes-or-no question, the planchette jolted to its answer. But if it was a more complex question, like why hadn’t she moved on, the planchette took it’s time spelling out the answer letter by letter. There was only so much I could drown out. As my friends’ gasps grew louder, even the most incredulous of us seemed shaken. I peered up as blood dripped from my friend’s nose and the planchette drifted across the board, introducing us to Claire, a spirit looking for closure.

I didn’t know this then, but I quickly learned the Everglades is a land that is very much alive, capable of swallowing you whole or healing you to the bone. I was ready to begin healing.

*

Miami’s flatness lends itself to looking up. With no elevation, there’s only the ever-expanding horizon and the sky above it. Two months before I went camping, my nightmare came true. I was twenty-six feet high on an outdoor rock-climbing wall at a school carnival. I had plans to sleep over at a friend’s house after with my girlfriend. Having never been that high before, that day, the cerulean sky was especially striking.

My girlfriend waited for me down below. It had only been a few weeks, and she was the first girl I had ever kissed, but already the experience was refreshingly sweet and full of hope. Cuddling in the back seat of my Saturn, stealing kisses in between classes—I was falling in love with my best friend. My family of overprotective and close-minded Cubans could never know. I knew my mom, who always had a tendency toward enmeshment, would forbid it.

It was the second semester of my senior year and I was already accepted into my dream college, far away from Miami’s stifling peninsula. I was due to leave the community I was raised in and the ideologies about queerness my parents believed in soon. I thought the innocence of young love was enough to never warrant a dire consequence, and I thought I had created enough space for myself to not get caught.

As I mounted the rock-climbing wall, I could feel the noise from the crowd fading beneath me. When I reached the top, instead of ringing the bell, I jumped down and rushed to hug my girlfriend. That was victory enough.

Then an unexpected yet familiar voice called my name.

“Alexandra.”

I didn’t know this then, but I quickly learned the Everglades is a land that is very much alive.

My mother’s voice was distressed. From there, things escalated quickly. Frightened, I immediately assumed my grandmother had died. “Is Abuela okay?” I asked her. She stayed silent. She grabbed my arm, parading me through the various vendors. “¿Tú eres lesbiana?” she interrogated. Her tone grew louder until I could feel my peers’ eyes singeing holes into my back. I let out awkward giggles in between unconvincing noes.

But she already knew. She’d discovered my diary hours before and learned the truth of my secret relationship. Shocked and terrified by the revelation and the fact that I had been keeping something so personal a secret from her, she dropped what she was doing and drove over to confront me. She was scared of what this would mean for my future—how society would treat me. She accused me of being manipulated by my friends—You always go along with what others do, she claimed. I told her I was bisexual, but to her, sexuality was black and white; the spectrum did not exist. That night, she laid out her rules: If I didn’t end the relationship, she said, she would pull me out of school, where I was one of the top students in my class and from which I’d already been accepted into my dream college. Even worse, I would have to rescind my acceptance at Columbia University. She told me she would tell my father. She assured me that his consequences would be even more severe.

When we got home, she had me call my girlfriend and break up with her in front of her. On the other line, my girlfriend knew what was going on, and she played along. Suspicious, my mom demanded all my passwords and began tracking my text messages, Facebook posts, and phone calls. In an instant, I felt everything I had worked for, and the new love I felt refreshingly secure in, crumble around me. My home became a breeding ground for anxiety and paranoia, my every act called into question. I wondered how long I could keep up the charade before my mom found out or, worse, my girlfriend grew tired and broke up with me.

After hours deliberating, I was eager to exit the mortification. I was desperate to escape my mother’s scrutiny; nothing I said appeased her. I felt like I had committed a crime without knowing it, a crime for being different from who she was and who she wanted me to be. I lied and agreed to it all. I sold my peace of mind for an easy out. I comforted myself with the fact that I only had to keep up the charade for a few months anyway. Soon I’d be out of Miami’s eternal summer. So when my friends proposed a trip to the Everglades where cell phone service was sparse, I jumped at the chance.

I needed to get out.

*

Even though I’d grown up just miles away from the wetlands, save for annual car drives across the state to Marco Island, I’d never been. I didn’t know what to expect. But I would take any opportunity to get out of my house, and especially one that promised limited cell phone reception.

Amid the marsh and fauna, my paranoia dissipated. As the sun set, we all gathered in our tent, snuggled in our sleeping bags. My mom managed to get a call in. I answered and pretended to be sleeping over at a friend’s house who she approved of. I felt so at ease, among my friends and the girl that I loved, that the lying felt like the truth. We set up haphazard lanterns, casting the tent in a warm orange glow. In the wetlands, for the first time in months, I felt safe and free.

In the wetlands, for the first time in months, I felt safe and free.

Cared for by Miccosukee and Seminole people, the Everglades has long been a site of refuge. As early as 1689, formerly enslaved Black people fled from South Carolina to Spanish Florida seeking freedom. The Maroon people took shelter in the seemingly harsh terrain of the Everglades and were welcomed by the Seminole people. The land that was previously seen as harsh and brutal by colonial forces was actually a site of survival, new life, and renewal.

The Everglades and its most desolate areas also have a storied history of supernatural occurrences. Centuries later, in 1996, all 110 passengers died on ValuJet Flight 592. The plane crashed into the Everglades about ten minutes after taking off from Miami and disappeared from radar at the exact time that it crashed. Eyewitnesses in a small private plane reported that Flight 592 seemed to “disappear” after hitting the swamp. Years later, another plane crashed into the Everglades, and the few survivors reported seeing ghosts of the victims during later flights. Other legends tell of a “skunk ape,” related to bigfoot/Sasquatch, and a ghost ship that drifts quietly through the sawgrass.

The night we gathered around the Ouija board in our tent, the spirit we summoned, Claire, was one of the phantoms that loomed in the Everglades. She was a French settler from the 1800s and had died from tuberculosis. When her newborn baby died, she was consumed by melancholy and lost the will to survive. During our encounter, Claire told us we needed to see a psychic. She was a lost spirit in limbo because of her own unprocessed grief during her lifetime. As we learned more of her story, others in the group grew concerned. They asked for permission to leave—proper Ouija etiquette—but the planchette kept shifting to no. It may have been the ideomotor effect, an unconscious, involuntary physical movement—that is, we moved when we were not trying to move—or maybe it was a spirit reluctant to let go of her one connection to life.

Claire unlocked a collective subconscious knowledge for each of us in the circle—that grief must be processed and released regardless of the pain.

Once we had finally gained permission to leave, I checked my phone. My mom’s routine paranoid texts did not faze me. Maybe it was the result of being faced with a spirit who couldn’t break free from the life she’d led and was bound by, or maybe it was the comfort of having my girlfriend pressed against me in the dark. But I saw my mother’s texts for what they were: a futile attempt to maintain the control over my life that she knew was quickly slipping away. Soon I would be gone, and she’d have relatively little say over my personal life. My mother’s rage did not change my truth. If I allowed my mother’s paranoia to kill my relationship, I would be the one to carry that loss—not her.

For a moment, as we sat reeling from the summoning, my mother’s disapproval felt so minor. Minor in comparison to Claire’s situation and in comparison to, well, everything. We were sleeping in the midst of historic land, land rife with spirits and healing. Maybe this issue with my mom would just be a bump in our personal history. But like the Everglades, life would move on, I thought, it would evolve. Our relationship had to grow. The alternative, Claire seemed to present, was getting stuck in some limbo between isolation and despair.

That evening, we played manhunt under the stars and in the pitch-black night. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face past the darkness. But it was freeing—running wild in the wetlands with nothing holding us back. A year later, my mother would put aside her fear of what my sexuality would mean for my life and accept me, but I didn’t know that then. That night, the only thing that mattered was beyond my mother or my girlfriend’s acceptance. I was reclaiming my own sense of self. The next morning, a frantic scourge of mosquitoes finally scared us away. As we drove, the Everglades in our rearview, I let go of the fear of being myself. I carried the land and its medicine with me.