At the suggestion of some, I have decided to document my path in researching some of the legends I trip or topic I cover, much like I did last year with the Oviedo School with its totally concocted urban ghostly legend. I am not sure how this will go, but I decided to take each story in Acts, with the hope the voyage is as interesting as the destination. I am hoping this also helps me for the narrative of some of these stories long before I normally do and ask question I would not have thought of. Researching and wondering and connecting and storytelling are very different skills with unlike methods.
Think of this as a fishing trip then and insight into how legends are approached. Correct me where you can, question me when it pops into your head, and know I am always in a constant state of tripping all over the stories I look into.
A friend, maybe too keen on all the things I like, sent me a TikTok video around Christmas of a story she knew I would be into. It hit all of the buttons, and I saved it, screenshot it, and then began to instantly see references to it all around me, some I did not connect until I started to look into it much more. I live in a #followthesigns world where the more I work, the more synchronicity has a tendency to stumble down the path with me.
We blame the outsider. It is the path of least resistance to pass off anything we may have done wrong ourselves while connecting with the people around us. If the issue is the interloper, then the trail of the just is with the majority. We want to be the majority, the mass of men. It’s cold out there.
What once felt as if it were a one-off casting, I now see time and again in the modern look at what is causing that ghost down the street. Witches are a major meddler in the haunted folklore of Florida, and time and time again she keeps finding a way to sneak into the backstory of small-town ghost stories. I wonder if this is the same in all states or particular to the ones I have lived in.
A dark figure appears in the middle of the road in Edgewater, Florida, on or near a bridge located on Volco Road. Said to be named for the county (VOLucia COunty), it has been described as a dirt road which curves and stretches over ten miles in the middle of nowhere with dense forests and swamp on its sides. There is no name attached to the body of water the it goes over, and some have placed the story on rusted and cracked bridges on Maytown Road or Cow Creek.
The best time to see the woman is midnight, although one version of the story says she can best be seen the night her followers tried to resurrect her on November 1st at 2 AM. There is not much of a description of her passed down, with most people who claim to have seen her saying she is merely a dark shadow and other a non-specific beautiful woman. When she appears in the road, she makes cars swerve to miss her or she takes control of the car, accounting for the many accidents on that road. She has been known to make cars malfunction and break down and then taunts the drivers and passengers from the woods nearby. She laughs and screams.
Different people have posted about encounters with her over the years, although most have actively sought her out so there is a similarity in their stories. They go to the spot at the right time, perform the ritual like they have been told by neighbors how to, and impatiently wait. The most frequent legend trip they do it to travel there, turn off their cars and roll down their windows, and see what happens. The screams start and orbs begin to float near the car (she has trapped either the souls of the people she has killed or the people who once followed her are imprisoned on the bridge with her as well). The temperature around you drops dramatically and the windows fog up. Then there may be chants and whispers from the darkness and scratching on the car. Several people spoke of finding gashes in their paint when they got home or to a nearby well-lit place after getting scared off the bridge. There have been several reports of bright headlights following you that appear out of nowhere and vanish as you leave the road. Dark figures begin to walk up to you from the woods, and if you make it out with your sanity, she haunts your dreams for seven days. There was one story of texts being sent to the people who saw her from an untraceable number telling them to never come back.
Locals are split on who exactly the woman is and why she continues to walk. The oldest and most common on ghost sites that talk of her, is that she is from the early settlement days, although they do not specify if they are referring to the Spanish or the later era when it became a state. A woman was kidnapped and dragged to the bridge. After she was assaulted multiple times by multiple men, she was murdered and then her body was mutilated and tossed into the water. She now travels the road looking for males to take her revenge on. There is usually no mention in this version of why she is referred to as a witch, but some, maybe trying to make a connection between multiple stories, say the motivation for the attack was that she was a local witch who had been trying to seduce young women to join her and young men to feed her. This was her punishment and a warning to all others to stay away. She is said to have cursed the town with every scream. There are some who say her blood flowed into the head of the spring there and turned the area into a swamp. Her curse may be why several settlements in the 1800s failed after having promising starts.
The version most spoken about by the locals is much different. About thirty years ago, a Satanist made her homestead in the area and was quickly gaining followers. She was driving home and got into an accident, hitting a tree near the bridge (there are several times the story is more about the townspeople who kill her hoping to get the cult to leave). She was buried, but her followers, believing she would come back, dug her up and brought her to the place of her death. They either buried her nearby or threw her into the water as a celebration of her power. As the years went by, they would abduct people in the area and sacrifice them on the bridge, allowing their blood to flow into the water before giving them a burial in a shallow grave nearby. Members also martyr themselves at the bridge or are buried there after they die. The cult is alive and well and owns the property in a shadowy way so all the bodies there will never be found.
This version fits in with the narrative of the location much better and has less holes, maybe due to it being retold and refined in the last three decades. It is relevant and relatable. Keep in mind, this is Volusia County, clearly in what I refer to as the Ocala (not the town or just the forest, but the general area). The witch and her cult are linked to some of the disappearances, a staggering data point which defines the area. People go missing there. Cults are active. People connect the two, and the witch and her cult are an extension of that. Afterall, it is not as if there haven’t been reports of cult being responsible for weirdness and crime and weird crime there for decades. There are road all around the Ocala with similar stories, although the Volco Witch does seem to take a little bit from many of these stories and combine them. Even the assaulted woman story has echoes of the Coyote Woman and the Stikini.
People connect one particular murder with the witch, although the link is never really made between the two. The closest connection is that the darkness the woman has brought is either a symptom of the place or has caused misery and crime to fall there. In January of 1992, 19 year old Charlene Hayes was coming back from Majik Market on Ocean Avenue when she was picked up by a man in a blue pickup truck. People who saw it reported it also had a CB antenna. On February 3rd, her body was found face down in Lake Volco, bound by the hands and neck with duct tape and with her breasts exposed. A short time later, James Phillip Schaub was arrested as he was serving time in Starke for other sexual crimes. He was known locally as Diamond Jim and Tatoo Jim and had a reputation for assault and his attitude towards women. Schaub was eventually acquitted of killing Hayes but ended up spending time in jail for his other crimes.
This is the story often talked about in relation to the Volco Witch, mentioned in Reels and YouTube videos, seemingly to offer proof that there is something dark there. Other than the vicious nature of the crime, there doesn’t seem to be anything else coupling the two stories. I can’t even find a Lake Volco, and the source for her body being found is the Orlando Sentinel, so I trust that information.
A detail that stood out to me was the CB antenna cited in the abduction reports. I am not sure I have a handle on the demographic of Edgewater in the 1990s, but were CBs a thing? It also stood out to me for another reason.
While no one talks about the other murder, it feels much more connected to the urban legend and to the true crimes of the Ocala. Now entering the story, serial killer George Stano.
But more on that later…
Explore the darker side of Fort Myers with Christopher Balzano during the dark on a hauntingly unforgettable walking tour with True Tours.
Check out Christopher Balzano’s books, including the newly released Haunted Objects, 2nd Edition.
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