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In 1886, a small railroad station was built and the area was platted into ten-acre parcels in a scheme to start a Roman Catholic colony called St. Joseph’s colony. Sanford believed that he could unload some real estate by attracting German immigrants to this colony. He appointed a Catholic priest, Felix Swembergh, to oversee the settlement. However, according to Central Florida historian, Christine Kinlaw-Best, colonization efforts ended after only four immigrant families settled there. “St. Joseph’s never got off to a good start,” said Kinlaw-Best. “In 1887, an outbreak of yellow fever wiped out four members of one immigrant family. Fearing that the fever was contagious, the bodies were buried in the woods north of the railroad. Father Swembergh was then called to Tampa to minister to victims of a yellow fever epidemic there, but he never made it back to St. Joseph’s Colony. Three days after arriving in Tampa, he succumbed to the fever, and with his death also went the information about the St. Joseph’s graves.” |
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The origin of the graves had long since been lost, but local tradition said the burials were a “Dutch family who had died from the fever.” Obviously, early yarn spinners had misinterpreted “Dutch” for “Deutsch,” meaning German. According to traditional accounts, Mr. Hawkins leased his land to other farmers and warned them about tampering with the little burial plot. One farmer tried to remove the rusty, wire fence from around the graves and on the same day, his house burned down. In the early 1950s, a small boy tried to dig up one of the graves and the next night he was killed by a drunk driver who was never identified or apprehended. Weird things also happened in the Hawkins’ home, which sat at the edge of the field. Allegedly, the Hawkins’ home burned down after Mr. Hawkins removed the nearly rotted wooden markers. After Mrs. Hawkins blamed the fire on the graves, Mr. Hawkins quickly replaced the markers. When they built a new house, they were plagued with episodes of unexplained activity involving children’s toys. A small child’s rocker would rock by itself and toys would roll around as if pushed by unseen hands. With all the weird shenanigans, the Hawkins field became locally known as the “Field of the Dead” This was oral folk history until 1999 when an old brochure for the St. Joseph’s Colony was found by historian Christine Kinlaw-Best. This discovery sent her on a quest that ultimately exposed the ill-fated St. Joseph’s colony and its connections with the four graves. In 1959, the Hawkins farm was purchased by the government for constructing Interstate-four. During surveying for the right-of-way, the four, nameless graves were marked for relocation, however they were never moved. In September 1960, fill dirt was dumped on the graves to elevate the new highway. This is where history gets weird. At this same instant, hurricane Donna was slamming into South Florida. Rated as one of Florida’s most powerful hurricanes of recent times, Donna plowed her way across the tip of Florida aiming for the Gulf of Mexico. Then, on the very day that the graves were covered with fill dirt, Donna changed her direction near Tampa and headed northeast across the peninsula. Strangely enough, her deadly path paralleled the surveyed route of the new highway. The big storm’s eye passed over the graves at midnight on September 10, 1960. Donna’s fury, the worst experienced in Central Florida in generations, interrupted highway construction for nearly a month. On the day that Interstate-four was opened to traffic, a tractor-trailer truck hauling a load of frozen shrimp became the Dead Zone’s first casualty when it mysteriously went out of control and jackknifed right above the graves. That was the beginning of a weird legacy of accidents that continue to this day. In recent accounts, people claim their cell phones will not work, or that static disrupts their radios in this section of highway. A few have claimed encounters at night with wispy, balls of light that zig zag just above the pavement. Is it payback time for the dead, or peoples’ imaginations gone wild? Whatever the case, locals swear there’s something sinister at work here, and it may be caused by an eerie secret just beneath the asphalt. Will Never Drive on I-4 Again Dead Zone Kills Cell Phones Too |