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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.

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Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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The ocean is full of secrets. It covers the majority of the planet. And only through immense technical effort can we even begin to glimpse what lies in the depths. Before deep sea submarines, we could only judge what lay below by what made it to the surface, which has led to some pretty curious tales. On November 30th of 1896, two boys were walking along a beach on Anastasia island off the coast of Florida. They spotted something that they couldn't quite make sense of. It was a large mass, about 21ft long, 7ft wide and just over 4ft tall. They didn't know what to make of it. It seemed to rise out of the sand, unmoving. So the boys ran to the nearby town of St. Augustine and told a local physician that they'd found a dead whale washed up on the beach. The physician was Dr. DeWitt Webb, the president of the local scientific society. Excited by the boy's story, he immediately went to see this thing for himself. And when he arrived, he too was puzzled by its appearance. This was some kind of animal, but it didn't look much like a whale. It was largely featureless, partially decayed, partially with several stump like limbs. And its skin was a faded pink gray with a tough, rubbery texture. Needless to say, this was a creature unlike any kind he had ever seen before. And soon enough, crowds of locals were flocking to the beach to get a glimpse of the thing. Local papers described it as a, and I quote, pear shaped blob of grayish goo. With effort, Dr. Webb and the others dug it up and had it hauled out of the sand. The immense size of the thing awed everyone who saw it. The weighed an estimated 7 tons. Webb took samples and sent them to his colleagues, writing that he thought he'd found an undiscovered species here. One of the men that he sent them to was Professor Addison Verrall at Yale University, one of the foremost naturalists of his day. Varrell said that this must be the carcass of a giant octopus. He proposed that the species should be called Octopus giganteus. And of course, the press latched onto the story eagerly. Stories of giant tentacles, sea monsters, are as old as human history. 26 years earlier, Jules Verne had famously described a giant squid in 20,000 leagues under the Sea. Before my eyes, Verne wrote, was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous. Locals dubbed it the St. Augustine Monster. Dr. DeWitt recruited a local photographer to capture the image of the creature and its strange shape. Varrel, meanwhile, began to doubt his original conclusions. It might actually be a whale after all, he wrote to a colleague in 1897. The following January, a storm washed the St. Augustine monster out to sea, only to deposit it on another beach two miles to the south. Concerned that the creature would be lost forever, Dr. DeWitt assembled a team of horses and men to carry the monster several miles inland. It was ultimately set up by a hotel, and there it became a tourist attraction. The mystique of the St. Augustine Monster drew tourists from all over Florida. They came to speculate on its origin, what deep sea behemoth had been deposited on their shores. But like many tourist attractions, its novelty faded over the years, and after a while, it disappeared. We have no record of what happened to the original carcass. Even the photographs of the creature have been lost. It wasn't until 1957 that the creature would resurface. Dr. Forrest Wood, a museum curator and cryptozoologist, managed to find an old newspaper article about the creature. And he eventually managed to find the samples of the creature that were held at the Smithsonian Institute. He examined all of it and concluded in 1971 that it was indeed some kind of octopus. However, rather than provide the final word on the subject, Dr. Wood's paper provoked another wave of public interest, which concluded with another analysis in 1995. In this case, the research team fully disagreed with wood. The St. Augustine monster was made up of pure collagen, which meant that it was matter from a warm blooded creature, not an octopus. And in 2004, a DNA test determined what this mysterious creature actually was. A collection of whale blubber. It seemed after all this time and all this mystery, the initial assessments of the boys on the beach had been correct. What they had found was a whale, or part of a whale. In their eagerness for the fantastical, the naturalists had let their imaginations run wild. It's curious, really. Of all the mysteries the sea has yet to give us, this one, it seems, was an open and shut case. On a spring day in 2015, police in Mosman, a sleepy town in northwestern Australia, received a report of a major accident along a remote coastal road. When first responders arrived on the scene, they found the truck of local Conservationist Dennis Lee Lafferty wrapped around a large gum tree. Sadly, Lafferty had not survived the crash. He had lived in nearby Daintree and was well known in the area for his encyclopedic knowledge of local flora and fauna and for his full throated advocacy for the local ecosystem. He made a living leading boat tours down the Daintree river, which wound through one of the most diverse rainforests in the world. He was well respected and would be sorely missed. Weeks later and halfway across the world, the Tampa Bay Times published an article outlining the life and death of one Raymond Grady Stansell, a Florida angler who had become something of a local legend himself. Stansell had been the son of a fisherman and had grown up on Florida's west coast, where he'd showed an early affinity for the family business, learning by the age of 6 how to catch bait for his father to use. This affinity for fishing continued into adulthood. But while he was passionate about his line of work, making a living as an angler required long days and backbreaking labor. And despite his almost preternatural skill, he still yearned for a better life. It's unclear exactly how he began to smuggle marijuana, but we do know that by 1971, he was running it from Jamaica, where he would buy loads of it from inland farmers. The crops were packed into large burlap sacks, which he would transport back across the Caribbean into US waters, hiding the massive loads under piles of fish that he would catch on the way back. Now, from his lifetime on the west coast of Florida, he was familiar with all of the quiet coves where a smuggler could unload his product onto the beach out of the sight of law enforcement. The product would then be loaded onto waiting semi trucks and then distributed to cities all over the country. Stansell only worked with people that he'd grown up with and trusted inherently, and so was able to work with impunity for many years. By 1974, he'd made contacts in other countries, too, his crowning achievement being his connection in Colombia, who supplied him with some of the best marijuana in the world. At the time, at its peak, he was one of the most productive marijuana smugglers in America. But it couldn't last forever. Authorities began to take notice, and In June of 1974, he was arrested holding $25,000 in cash checks from a Swiss bank and a blank Nicaraguan tourist visa, which allowed him to come and go at will. There was more than enough proof to put him away. His bail was set at $500,000, which was paid with a cashier's check. On the day he was to return to court to face trial, his lawyer informed the authorities Raymond Grady Stancil Jr. Had drowned while scuba diving in Honduras. Authorities could not believe it. Over the course of the following years, there would be the occasional sighting. He was seen on a beach in Jamaica, in Key west, and at one point, a report from authorities in Honduras informed American officials that they had him in custody. But when they showed up to collect him, they were shown an empty cell. Raymond Grady Stancil Jr. Was a ghost. He left behind a family, close friends, everything he owned. He was never seen in Florida again. Which brings us back to Australia. You see, weeks after the car crash that led to the death of Dennis Lee Lafferty, the Daintree police received a message linking to an article from the Tampa Bay Times which outed the beloved conservationist as none other than Raymond Grady Stancil Jr. His longtime partner, Janet Wood, decided that it was time to finally come clean. She had been in Key west when she met him at the storied Chart Room Bar, a watering hole famous for its eclectic clientele, politicians rubbing elbows with fishermen, musicians and the occasional smuggler, and they began a relationship and would confirm the newspaper's story. After Stancil skipped bail in 1974, the two had sailed to Venezuela, flown from there to Peru and then Tahiti, and finally ended up on the remote northwestern coast of Queensland, where they had reinvented themselves entirely and started a family. He billed himself as a marine biologist and began the Daintree River Cruise center, which he would run for the rest of his life in Florida. He has long since moved on into legend, but curiously, in Daintree, his company still operates with his daughter at the helm, leading his legacy of conservation onward into the future.