Miller details the deadly four-mile stretch of Tampa Bay shipping channel where three major maritime disasters claimed over 58 lives, including the 1980 collision that sank the Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn and the 1980 freighter strike that toppled the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. He describes the ghost of a Greyhound bus that plunged from the broken bridge, still seen by fishermen in early morning fog with passengers staring forward and a woman in the last window waving mechanically. Other apparitions include a vanishing blonde hitchhiker on the rebuilt Skyway and a romantic ghost fisherman visible only to women.
The conversation spans spontaneous human combustion, the scientifically unexplained immolation of Mary Harder Reeser in 1951, a sunken Nazi U-boat with tanned corpses preserved in petroleum fumes, chupacabra sightings near Tampa Bay, and a massive Virgin Mary apparition on a Clearwater glass building that drew over a million visitors.
Key Moments
Bodell's three-day gap from his Tampa-to-Long Island log: Sailor Robert Bodell tells Art that on a single-handed delivery from Tampa to Long Island his meticulous logbook came up three days short, with no entry between his last shortwave QSL log and arriving at the dock.
Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn collides with oil tanker (Jan 1980): Miller details the head-on collision in Tampa Bay's shipping channel between the buoy tender Blackthorn and an inbound oil tanker - the tanker's anchor capsized the cutter, killing 23 Coast Guardsmen, the largest peacetime Coast Guard disaster in U.S. history.
Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse (May 1980): Miller recounts the inbound freighter that hit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in a freak storm - 35 dead, including a Greyhound bus that plunged 150 feet. The pilot's course recorder showed the ship dead-center in the channel.
Mary Hardy Reeser - St. Petersburg spontaneous combustion case: Miller walks through the 1951 case of widow Mary Hardy Reeser of St. Petersburg, found reduced to a foot and a burned chair with surrounding furnishings undamaged - the FBI ruled it 'unusual and improbable.'
U-166 cover-up - Jim Hall and the tanned German submariners: Miller tells the story of diver Jim Hall finding U-166 off Tampa Bay, climbing into the engine room and seeing German sailors leather-tanned by petroleum fumes, then being warned off by the government - not over the sub itself but something nearby.