Deep beneath Florida’s urban sprawl is an underground river that supplies most of the state’s drinking water. As this aquifer rushes through the perforated karst, sometimes causing sinkholes that have swallowed up car dealerships, the rush of water also bubbles to the surface in more than 700 springs as crystal clear as gin—the greatest concentration of springs on earth, and possibly, via the writings of naturalist William Bartram, part of the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan.
Silver Springs, the source of the Silver River, the major tributary of the Ocklawaha River, is among the best-known springs, not only for its glass-bottom boat tours but also for its use as the location of early films, jungle movies in the 1930s, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Rebel Without a Cause in the ’50s, and as one of several locations for Lloyd Bridges’ television series Sea Hunt.
Today, Silver Springs is also known for its troop of 300 rhesus monkeys that inhabit both sides of the Silver River, descendants of primates imported for an ill-advised tourist attraction in the 1930s.
Equally famous is Weeki Wachee Springs, the headwaters of the Weeki Wachee River, named by the Seminoles to mean “little spring,” at first a roadside attraction that over the decades has become a Florida icon. Located in Hernando County, 7 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico, near the unincorporated town of Weeki Wachee with its population of 16, Weeki Wachee Springs is famous for its mermaids: impersonators of a legendary marine creature, part human, part fish, able to charm sailors with a magical singing voice (mermaid mythology overlaps with that of the siren). For thousands of years, mermaid mythology has included the warning that to see one on a sea voyage is an omen of shipwreck.
Reports of mermaid sightings are still coming in, including the 2009 reported sighting of a fishtailed woman off the coast of the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam, where a skeptical mayor posted a million-dollar reward for its photograph.
At one time, all known maps were illustrated with mermaids and monsters; thus the seagoing, especially those on the water for long periods, were primed for mermaid sightings. The source of the confusion may have been the manatee, with its two stubby forelimbs that resemble arms and its ability to rise upright out of the water. Christopher Columbus recorded the sighting of a manatee off the coast of the Dominican Republic
as that of a mermaid—a creature, he commented, not as attractive as he had been led to believe. His exact words were that they were “not as beautiful as painted, since in some ways they have the face of a man.”
The mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs, where each day millions of gallons of water bubble up out of subterranean caverns, are definitely human and by all accounts good-looking. Although mermaids have come from all over, generations of mostly local Florida women have squeezed into a sequined 16-pound tail to swim in synchrony underwater and smile.
It all began in 1947 when Ocala-raised Newton Perry returned to Florida after serving as a Navy frogman in World War II. In the decade that changed Florida more than the previous four centuries, Perry, once a swimming double for actor Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, plugged into what would be an important part of Florida’s dream-scape, a realized fantasy of mermaids. Perry’s vision was to establish a tourist attraction of underwater swimmers at Weeki Wachee Springs on the two-lane State Road 19.
So deep that the bottom had yet to be reached, the springs had been littered with some old, rusted refrigerators and abandoned cars that Perry had to haul out. He then embedded large glass viewing walls in the limestone spring walls, creating an 18-seat theater from which spectators could watch the mermaids perform 16 to 20 feet below the water’s surface.
Auditions were held for women who had to be able to swim underwater for 45 minutes in 72-degree water while battling a 5-mph current with their legs encased in a fishtail, performing such stunts as playing football and eating bananas. All the while, they breathed through an air hose invented by Perry.
On October 13, 1947, the same day Kukla, Fran and Ollie aired on TV, the first mermaid show opened. Perry sent out promotional pictures all over the nation of mermaids playing cards, hugging Santa, having a picnic. According to a review in The New York Times, the performers were happy to work in exchange for free swimsuits, meals, and an audience.
Perry’s attraction achieved quick popularity, attracting not only hordes of everyday tourists but celebrities of the day, such as Arthur Godfrey, Esther Williams, and Elvis Presley, who visited Weeki Wachee Springs for a photo op with a mermaid. In 1959 the American Broadcasting Company acquired the attraction, developing themes like “Underwater Follies” and “The Mermaids and the Pirates,” giving the mermaids ballet lessons, and building the current 400-seat theater also embedded in the limestone rock below the water’s surface.
By the 1960s, the show was so popular that women from all over the world auditioned for the privilege of living in a mermaid cottage behind the attraction, encasing their legs in a sequined tail, and breathing through an air hose for 45 minutes four times
a day.
Although soon competing with newer, more sophisticated attractions like Universal Studios, SeaWorld Orlando, and Walt Disney World, the mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs held their own. Despite an item in National Geographic suggesting that the mermaids were doomed to extinction, young women were still auditioning to become part of the cast.
In 2008, the Florida state park system assumed control of Weeki Wachee Springs and its mermaid show; built Buccaneer Bay, Florida’s only spring-fed water park, featuring two waterslides named “Cannonball” and “Pirate’s Revenge”; and put the mermaids, now a Florida landmark, on the government payroll.
The attraction has also branched out in another unexpected direction. It operates two mermaid camps: one for children aged 7 to 14, the other for adults 30 and older, called “Sirens of the Deep Mermaid Camp.” In the latter, participants, who are limited to eight per session, pay $575 to be escorted through the staff entrance by camp trainers (retired Weeki Wachee mermaids) for a weekend of underwater ballet, a behind-the-scenes look at mermaiding, and photo ops at every juncture. Over the course of the weekend, participants learn to roll down their teal-colored fishtail like pantyhose; hop backward across the floor (forward and you trip over the tail); and free dive among turtles, fish, manatees, and an occasional water moccasin.
What is the attraction of the attraction? There are many Florida springs considered just as beautiful. It may have something to do with our mythology, part of what Carl Jung called our collective unconscious, spun from a 2,000-year-old history of Babylonians worshiping the fishtail god Oannes; the Greek poet Homer’s inclusion of sirens in the Odyssey; the legend of Alexander the Great’s sister Thessalonike, transformed into a mermaid and sent to dwell in the Aegean Sea; and Renaissance chemist Paracelsus’ scholarly description of half-fish, half-women he designated as “undines.”
Then there’s Germanic lore of mermaids inhabiting the Rhine, Finland’s Finfolk of the Orkney Islands, and Zimbabwe’s njuzu, blamed for bad weather. Most of us are familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Little Mermaid, made into a film by Disney, not to overlook Tom Hanks’ mermaid in Splash or Starbucks’ well-known logo of a siren with a double tail.
Can it be a universal longing to bridge the gap of understanding between the earthly world of humans and the aquatic world in which we cannot survive, but which we cannot live without? Or even a yearning to connect to our ancient beginnings, when one of our finned forbears, seaweed crowned and dripping, rose out of the muck to take its first steps on land.
True Tails is a series written by Amy Robinson for Vero Beach’s dog lovers. Ask Amy about your dog’s behavior by clicking below.
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