The Devil's Tree, Oak Hammock Park

Gerard Schaefer, a Martin County sheriff's deputy later linked to dozens of killings across the region, murdered two teenage girls, Susan Place and Georgia Jessup, in September 1972 at a different site elsewhere in Port St. Lucie; their remains were found the following year on Hutchinson Island, more than twenty miles from this park. After Schaefer's arrest, local legend nonetheless attached the crime to this particular oak along the C-24 Canal, and the tree has carried the name ever since — though the City of Port St. Lucie has stated publicly that it is not the tree actually connected to the murders. What is real is the tree's own history: vandalism and an attempted arson have left it scarred, its trunk cavity filled with cement, and it continues to draw visitors attempting rituals; a cross was placed near it in the 1990s. Loggers who once planned to clear the tree reportedly abandoned the attempt after repeated equipment failures. Visitors describe an unsettling atmosphere and reports of screaming and hooded figures in the surrounding woods after dark — activity now tied to the tree's own decades-long reputation rather than to the Schaefer case it was mistakenly named for.