Larry and Penny Thompson Park is always a great choice for those who are looking to spend a few nights away sleeping in a tent.
This Miami campground has 270 acres of forests, a freshwater lake to swim in and several trails for avid hikers or horse riders to enjoy.
Updated 2/10/2020 – Along with all that, it also has a number of malicious spirits that occasionally want their presence to be known by the park campers.
A Haunted Miami Campground
Standing in the same field that is home to the Miami Zoo, the Larry and Penny Thomson Park was created as a memorial to the Miami Herald cartoonist, Larry Thompson, who was a devoted naturalist and wildlife lover.
Natural beauty was schemed to take over the park, and its visitors can appreciate it even in the smallest wildflowers.
However, the park has been reported to have unwanted inhabitants that might not have been part of the plan in the first place, but still took over the field as years passed by.
It is told, by some of the visitors that have experienced strange phenomena, that there are foreign presences in places of the campground that create a malevolent atmosphere when they are around.
Whoever these ghosts are, no one has found a clear answer, but they seem to find pleasure in playing nasty deeds on the park’s visitors, especially when it comes to hiding their most important belongings.
From car keys and wallets to whole bags of food, the dead that roam the Larry and Penny Thompson Memorial Park have created great inconvenience to the visitors that have been forced to return home without their spare keys or any of their bank cards.
These spirits are not in constant action and they rarely show themselves, but occasionally, an unlucky camper will see shadows or hear whispers in the dark, threatening those who dare to listen.
Spirits With Malicious Intentions
unicorniallychromantic/tumblr
As things go missing, some other stuff show up in the campground as well.
A low number of visitors have reported finding old belongings and even voodoo figures near their tens.
A camper with a particularly dreadful experience retells the story that left him unable to sleep at night:
“The same day I arrived at the park, I went to the lake and swam for a while.
When I came back to my camping spot, the sun was setting”, he says.
“I was flabbergasted, ALL my things were out of the tent and scattered all over the ground as if someone had been looking for something.”
The young man says he thought at first it might have been an intent of robbery but no one was camping anywhere near him that day.
What happened next showed him how wrong he was.
“As I was organizing all of my things again, I noticed there were things that weren’t my own.
They were dolls made out of sticks and feathers, like the ones used for voodoo and that sort of thing.
That scared me a lot, I took them all and threw them away as far as I could”.
“Later that night, scared as I was, I was trying to fall asleep when I started hearing angry voices around my tent.
Men’s voices.
Then, suddenly, they started kicking my tent.
I felt the feet of four or five man trying to hurt me from the outside”.
Somehow, between the fear and the shock, he crawled out of the floor and opened the tent door to see who was playing such a nasty trick.
There was nothing or no one outside but silence.
“I didn’t go back to sleep.
Who could?”, he questioned.
“As soon as the sun was up, I took my stuff and left the park”.
Just as they did with this man, the ghosts in this Miami campground and their spiteful tricks have scared off a few visitors before who are not the first and likely won’t be the last to experience such terror on these grounds.