What horrors lurk in Palm Beach's Coral Cut?
Join me for a trip through the Witches' Wall, but for heaven's sake don't touch anything
It’s the door that freaks you out, the door where a door isn’t supposed to be.
To spot it, you’ve got to look quickly as you’re navigating the narrow two-lane Country Club Road, watching for oncoming traffic on one side of you, and looming gray coral walls on the other. Look quickly there on the south side of the street, just before the coral disappears like a half-remembered dream, and you’ll spot it there, a tiny iron grate that looks for all the world like the bars of a medieval prison.
What is it? What’s back there? And what the hell is this bit of mysterious arcana doing in Palm Beach, Florida, of all places?
Hop in, let’s go for a drive.
Every time I travel for work, I carve out a little extra time for exploration. Under the guise of “just want to make sure I avoid any travel difficulties!”, I leave a couple hours early, or late, and seek out whatever strangeness is within a few miles of the stadium/golf course/race track where I’m posting up.
Last week, I traveled to Palm Beach for the debut of Tiger Woods’ new indoor golf league. (My review is right here, check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.) Before I left, I dug around for the best local restaurants (more on that in a future F&AB) and other arcana, and that led me here, to this extravagant spit of South Florida land, in search of the stretch of road they call the Coral Cut … or, sometimes, the Witches’ Wall.
As you can see above, the Coral Cut slices right through a massive, 20-foot-high wall of coquina stone, the byproduct of millennia of sea life stacking atop itself, fossilizing, and decaying into a solid mass. The man-made little canyon was carved in 1916 after a hurricane washed out roads and cut off the top half of the island of Palm Beach from the bottom half. You can imagine the environmental impact response were something similar attempted today.
The road that runs through the cut isn’t, say, “Lonely Lane” or “Dead Man’s Alley,” but “Country Club Road,” which should give you a clue of the territory here. The cut runs along the south edge of the elite Palm Beach Country Club, where JFK was once a member. No, you’re not invited. (The hole along the cut is the 427-yard par-4 third, for the detail-obsessed.)
So what makes this place “haunted”? Weelllll … that’s where it gets a little sketchy. According to one legend, a family took the hard left turn into the Cut too quickly, smashed into the wall, and their ghosts now haunt the road. According to another, an evil stepmother (there apparently aren’t any good stepmothers in lore) imprisoned a young girl in the wall, and if you look closely in the door when the light is just right, you can see her shape in there, silhouetted and alone …. waiting to get out, or perhaps waiting to lure you in there with her. Spooky! Also, very very difficult to verify, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment!
First off, as for that door, here it is:
Normally, I would get a bit more of an artistic shot than this — you know, the foreboding barred door in the left foreground, the vectors of the road reaching off into the center distance — but there is literally nowhere to park anywhere near the door. That is surely by design; the denizens of Palm Beach don’t want gadflies like you and me just gallumphing up and down their precious manicured streets.
This is pricey territory around here. The house at the western entrance to the coral cut is valued at a cool $34.3 million, per Zillow, and the one that overlooks the heart of the cut is another $18.9 million. Bargain shoppers might want to check out the eastern edge of the cut, where a nearby home is on the market for a steal at $8.7 million. Not only that, there’s a certain loud, spray-tanned someone who lives about three miles south along the beach … but he’s going to have to relocate soon for work.
All of this combined means that pretty much the only way you’re going to get a look at the door — or the Coral Cut in general — is on the move, probably with either a landscaping truck or a car worth more than your house right on your bumper. Not the ideal way to ghost-hunt, but hey, why try to verify a good story?
There are no reports of any actual harm coming to anyone in the Coral Cut, so if there are really witches wandering the Witches’ Wall, they really need some better PR agents. Truth, honestly, is that the witches have probably gotten priced out of the market by the escalating real estate costs, which is a shame.
But hey, all that means is that this place is ripe for a little brand reinvention. Think of all the movies and TV shows that could film right there in the Cut: Mob movie hit scene! Doomed vampire-werewolf romance make-out spot! Superhero Final Battle arena! “Yellowstone”-in-Miami covert meeting between the morally compromised protagonist and the charismatic-but-deadly antagonist on the other side of the law! The options are endless, even if the nearby parking isn’t.
Think new, Coral Cut. It’s reinvention time.
Know any good Southern lore I need to check out? Hit me up!
Song of the Week: Jason Isbell, “Bury Me”
One of the few hard-and-fast rules around here is, when Jason Isbell releases new music, we promote said music. This is the first single from his upcoming solo album, and it’s a solo acoustic tune that’s characteristically both mournful and still redemptive at the same time. Isbell has an eye for the telling, perfect detail that just sketches the outline of a life in only a few syllables, and he employs that mastery here:
Bury me in the last few lines
Of an obituary for these trying times
Find an old live oak to carve my name
Hard liquor and dirty jokes, cheap picture frames
Maybe not the most uplifting of music, but then it’s resonant in a way that all the best music is. Check out “Bury Me” above and at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit Spotify playlist, accept no substitutes:
Stunt Food of the Week: Cotton Candy Burrito
Here’s a classic sweet-and-sour situation — the Arizona Cardinals have created a concoction that will keep dentists across the Southwest busy for years, meaning you’ve got to see some really sour football to get your hands on something this sweet. Check out this monstrosity, the Cotton Candy Burrito. It features cotton candy-flavored ice cream mixed with Fruity Pebbles, Froot Loops, marshmallows, Skittles, M&Ms minis, Gummi bears and sprinkles, and the entire thing is wrapped up in more cotton candy. Mother of God.
Check out what it looks like live right here. The Cotton Candy Burrito was $15 on sale at Cardinals games this season; let’s hope for chaos’ sake they bring it back in the fall.
Would you eat it? Let’s find out …
Seen some weird/horrifying/disturbingly enticing food on a restaurant menu or at a stadium? Let me know!
That’ll do it for this week, friends. Thanks for hanging out … stay warm and we’ll see you soon!
—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia
This is issue #151 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:
Our first documentary, on the famous Rama Jama’s diner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama:
Snow in Georgia? Behold the devil’s dandruff!
Jimmy Carter, a Southern man in full
Sometimes, just be glad you’re alive
It’s time to make the greatest holiday playlist ever … and the worst.
What does “Flashlight & A Biscuit” mean, anyway?
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