Peg Leg Pete is a pirate statue that’s been standing in Fernandina Beach, Florida, for nearly 50 years.
Pete is made of fiberglass. Everyone just assumed there was nothing else in him. Turns out they were wrong. He’s made of fiberglass… and he was stuffed with the cremated remains of a human.
Even crazier? Local officials allegedly knew about the human cremains for a year and didn’t tell anybody about it.
Emails obtained by Action News Jax revealed that, back in April 2024, the city’s then-deputy city manager, Charlie George (who himself passed away months later), explicitly noted that members of the local pirate club didn’t want the statue repaired.
They claimed that doing so might “diminish the significance” of the ashes sealed inside it. You know, the way you wouldn’t buff a haunted doll or vacuum under a cursed sword.
Let’s rewind a little bit first. You might be wondering what a pirate club is. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a group of people who love pirates, so they formed a community group where they dress like pirates.
The Fernandina Pirates Club has been around for—and its members have been dressing like pirates—since 1973. Today, we would call this cosplaying.
This Florida Pirate Statue Isn’t Just a Statue—It’s Full of Human Remains
Peg Leg Pete is the group’s mascot—a statue honoring a fictional pirate carved out of a live oak log during a 1978 shrimp festival and named by the students of a local elementary school. The backstory of all this is dripping with charming small-town Americana, which takes a David Lynch-style turn into the dark underbelly.
The statue had fallen into disrepair. There was talk of fixing it, but doing so would be disrespectful to the cremains inside. City Attorney Teresa Prince’s discovery of that fact froze talks of replacing Pete.
Still, in this week’s city commission meeting, she pivoted, suggesting it might be time to relocate the statue finally. In her legal opinion, the remains of a former pirate club member aren’t a legal issue.
Her official stance is…who cares. Take the old statue and the dusty, dead person inside of it and move it.
The proposed plan is to relocate Peg Leg Pete to the Amelia Island Museum, where he can interact with a more curated audience, and then install a newer, less menacing pirate statue in his place. Locals remain divided.
Some think a replacement is overdue. Others argue Pete is a piece of quirky civic history. One thing everyone seems to agree on is that the new statue should not contain human remains.
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