My creative writing teacher, Carolyn (Cissy) Arena Wood, told me how to get to Ginnie Springs (I think she might have drawn a map on a napkin):  Take County Road 340 west out of High Springs past the chicken farm, past Poe and then Blue Spring (the only spring that had a sign), go under one set of large power lines and a second set of smaller lines, turn right onto a dirt road that ran along a shaded fence line and then took a sharp curve to the right before finally curving left down into the woods, where you could smell the spring before you saw it. It was Ginnie Spring that became my happy place, until one day when…

“Come on girls, I found a new spring, let’s go.” Chad, my pizza-delivery-guy roommate from Fort Lauderdale who had a Plymouth Barracuda that we called the Blue Fish, took our other roommate Pam and me to Ichetucknee Springs for the first time. We were the only people there on a fall afternoon in 1969, the year before the State of Florida bought the property to turn it into a state park.

That autumn afternoon with just the three of us at Ichetucknee was magical—sunlight afire on saffron and crimson leaves, the aquamarine water cold and bracing. We splashed into the headspring and Chad climbed up onto one of the big limestone rocks, produced a bar of soap he had hidden in a pocket of his swim trunks, and lathered up while singing a bath soap jingle. We dissolved into laughter.

Later, I climbed the little hill above the spring and away from my friends and lay down on my towel to dry off in the late afternoon sun. In the distance, I could hear Chad and Pam laughing and splashing in the spring. Then I began to hear, dimly at first like the whisper of a breeze through the trees, but gradually louder and more and more clearly resolved, the murmur of voices in a language I had never heard and did not understand.

Convinced that there must be someone else in the woods, I stood up and turned in a complete circle, searching between the trees for signs of human life.

But there was no one else there.

I’ve since learned that in the realm of paranormal studies, this kind of hearing—called clairaudience—is a fairly common occurrence. The theory is that at places where strong emotional responses have been evoked in people, those responses may leave traces that other people can experience later.

And so I wonder:  What traces might we leave behind, those of us who love the Ichetucknee?