Out in the citrus hills near Lake Wales, there is a stretch of quiet road where gravity seems to take the afternoon off. Pull your car up to the faded white line, shift into neutral, lift your foot off the brake, and watch it drift slowly backward, looking for all the world like it is rolling uphill. It is a gravity hill (or magnetic hill), which creates an optical illusion caused by the surrounding landscape, making a downward slope look like an incline
The folks in Lake Wales have been letting visitors try it for generations, and in 2019 Spook Hill even earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. The honest answer is that it is a gravity hill, a trick of the land where the rise and fall of the ridge fools your eyes into reading a gentle downhill as an impossible climb. Somehow knowing that never makes it any less fun.
It is pure Old Florida, the kind of free, no frills roadside wonder you went out of your way to find before the interstates smoothed everything out.
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