MIAMI _ A heavenly visitor descended on the sands of Fort Lauderdale's Ocean Manor Beach Resort _ with a little help from man.
A 20-foot wooden cross, encrusted with barnacles and other signs of sea life, washed ashore in waters lapping the resort and was carried onto the property sands by tourists.
Four days later, people were still speculating on the origins of the religious symbol.
On Wednesday afternoon, Robin Stowe called the Miami Herald to shed some light on the mysterious arrival.
The cross, Stowe said, was erected as a memorial to her brother, Capt. Richard Baran, who disappeared while on a solo hunting trip in the Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina in January 2016. The Coast Guard suspended its search after covering 33 miles over eight hours.
"I think it might be my brother's cross from the Hatteras in North Carolina," Stowe said. "A bunch of his friends went out there and Capt. Aaron Aaron built that cross and put it on the island." (Yes, Aaron's surname and first name are one and the same.)
In April 2016, she said Aaron and the group put the cross up on Dredge Island not far from where Baran's boat was found with his hunting gear still on board.
Putting that cross up as a memorial, she said, "was a labor of love and means a lot to us. We'd love to get it back."
She believes Hurricane Michael, which battered the Cape Hatteras region as a tropical storm in October 2018, may have swept the cross off Dredge Island and that it's been at sea ever since.
Aaron confirms her account. The spate of news reports since it turned up Saturday in Fort Lauderdale came to their attention when people called Stowe and Aaron because they recognized his handiwork on the cross.
Aaron said he built the cross in about an hour's time and brought it to the island by boat where a group of 20 or so friends celebrated Baran's life.
"The reason I know it is (the cross) is I built it and notched it and can see the eye bolts and that it's set off to one side," Aaron said. "It's the cross _ 100 percent."
In addition to the craftsmanship and design, Aaron said many of the friends signed messages on the cross with Sharpie pens but he realizes that all of these missives would likely be lost under the barnacles and saltwater during its long journey.
"We would love to see the cross come back to Hatteras. We set it up as a memorial. It was such a big ordeal when we never found him and he died at sea and that's why this is so important," Aaron said.
Baran, 47, ran a guide service at Hatteras Harbor Marina at the time. Aaron, a charter boat captain, was Baran's former business partner and a friend.
Stowe said she reached out to Frank Telerico, the owner of Ocean Manor Beach Resort, after seeing his name in news reports but had yet to hear back from him. The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Talerico or a manager at the resort on Wednesday.
If they get the go-ahead, Aaron said several charter captains in the area are prepared to bring the cross back to North Carolina where it will be put back up.
Talerico told WSVN-TV on Monday, before Stowe reached out, the cross is "staying here" and welcomed people to come and take pictures alongside the unexpected gift from the sea.
Here are some oddities that have found their ways from the sea to the shore in Florida _ not counting the occasional bales of drugs or dead body.
On Nov. 23, 1984, the day after Thanksgiving, a Venezuelan freighter named the Mercedes I _ as long as a 16-story building _ beached itself on the seawall belonging to Palm Beach socialite, "the unsinkable Mollie Wilmot," as the Herald described her.
The night it happened, Wilmot, the daughter of a man who made millions from department stores in the Midwest, "did what any gracious host would do. She sent fresh-brewed coffee to the salty, unshaven crew and served cocktails to friends inside, with the wide-screen television on in case anyone grew tired of watching the hulking ship outside the big glass doors," the Herald reported.
The 197-foot Mercedes soon overstayed its welcome near Wilmot's swimming pool. Within a week, she'd had enough. Wilmot entertained notions of stringing Christmas lights around it, opening a disco on its deck, turning it into a beachfront restaurant, painting a seascape on it "to get back her ocean view," a reporter suggested.
She didn't do any of those things.
The freighter would squat there until March 1985. A tugboat hauled it out to sea and it was blasted and turned into an artificial reef.
"I think turning it into a reef is wonderful," Wilmot told the Herald when the Mercedes met its final fate. "But the thought of them exploding it does upset me a bit. I don't know if at the last minute I can even look at it. It depends on how cool I can stay."
Wilmot, who became a national celebrity as a result of the freighter's beaching at her manse, died at 78 in 2002. There had been talk of turning her South Florida 105-day saga into a movie with either Bette Midler or Melanie Griffith playing her but the film never made it past the development stages.
Perhaps "The Last Temptation of Christ" director Martin Scorsese could consider a movie about the Ocean Manor Beach Resort cross if it sticks around long enough.
In January 2011, a baby grand piano popped up on a small Biscayne Bay sandbar a few hundred yards east of Miami Shores. Within weeks, the images of that piano went viral worldwide and it was even pictured in National Geographic.
Mystery solved: it wasn't a discard from a concert stage by an angry Elton John or Billy Joel. Turns out, a teenager, Nicholas Harrington , his dad Mark, brother and a neighbor had set the piano afire on the sandbar on New Year's Day. The piano was a prop for a movie and wound up in the garage of J. Mark Harrington's mother. Mark was a production designer on "Burn Notice."
In November 2012, a white bathtub found its way onto the rocks on Government Cut, off Miami Beach. Some speculated it might have been some artist's idea of an installation for Art Basel Miami Beach. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission wasn't amused. It was soon hauled away.
A softball-sized eyeball washed up on Pompano Beach in October 2012.
The eerie orb wasn't from a character described in Peter Benchley's 1991 novel, "Beast."
Rather, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said that the icky discovery probably fell off a swordfish, as the attractive fish are desired catches of sport and commercial anglers along the South Florida coast.
A World War II-era flash bomb washed ashore in St. Pete Beach in July 2015. The arrival of the cylindrical, 4-foot, barnacle-encrusted relic of the 1940s sparked an evacuation of the beach and nearby homes.
Authorities soon detonated the bomb after building sand berms around it and protecting nearby hatching sea turtles.
An 8-foot-tall Lego man washed ashore on a Siesta Key beach in October 2011. The Sarasota man who found the colorful mega-toy, with the puzzling words, "NO REAL THAN YOU ARE, in block white letters on its green "shirt," surmised its appearance on the shore must have been some sort of publicity stunt.
But according to the Herald-Tribune, which reported the story, Legoland wanted no part of the discovery and said it was a counterfeit.
