The "Beware The Mystical Silk Cotton Tree!" Story

The Silk Cotton or Ceiba tree.

It was an ordinary day.  Looking at a photograph of the Silk Cotton or Ceiba Tree.  The tree is a rapidly growing deciduous tree that can reach heights of 80 feet or more with a diameter of five to eight feet above its buttresses.  The buttresses themselves can be up to ten feet from the main trunk.  The tree has a broad, flat crown of horizontal branches.  The compound leaves have five to eight lance-shaped leaflets that are three to eight inches long.  

The bloom of the Silk Cotton tree.

The tree blooms from December to February with five-part whitish to pink flowers which occur in dense clusters and bloom before the leaves appear.  Now that, my friends, is a BIG tree.  The fruit it produces is about three to six inches long with an elliptical shape to them.  The fruit contain many seeds surrounded by a dense mat of cottony fibers.  The tree gets its name from the fibers which rain from the tree when the fruits ripen.  The tree fibers do not lend themselves to spinning, but can be used for insulation, padding in sleeping bags and life preservers and for stuffing mattresses and pillows.  

This tree has grown over top of a building.

It's a great shade tree.  But, its also considered by some to be the most feared and notorious symbols of the spirit world in the West Indies.  You are warned to avoid the tree if you happen to be in the vicinity of it during Halloween.  Tales of people refusing to cut down the silk cotton trees for fear of releasing the spirits inside are not uncommon across the Caribbean.  A few years ago the Guyana East Coast Highway was scheduled to run right through where a rather large silk cotton tree was located.  The highway planners needed it to be cut down.  

The tree dwarfs this young man.

It is said that the engineers who dared to try remove it were struck dead!  The highway was completed, but it ran around both sides of the tree.  The other name for the tree, the "Ceiba tree", is a Taino or Arawak tribe word.  It is said that Christopher Columbus and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo were both impressed by the size of the the canoes that the Indians in the West Indies and coastal Central and South America made from the Ceiba tree.  The canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks all in one piece.  Some were eight to nine feet wide and could carry more than 100 men.  They are still used today to make dugout canoes.  That's provided you have the nerve to cut one of them down.  Many of these beliefs about supernatural spirits of the silk cotton tree came to the West Indies from African enslaved peoples in the 16th century.  And, I'm sure many still believe in the spirits that surround the Silk Cotton Tree.  And, who's going to challenge a gigantic tree?  Not most people!  Certainly not me!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.