The Okefenokee's name comes from the Creek (Muscogee) words meaning 'Land of Trembling Earth,' referring to the floating peat islands that shake underfoot — ground that is not quite solid, a landscape between land and water. In Creek and Seminole oral traditions, the swamp is home to spiritual beings and trickster figures who inhabit the borderlands between the seen and unseen worlds.

Will-o'-wisps — flickering lights seen over the swamp at night — feature in both Indigenous and later settler folklore of the region. In Creek tradition, these lights could be the manifestations of spirits or warnings from the spirit world. European settlers brought their own interpretations: ghost lights, fairy fires, or the lanterns of the dead. The scientific explanation — bioluminescence or spontaneous combustion of swamp gases (methane and phosphine) — has never fully accounted for all reported sightings, and the mystery persists.

The Seminole people, who entered the swamp in the 18th and 19th centuries while fleeing American military campaigns, added their own layer of spiritual geography. The Okefenokee became a refuge — a place so forbidding that the US Army could not follow. The swamp's resistance to human control became part of its mythic identity: this is land that refuses to be tamed, that literally shakes off the weight of those who try to walk on it.