His eyes glowed red, he wore a skirt & seduced Lana Turner. Remembering Smyrna's 'demon'

An 11-foot-tall, 3,000-pound, skirt-wearing statue of a pagan god with red glowing eyes, four horns, and a headless serpent in his hand, inspired double takes or even the jitters from motorists passing by the Smyrna Rest Area for almost 20 years.

The statue's trajectory from a Hollywood movie prop featured in a campy Lana Turner flick to a Dela-weird roadside attraction is the stuff of legend.

Since Halloween is on the horizon, it seems to be the perfect time to tell this not-so-scary tale.

Do you remember the "demon" of Smyrna?

The statue of Baal, which sat on the side of U.S. 13 from 1984 to 2004, may have looked like a demon but it represented a male "God of the flesh" or fertility god. (The term baal is used to refer to "any of numerous Canaanite and Phoenician local deities,'' according to Merriam Webster dictionary. )

It originally was built as a Hollywood prop for the 1955 Lana Turner movie "The Prodigal." It also appeared in the 1961 movie "Atlantis, The Lost Continent" , as well as Tarzan movies.

"The Prodigal" is a cheesy movie (at least when viewed today) with the alluring Turner as an evil pagan priestess named Samarra who prays to the god Baal and likes to lay across his lap. She seduces Micah, a young man from the sticks who is bored with life, and goes to find excitement in the big city of Damascus in 70 B.C.

In a tale as old as time (this is a biblical flick, after all), Micah squanders his money and betrays his faith but eventually returns home where all is forgiven.

Turner wasn't a fan of the movie nor of her co-star Edmund Purdom, who played Micah. In her autobiography, "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth" she said Purdom had both pomposity and garlic breath.

"My lines were so stupid I hated to go to work in the morning. Even the costumes were atrocious," she wrote.

The film was a stinker and lost millions for MGM, according to studio records.

In the movie, the Baal statue falls into a pit of fire. In real life, it ended up in Delaware.

According to News Journal archives in about the 1970s, a Delaware man bought the Baal statue, formerly black and gold, and later painted it green for the "Atlantis" movie, at an MGM studio props auction. The fiberglass and steel statue was shipped to the Shopper Publications business on Ogletown Road.

It sat on the roadway and was loaded out on occasions, once to the headquarters of a political officer seeker in New Castle County and once for a chemical company's toga party.

In 1981, it was sold to Newark Lawn Services and displayed at that business for about three years. The owner called it Buddha. The Wilmington Jaycees rented the statue for haunted houses and a Christmas parade. During its stay in Newark, someone snapped off and stole the serpent's head.

Pat Stombaugh bought it for $1,200 in 1984. It sat in front of her travel agency, Tranquility Travel, across from the Smyrna Rest Area off U.S. 13, for years. It attracted much attention when the roadway was heavily used as a thoroughfare to Delaware's beach towns, but less so after the creation of Delaware Route 1.

In 1999, Stombaugh moved her business about 4.5 miles away. Town officials told her she could have the statue outside of the travel agency or a sign at the new location, but not both.

The statue stayed on Route 13.

Stombaugh, who later served as Smyrna's mayor, eventually put it up for sale for $5,000 and told potential buyers they would "get more notability from the statue than you would from any sign you could ever have."

By then, the statue had seen better days. The paint was weather-beaten and the statue was now a dull gray and yellow. Someone had long pilfered the light bulbs that made the eyes glow red, as well as a scepter that had been in one of the demon's hands. The stolen serpent's head was never recovered.

Baal finally sold for $4,000 in 2004 to Denney Van Istendal of Lumberton, New Jersey. Van Istendal saw it when he traveled to a NASCAR event in Dover and wanted it for his lawncare service business.

"I just think it's cool," he told The News Journal in 2004 and said he was planning to restore it.

The fiberglass demon was moved to the yard of his New Jersey home, but it wasn't a hit with some neighbors. One called it "an eyesore" and another said it scared horses stabled at a neighboring property.

There was talk of moving the statue to the top of a bar in Philly, but it never happened.

According to one blog and photo from 2020, the statue may have a home in a backyard in Southampton, New Jersey, which is in the Pine Barrens. In the photo, it appears as though it was never restored.

No Hollywood ending this time, at least not yet.

"Do you remember?" is an occasional News Journal/Delaware Online feature that looks at the history behind long-gone Delaware buildings, objects, businesses, and places.  

Contact Patricia Talorico at ptalorico@delawareonline.com or 302-324-2861 and follow her on X (Twitter) @pattytalorico Sign up for her Delaware Eats newsletter.

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This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: 'Demon' who enticed a Hollywood movie star once had a home in Delaware