The Secret Life of Shelby Stanga Told in “Shelby” Documentary

Louisiana covets its fair share of mysteries across its three million acres of wetlands; fragments of cultures thought forgotten, treasures left to fester in a swamp water grave, and people for whom the cool embrace of the bayou is home.

Filmmaker Daniel Fiore learned of one such legend over a decade ago, that of a man named Shelby Stanga; a wild man living on the furthest edges of society who doesn’t even bother to know his own age, a purveyor of strange artifacts found uncovered in the muck and the mud, and a savant with a sixth sense for finding rare and valuable distressed cypress trees abandoned in the waterways along the Tangipaoha River.

Himself an Emmy-winning cinematographer and director for popular reality television programs like “Deadliest Catch” and “Axe Men,” Fiore not only found Shelby but became fascinated and, armed only with his experience filming in extreme conditions and a camera, decided he would document the life and times of this bayou-dwelling curiosity.

In October 2025, the documentary “Shelby” premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival, an intimate chronicling of not only Shelby’s day-to-day existence but the many tall tales, superstitions and paranoias that perhaps hold more truth than meets the eye.

“I was hearing from log buyers from Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana that I had to meet this guy named Shelby. He lives in the swamp and didn’t even have a phone at the time,” says Fiore. “I’m hearing stories about how he’s biting the heads of snakes and jumping on alligators, so my contact brought me into this deep part of the swamp, and it was like a time warp. I spent the whole day with Shelby and ended up rolling seven hours of footage. I knew I had lightning in a bottle.”

Daniel Fiore – Director of “Shelby”

Even though Shelby was featured in “Axe Men,” Fiore knew that there was more to mine, a documentary that dove into the captivating contradictions of Shelby, whose self-imposed isolation that reality TV just couldn’t touch. Thus began a decade of short trips down to a derelict lean-to shack tucked against the banks of the Pontchatrain, where Shelby lived in a tent with his dog Willie, massive industrial vehicles and quite a few guns.

Shelby’s trade is the resurrection of buried sinker cypress logs from the depths of the river, the leavings from centuries of settlers ravaging the land for timber and sending the spent carcasses of mighty trees down to New Orleans to sell. As the last of the great cypress trawlers in the swampland, Shelby seems to have a sixth sense as to the location of not just the most valuable logs left to fester beneath the muck, but hidden items of immeasurable value, from pirate gold to time-forgotten Civil War submarines.

“Through my documentary work, I’ve heard all kinds of treasure hunting stories, but the more I spent time with him, the more he would show me things that made me think, well, there’s a lot of smoke here, there must be fire somewhere,” says Fiore.

Daniel Fiore and Shelby Stanga filming “Shelby”

The key to Shelby’s treasure hunting prowess, according to Fiore, is the byproduct of modernization after many generations of colonialization, bloodshed, and settlement amidst the Louisiana swampland. Steam vessels allowed for industrialized logging, which destroyed root systems across the wetlands and buried the remnants of civilizations long past in an anaerobic environment, which is ideal for the preservation of antiquities but also creates a smokescreen that side steps the effects of high-tech sonar systems. Shelby’s method of trawling with his excavator, essentially fishing for cypress logs no human eye could find, means that he often pulls up more than he bargained for, artifacts that no person was ever meant to uncover.

One such white whale for Shelby is a mythic Civil War vessel, a prototype Confederate submarine that was tested in Lake Pontchartrain, known as an “infernal machine.” While Shelby claims to have pinpointed the approximate area where the submarine might be located, Fiore has had to caution him to make sure any of his historical artifacts are treated with care and not, as has often been his modus operandi, given away to friends as gifts.

“The thing about these artifacts is that if you yank them up out of the water and simply throw them onto land, they’ll disintegrate. I’ve had to explain to Shelby that if he finds something, it needs to be preserved, to at least put it back in the water or leave anything alone if he finds it,” explains Fiore. “All that material could rewrite history books, but only if the pieces are kept together and in the right context. Shelby understands that now, not just give these things away.”

Shelby Stanga from the documentary “Shelby”

As presented in “Shelby” and narrated by Fiore himself, the wild man persona that has been fostered for decades is certainly an apt one, though such simplification does not tell the whole story. Fiore’s lens finds Shelby to be an endearing figure, earnest in his care for others and fiercely devoted to his singular way of life. For Shelby, showers are rare, as are sustained interactions with other people. He claims to have spent Christmas alone for the last ten or fifteen years, castrated himself on a dare, and to have run across a cryptic swamp monster as a boy. Where truth begins, and fantasy ends, with Shelby is ultimately immaterial.

The man is the story, as Fiore understood early on, and it is through the filmmaker’s burgeoning care for this anomalous man that the heart of the film presents itself: a friendship as improbable yet as glittering as long-lost pirate bullion.

“My goal is to be unbiased. I don’t want my personal judgment somehow even subconsciously carrying over to the edit or camera work,” explains Fiore. “Yet over the years of filming, I found myself becoming one of the only people that he could trust. I started waking up to it when he told me I was in his will. Being this close to a subject was something I had never done before, but this seemed like a unique case, and a unique person, for whom this type of natural approach was the right one.”

While the film is hopefully soon to find distribution, Fiore is keeping Shelby’s story alive and well on YouTube, where behind-the-scenes sequences and never-before-seen clips that dive deeper into the mind and world of Louisiana’s real-life wild man.

Whether or not Shelby ever really finds that trove of treasure he’s spent his life scavenging for, there’s a comfort in knowing that somewhere out in the bayou is a myth made real, a true-to-life bedtime story of a man who tamed the waterways once traversed by pirates and found a fortune in the calcified remains of ancient sentinel trees.

A mystery made flesh, who will assuredly inspire his own legends someday, Shelby is a reminder that there’s still a little wonder to be found around the crusty edges of the known world if you’re willing to dig for the glimmer of gold just beneath the mud.