Catherine Lower - Haunted Florida: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Sunshine State

STACKPOLE
BOOKS

Copyright 2008 by Stackpole Books

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Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Caroline Stover

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thuma, Cynthia.

Haunted Florida : ghosts and strange phenomena of the Sunshine State / Cynthia Thuma and Catherine Lower ; illustrations by Heather Adel Wiggins. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-4062-3

ISBN-10: 0-8117-3498-6 (pbk.)

1. GhostsFlorida. 2. Haunted placesFlorida. I. Lower, Catherine. II. Wiggins, Heather Adel. III. Title.

BF1472.U6T48 2008

133.109759dc22

2007040121

Cynthia Thuma:
To the men in my lifeDad, Joe, Jim, and Nick
and to Cathy Lower, a world-class coauthor
and an even better friend.

Catherine Lower:
To my mother, Lorraine Hill,
for reading to me from day one,
instilling a lifelong love of the written word.

FLORIDA, WHOSE NAME LOOSELY TRANSLATES TO LAND OF FLOWERS, is also known as the Sunshine State. Somehow, with the images of sunshine and the vivid hues of flowers swirling in ones consciousness at the mere mention of the states name, it seems incongruous that ghosts and other spirits might be at work there as well. Yet they are.

From coast to coast, Florida is home to ghosts, spirits, and strange phenomena that defy conventional explanations. Whether the victims of spontaneous combustion, foul play, or just hard living, it seems that these spirits are stuck and cannot or will not move on to the next life. They haunt some of this states most beautiful hotels and historic buildings, and they haunt some rather common places too.

Florida is a beautiful, inviting state, with white sandy beaches, swaying palm trees, coconuts, and orangesbut it also has its share of ghosts that make things go bump in the night.

MOST PEOPLE THINK OF FLORIDA AS A PENINSULA, A DAGGER OF LAND with a string of pearlsthe Keysattached to its end. But there is also North Florida, which runs from the First Coast on its far eastern edge through the Panhandle on its western side and adheres to the underbelly of the contiguous states. This region is the other Florida, a lush ribbon of land with graceful antebellum homes, gently rolling hills, and vegetation such as pecan trees and gnarly live oaks dripping with Spanish moss.

The search for the fountain of youth began in North Florida, where Spanish conquistadores set foot on North American soil for the first time on April 3, 1513. But the Spaniards were not the first ones there. As early as 1000 A.D., indigenous people roamed the area that is now North Florida. Some of the spirits encountered in North Florida today apparently come from the lands original visitors, while others are more contemporary.

The Ancient City Inn Bed and Breakfast, also known as the Painted Lady, at 47 San Marco Avenue in St. Augustine, is a lovely bed-and-breakfast inn featuring beautiful accommodations at modest prices. A painting on one wall of the inn depicts a slightly dour woman with a fashionably long neck wearing a large, dark hat. She is the spinster daughter of the Charles Segui family, who built the home and occupied it for more than eighty years, and it seems that her ghost continues to occupy it to this day.

Over the years, she has come to be known simply as Martha Lee, a ghost as benign as her smile. Martha Lee likes fine jewelry and hats, and guests have traditionally left hats for her. Her bedroom is the most requested room in the inn.

A skeptical guest once challenged Martha Lee to prove her existence. At first nothing happened, but when he retired to his room and lay on his bed, it crashed to the floor. The inns staff fixed the bed and tested it to determine that it was safe and sufficiently repaired. The skeptic then lay down again, and the bed crumbled once more. The staff moved him to another room, but when he stepped outside the door of the second room, it slammed shut, locking him out. The skeptic apologized to Martha Lee, and the remainder of his stay was mishap-free.

Henry Morrison Flagler was one of the worlds wealthiest men. He was accustomed to power, success, and getting what he wanted. A testament to Flaglers power and influence is that his ghost has been observed in two Florida cities. Maybe spirits like touristslike to go south for the winter.

Flaglers first venture, a salt-mining and production company in Michigan, ended in failure. But then he made good as a partner of John D. Rockefeller and Samuel Andrews in the Standard Oil Company. He went on his own to establish the Florida East Coast Railway.

After the death of his beloved first wife, Mary Harkness, Henry Flagler married Ida Alice Shourds, her nurse, on the rebound, but Ida turned out to be carrying lots of mental baggage. Not too long after their marriage, she began experiencing delusions, bragging about her affair with Nicholas Romanov, who had begun his reign as Czar Nicholas II the year before the Flaglers were married. She began sending the Russian monarch jewelry and expensive gifts, which Flaglers staff intercepted. Her condition grew progressively worse. For the wealthiest and most powerful entrepreneur in Florida at the turn of the century, his wife loomed as a huge liability.

Then things got more complicated. While staying with friends at one of his St. Augustine hotels in 1891, Flagler, now sixty-one, met the twenty-four-year-old Mary Lily Kenan, a stunningly beautiful young woman from Kenansville, near Wilmington, North Carolina. At first they merely bumped into each other in social circles and came to enjoy one anothers company, but Henry was genuinely attracted to the vivacious Mary Lily and taking care of Ida was not a minor detail.

So he took his problem to his powerful friends in the Florida legislature, who were pleased that Flagler was bringing money and jobs to the state through the railway and the hotels he was building along the way to Key West. He urged them to pass legislation that would allow him to divorce Ida and subsequently wed Mary Lily. They complied, passing what became laughingly known as the Flagler Divorce Bill, which permitted persons to divorce spouses with incurable mental illness of long-standing duration. The Florida media was critical, and public sentiment was overwhelmingly against him, but once freed from the albatross that was Ida, Flagler acted quickly. Two months after the law was passed, he filed for divorce. Sixty-three days later, the divorce was granted, and Henry Flagler and Mary Lily Kenan were married on August 24, 1901.