Inside St Augustine, the US town that locals believes is the country’s most haunted
A US town has so many ghosts some claim to experience hauntings with terrifying regularity – but one spirit’s image is said to be particularly “creepy”.
The most recent occasion that Abbey Smith felt the otherworldly presence of a ghost was last Wednesday night.
That evening, the EMF reader that she sometimes carries with her on her rounds of Florida’s historic St Augustine lighthouse went berserk.
The meter measures electromagnetic fields. It’s usually used to locate faulty electrical wires or radio waves, but some insist that it can also indicate close at hand spirits.
Yet last Wednesday’s encounter wasn’t that notable, or even that rare. It was minor compared to an incident in March when Ms Smith said she came face-to-face with the ghost of a child that passed away almost 150 years ago.
“I could see all her features,” she told news.com.au.
“Things go bump in the night, there’s plenty of unexplained activity and each time it catches me off guard.”
Ms Smith’s experiences barely raise an eyebrow in St Augustine. Why would they when you work in what’s reportedly the most haunted town in the United States?
“St Augustine is a place where every building has a story,” said Rob Faubion, a former US navy submariner and now a “ghost host”.
“People jokingly say you can’t shake a stick here without finding another ghost.”
Mr Faubion said it wasn’t just spooky stories told in the hush of night. He has photographs that could prove echoes from another world inhabit the town. And there’s one particular image which is the creepiest he’s seen.
Unlikely setting for most haunted town
In the glorious sunshine and humidity of the day, St Augustine hardly looks like a community with a worrying infestation of ghouls.
Less than two hours northeast of the theme park mayhem of Orlando, this town of 16,000 nestled on the Atlantic coast is charming and languid.
Palm trees and tangled oaks shade cobbled streets thronged with colonial buildings of British, Spanish and American stock. What time to have the day’s first bourbon seems the biggest concern.
But this peaceful present is a new phenomenon.
“St Augustine has a tradition of turmoil and war and they say that pain and trauma can take hold,” Mr Faubion told news.com.au.
The settlement was founded by the Spanish in 1565, named after the feast day of St Augustine. At its heart is the Castillo de San Marcos, an impressive and formidable fort and prison that dates from 1672.
In 1586, British explorer Sir Francis Drake pillaged anything of worth in the town and burned the place to the ground.
In 1668, another Brit, Robert Searle, did much the same thing but in addition, killed sixty locals. Britain took possession of St Augustine in 1783 only for it to fall twenty years later to the newly-independent Americans.
Many of the apparitions that inhabit the town are said to be a direct legacy from this seesawing of conquest and death. Strange lights and shadows have been claimed to manifest around the fort, near where Europeans and Indigenous alike fell – the latter often kept shackled in the fort.
But exactly how many ghosts have taken up residence in the town as a whole, no one can seem to pin point.
Tragic story behind ‘creepy’ image
Some of the most vivid of spirits have been linked to townsfolk whose untimely demise was nothing to do with anger and bloodshed.
Between the Matanzas and San Sebastian rivers, which lie either side of St Augustine’s old town, is the Tolomato Cemetery. Originally believed to be a native burial place, the Catholic Church began using it in the late 18th century.
With its gravestones and twisting trees it was a fun place for children to play.
Mr Faubion, who shepherds visitors on A Ghostly Encounter tours, said five-year-old James Morgan had climbed a cemetery tree one day in 1877.
“They say he lost his balance and tumbled backwards,” he said.
“On a tombstone he broke his back and his neck and the poor boy died.”
The grave of James is striking. Tiny, white like snow, it sits on its own near the edge of the graveyard. Apparently his distraught parents owned several plots in the Tolomato Cemetary and chose to not crowd other bodies around their late son.
But, say locals, James’ echo still appears in the trees.
And there are claims of photographic proof, said Mr Faubion. He produced two images of the spirit of James in the tree.
One, like many supposed images of ghosts, is blurry, and a little unclear. Make of it what you will.
But the second, Mr Faubion said, sent a shudder through many.
“It was given to me about five years ago by some folks who came down here from Ohio,” he said.
“It gives me a creepy feeling and a lot of people say the same.”
In the bough of the tree, there are shapes that look faintly like a boy. Head, eyes, dressed in his best, staring down at the tour ogling up at the tree.
“In 1877 if you died they would bury you in whatever your best set of clothing was – a shirt, blazer, and jacket, anything that was appropriate,” he explained.
Building brimming with ghosts
The area of town with the most reported hauntings is in and around St Augustine’s lighthouse.
Here they’ve tried to do a spirit census.
“We have between seven and nine confirmed (ghosts) that vary from our lighthouse to the old original lighthouse that is no longer standing,” said Ms Smith.
“Mary and Eliza are the most active spirits that we have on our property.”
They were the daughters of Hezekiah Pittee who in the 1800s was given the job of building the current lighthouse.
For years, the Pittee family lived in what was a building site. A small railway travelled to the water’s edge so the 1.2 million bricks to build the structure could be brought ashore.
“It was like a Victorian era roller coaster,” which sisters Mary, Eliza and Carrie Pittee would regularly take jaunts on, said Ms Smith.
One tragic day when the three family members – plus a young African American girl the identity of which sadly remains unknown – were rollicking on the makeshift coaster, the brake failed.
“The cart flipped them out and into the water, trapping them underneath.
“A construction worker called Daniel Sessions tried to save as many as he could but only four-year-old Carrie survived.
“It’s a very hard story for us to tell.”
Face-to-face with a spirit
But something of the sisters perhaps remains.
Reportedly, they tie people’s shoes together among other pranks, send EMF meters “crazy”, create cold spots, hold tourists’ hands, and even appear wandering around the grounds in their 19th century garb.
Ghost hunters, both individually and from the show Ghosthunters, have tried to capture the girls. People have claimed EMF readers have enabled simple questions to be put to the pair; blurry images have been taken.
But Ms Smith said she’s seen one of them with her own eyes.
“There was one night in March this year. We got a lot of EMF activity in the lighthouse and we were talking to Eliza,” she said.
“I looked up (the stairwell) in the pitch black and I saw a white face leaning over the railing staring at me.
“You could see the hair that was pulled back and distinctly all the facial features.”
She admits that even after all the ghostly encounters, eyeballing a spirit is an arresting experience.
“It was very unnerving. My stomach dropped because I’d never seen something like that,” she said.
“But it was like it was acknowledging me and I was acknowledging it.”
Nicole Diehm, a librarian at the St Augustine Historical Society, said the people spoken about during the ghost stories were real
But there was no way of judging the veracity of the ghosts themselves. How can you conclusively prove a spirit exists – or doesn’t?
“For me, ghost stories are a way of people making sense of unexplainable circumstances. Perhaps they are a way of people finding comfort that there’s something after death.”
Ms Smith admits it can seem a bit far-fetched. And there are a lot of sceptics who think talk of shadows and sightings is smoke and mirrors. All just a trick of the light.
“But in my opinion, too many things have happened in St Augustine that are hard to brush off”.
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