Ghost Tours in St. Augustine

One of the scariest things you'll learn about St. Augustine is that whatever pleasant little brick street you're walking down, you're probably stepping on somebody's gravesite. Indian burial grounds, cemeteries that have graves beyond their walls and hospitals that basically buried their dead in the street are just a few of the graves you'll walk over. Simply put, St. Augustine is brimming with the dead.

You'll get the skinny on the scary in St. Augustine with the Ancient City Tours.

If you want to know which romantic St. Augustine Bed and Breakfast has a history of hauntings and was formerly a mortuary, which cemetery someone actually died in, or what busy restaurant has a ghost in the ladies room, this is the tour to take. My tour guide was Melissa Tomasino, who most often dresses as the "lady in white" a famed St. Augustine ghost. By day, Melissa's an accountant. By night, she takes her guests on a spine tingling tour of St. Augustine's ghostly hotspots.

We visited a number of old cemeteries, though we couldn't go in the gates. Tolomato Cemetery has a number of spirits that sometimes come out to play when the tours come by. The well-known Lady in White, buried in her gown just before her wedding day, is known to haunt the cemetery and two houses nearby. Judge John B. Stickney is known to still be looking for his body parts in the Huguenots cemetery, as a result of a sleeping grave digger who was assigned to dig up his body for shipment and drunken pranksters, who smashed the good Judge's head just to steal his gold teeth.

Some of the interesting tales told on the tour aren't about ghosts, but rather about something related to death or St. Augustine history. You'll learn about the exploding Bishop, who was placed in a nearly airtight metal coffin with a glass window, for about two weeks in the heat of the summer, so that everyone would have a chance to travel to view him. He took the opportunity to explode in the middle of his memorial service (as a result of the decay gasses building up in his coffin). As prestigious as he apparently was in life, people always talk more about what happened to him afterwards.

The scariest spot we stopped at was the Spanish Military Hospital, where the tour has its HQ. Underneath the street in front of the hospital are the bones of amputees and those unlucky enough to die in the hospital. Tours start from either the Military Hospital (site of countless deaths, at least one suicide) or the Old Drug Store (on top of an Indian Burial ground). Ghost tours don't just run in the month of October, you can go anytime you please, although reservations are highly recommended. Call 904-827-0807 to make a reservation. Go to www.ancientcitytours.net to check them out, but buy your tickets either over the phone, at the Military Hospital or at the Old Drug Store.