Haunted Jacksonville

People love a good ghost story this time of year, so I've come up with a list of local ghostie hotspots, scouring the area for haunts and history. Happy Hauntings!

The Haunted School
Anne, School # 4 or The Devil's School Lytle School

Stories about the School No. 4 are legion. Bring up hauntings in Jacksonville and inevitably someone mentions it as the most haunted place in Jacksonville. The place just looks haunted. You've probably passed it at one point or another. It's on the corner of I-95 and Margaret Street in the Brooklyn area of Riverside.

I love the stories about the school, even though none of them are true. I've heard that most of the students died in the 60s because of a furnace explosion, that the principle was a cannibal who ate children and that a disgruntled janitor went on a bloody killing spree. Everybody has a story as to why the place was abandoned.

The reality is much more mundane. The school was built around 1917, as Riverside Elementary. It was used as a school until the 1960s, when the construction of I-95 cut off access to the place, making it a logistical nightmare to get to in a car. The same is true today-you can see it from the highway, but it's difficult to get to by car. After many complaints and logjams, it was shut down as a school and used as an administrative building until 1970, when it was vacated.

Since that time, the homeless, ghost hunters, vandals and would-be-Devil worshippers (so the story goes) have invaded the school. The spook appeal has proven too much for teens looking for the forbidden. At this point, the place is in such a state of disrepair, after a roof collapsed and a fire in the 90s, that it's very dangerous to go into the place, which has been slated for demolition since the 80s. Property owners, afraid that trespassers would be hurt on the site, put up barbed fencing and padlocks.

It hasn't yet been torn down because of its status as an historical building. Plenty of uses for the building have been floated over the years, but most have been scrapped, either because of the accessibility problem or because renovations would have been too expensive. It doesn't help that I-95 whizzes by the place within a few feet of the façade.

Finding a use for Public School #4 is only going to get tougher, as they've jsut built a fly-over ramp that will obscure the building.

While it's been reported that the building will finally be demolished and the land sold, it has somehow survived under the constant threat of destruction for years. I'll believe it when I see it.

Haunted Hospital
Old St. Luke's Hospital

The site of the Old St. Luke's Hospital is now the location of the office for the Arthritis Foundation. The site's got a long history and death associated with it, so of course there are rumors that 314 Palmetto Street is a ghostly haunt. In 1878, the Old St. Luke's hospital was constructed to house local tuberculosis patients. About 40 years later the hospital was relocated. After that, the old structure was used by other businesses, supposedly even a coffin manufacturing company. The story goes that the place is haunted by patients, nurses still roam the halls and an unbalanced lady who believes that the men building coffins were building one just for her. Since she's supposed to be a ghost, she's probably right.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker on Girvin Road

A vanishing hitchhiker is common enough in the annals of ghostly lore. In Jacksonville's case, it isn't a guy who disappears from your back seat. Nope, we're all for equal opportunity haunting. Our vanishing hitchhiker is a girl on Girvin Road, who tends to show up sometime past midnight. She wears glasses and will summon your car to stop. Look away for a moment and she simply disappears.

A Watery Grave at the Dames Point Bridge

Officially called the Napoleon Bonaparte Broward Bridge, this cable bridge which spans the St. Johns as part of 9A, is also more colloquially called the Dames Point Bridge. It's not a very old bridge, as the main span was completed in 1988, opening in '89 for highway traffic. Despite persistent rumors, no one was killed during the construction.

But people have died on or near the bridge since then.

It's known to be haunted by a dark-skinned woman woman, who is sometimes seen walking back and forth along the bridge and then disappears. It's said that she was thrown from the bridge in 1996 by an unknown attacker. There was a documented suicide on the bridge that year, but the unidentified woman who fell to her death was white.

In November of '06, there was another suicide, wherein a different woman drove her car to the top of the bridge, abandoned it and then jumped. An unidentified man also jumped in September of '07, and his body was later recovered by fishermen on the St. Johns.

In May of '07 a young Black woman who had gotten out of her car after her tire blew out was pushed into the river when a Hummer slammed into her vehicle and the impact to her car tossed her into the river. She survived, miraculously unhurt. Maybe somebody was watching out for her.

Old Red Eyes
Kingsley Plantation

In Jacksonville, on St. George Island, is the old Kingsley Plantation. Timucuan Indians are known to have lived on the site about a thousand years ago, but all the remaining structures are from the plantation era. Zephaniah Kingsley owned and ran the plantation from 1813-1839.

Kingsley operated under a "task" system, allowing slaves to work tending their own gardens or working at their own craft once plantation tasks were complete. Profit from their labors during their "free" time was usually kept by the slaves. He even allowed slaves to buy their freedom and married Anna Madgigine Jai, one of his own slaves, who was freed in 1811.

Kingsley's liberal notion concerning slaves for the time came to an end once Florida became an American territory. Florida passed laws that discriminated against free blacks and placed harsh restrictions on African slaves. This prompted Kingsley to move his mixed-race family to Haiti, where the descendants of Anna and Zephaniah live today.

The Kingsley Plantation still stands today, along a rough and narrow road. On that road, near ruins of abandoned slave quarters, some people have seen Old Red Eyes, said to be the spirit of a slave who raped and killed several of the female slaves. The other slaves caught him and hung him, supposedly from the large oak tree at the entrance of the plantation. He is often spotted in the rear view mirror of a car, simply two, red glowing eyes that follow you.

Two other ghosts round out the cast at the plantation. A woman in white (there certainly are a lot of these haunting the area) who sits on the porch of the main house. She only shows up in photos and is thought to be Anna Kingsley, mistress of the plantation. The last ghost is that of a child, whose screams can be heard at the old well.

It's a spooky place towards dusk, full of history and the promise of spirits from the beyond.