The unseasonable heat we’ve been suffering through here in St. Pete broke last Friday, finally making it feel like fall, or as close to fall as you feel surrounded by trees that stay green year round. Time to go on a ghost tour!

Ghost tours are traditional in many cities across the country. St. Petersburg is a relatively young city, so it doesn’t have ghost stories that go back to colonial times, or even the Civil War. In fact, most of the stories I heard on this year’s tour were post-1980, if they had historical truth to them at all. I went on a tour put on by GhostTour.net, which leaves from the Full Monty Cafe downtown. The guide was a friendly woman named Laurie, who was wearing a cape and skull earrings. There were about 25 other people on the tour the night I went.

Basically, Laurie took us on a mile long hike to the oldest buildings still extant in downtown. At each stop she talked a bit about the history and significance of the building, and then followed up with some creepy tales about ghosts or other mysterious happenings. Most of the stories ended with the equivalent of a wink, as if she were letting us in on a joke.

Perhaps the most interesting story was attached to the Detroit Hotel, the oldest and arguably the most historically important building downtown, built by the city’s founder John Constantine Williams. In 1981, workmen knocked down a partition to an unused portion to the building’s attic and found a portrait of a man that appeared to date back to at least the early part of the 20th century. The find was reported in the local paper along with a request for information as to whom it portrayed. A couple weeks later, the paper printed a follow-up that came to no firm conclusions. However, Laurie told a story that took the identification of “the Captain” and ran with it. She claimed that some nights when there is a concert at Jannus Landings (a venue that is essentially a courtyard the hotel overlooks) people will see a shadowy figure in old timey clothes on one of the balconies of the hotel, watching the ladies, as the Captain was wont to do. I can attest to seeing mysterious shadowy figures while at Jannus Landings, but they might have been attributable to the fact that I was at a Meatloaf concert, and some of the other concertgoers were smoking what can only be described as a heroic amount of weed.

The next stop was the Ponce De Leon Hotel, currently host to the tapas restaurant Ceviche. At one point, the hotel, by virtue of having a basement (nonresidents can be excused for finding that odd) was used as a morgue, so all kinds of creepy things happened there. Mysterious attacks, falling bottles, suicides (including that of Thom Street, who was mentioned in the first newspaper story about the Detroit Hotel portrait), and even hints of conspiracy. Laurie did tell one story I suspected was a complete fabrication, about the mysterious death of an elderly resident of the hotel. It sounded suspiciously like a conflation of the story of Mary Reeser (St. Pete’s famous spontaneous human combustion victim) and Norma Desmond.

The final two stops on the tour were the Fine Arts Museum (no ghosts, but maybe a curse) and The Vinoy resort. The latter is supposed to be home to a Lady in White, which is such a standard feature in ghost stories that I wonder if it’s mandated by the afterlife entity union, and some stories involving baseball players that showed up in Haunted Baseball.

I enjoy these kinds of tours, so long as the whole paranormal angle isn’t pushed too hard. Laurie did encourage us to take pictures and look for orbs, but I suspect that was a just a little theater. I may be projecting, but I don’t think she took the whole ghost thing very seriously. I didn’t get any history of the area I didn’t know already (I take history tours on a regular basis, too), but the stories were amusing. If you’re in the area and would like to have a pleasant evening out, tickets are available at this website. They’re doing tours every night until at least Halloween.

With all the hubbub over Paranormal Activity I remembered a scary ghost story I read years ago about the dangers of falling asleep in a haunted house in London. It was presented as a true story, and I remembered enough details to find it on the web. Though I can’t remember the book I read it in, the following, from the website alienbodies, is close to word for word what I remember reading.

In 1943, two sailors from Portsmouth, Robert Martin and Edward Blunden, after having squandered their lodging funds on an evening of drunken ribaldry, broke into the then abandoned Berkeley Square home in search of a night’s rest. Discovering that the lower levels of the house were uncomfortably damp, the sailors migrated upwards, finally settling down in the now infamous room.

Blunden, presumably the more sober of the two, expressed the anxiety he felt upon entering the room, but these fears were promptly dismissed by his shipmate, who used his rifle to prop open a window to allow for a breeze. It wasn’t long before the two men were huddled on the floor, fast asleep.

Sometime after midnight Blunden awoke to see the door to the room creaking open. Little by little a sliver of dim, grayish light crept across the wooden floor. Too terrified to move, Blunden managed to wake his accomplice. The two men sat up as they heard a strange, moist, scraping sound slowly approach them. Later, Martin claimed that it sounded as if something were dragging itself across the floor.

Suddenly, the terrified men leapt to their feet and came face to face with the abhorrent visage of what could only describe as a hideous monstrosity. The creature undulated between the sailors and what was their only hope for escape; the open door. Then, just as the trembling Blunden began to reach toward the rifle – which was still wedged in the window frame – the creature suddenly lunged forward, wrapping itself around the young sailor’s throat.

Seizing the opportunity, the panic stricken Martin ran from the house, screaming for help. Soon enough he stumbled upon a patrolling police officer. Although skeptical of the young sailor’s frenzied tale (and no doubt attributing it to the almost overwhelming stench of alcohol which permeated his uniform) the officer dutifully followed Martin back to Berkeley Square.

Martin and the officer ran up the stairs, but found no sign of Blunden in the 4th floor room. Martin reclaimed his rifle as the two men continued to search the house. Their efforts seemed to prove fruitless however, until the men entered the basement and were greeted to an image which would scar them for the remainder of their lives.

Lying at the base of the stairs in Berkeley Square’s moist, rock walled cellar was Blunden’s dismembered corpse. His body lay in a mangled heap, with his head wrenched viciously to the side. The officer reported that the young man’s eyes were wide with unimaginable horror, and his face frozen in a grimace of twisted terror.

That’s a hell of a story. Is there any truth to it? Certainly not in this form. While there is a long tradition of ghost stories at 50 Berkeley Square, where this story is supposed to have taken place, it wasn’t abandoned in 1943. It was a booksellers. This is also a very odd ghost story, in that the ghost is described in almost science fiction terms. It could be alien or a mutant that the sailors saw.

There is a parallel tradition of this story where it’s set farther back in time and with a more conventional ghost. For example, there’s this version, which is set in 1887 and ends with the sailor being found dead outside the house, impaled on a fence because of ghost-caused defenestration.  Here’s another version, set in 1843, with a conventional ghost but the non-mangled body being found in the cellar. It seems unlikely any of these could be true stories because they include many elements that should have left copious evidence in the public record (the names of the sailors, where they were from, the involvement of a police officer, and of course a dead body to be explained), yet no newspaper I could find reported on any of this. I assume the Berkeley Square story has its origin as some piece of fiction that accidentally leaked into the “real” annals of the paranormal, but I have no idea when or how that happened.