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A couple of weeks ago I had a phone call from one of my hearse drivers that she couldn’t find her set of keys for the 1990 Hearse, Frankie. She knew 100% that she had them and they were nowhere to be found! Last week I had an email from the hearse driver: “FYI Frankie’s keys came home!” They were in a plastic bag with tea candles in a plastic shoe box under a shelf in my office!  I HAVE NO IDEA how they got there but I just laughed and said thanks for giving them back! Since working at Ghost Augustine I no longer try and find “logical” explications for illogical things that happen.

Spook Hill is a gravity hill (an optical illusion where cars appear to roll uphill) in Lake Wales, Florida. Spook Hill is located on the Lake Wales Ridge, a geologically significant range of sand and limestone hills, which were islands from two to three million years ago, when sea levels were much higher than at present. Many species of plants and animals evolved in isolation and are endemic to the Ridge. Most are threatened or endangered by possible extinction. The attraction is adjacent to an elementary school that adopted Casper The Friendly Ghost as their school mascot. The attraction is also in close proximity to Bok Tower. Spook Hill received national media attention when an article about it appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on October 25, 1990, and it was featured in a segment on…

Tale of the Poe Toaster by Curt Rowlett “There are some secrets that do not permit themselves to be revealed.” Edgar Allan Poe For over 50 years since 1949, on the night marking the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, a mysterious man-in-black has entered the cemetery where the master of the macabre lies buried, and, making his way through the dark shadows to Poe’s grave, he places a partial bottle of expensive French cognac and three blood-red roses there, presumably as tokens of admiration and in tribute to the great author. This ritual completed, he then slips away into the night as quietly and as mysteriously as he came. The identity of this dark stranger (dubbed the “Poe Toaster” by observers) has never been revealed. And out of respect to the memory and legacy of Poe, and with a…

Coming up on the birth of one of the greatest writers of all time, we are doing this article as a tribute to him! Edgar Allan Poe was e I could tell visitors about new additions to my site so they’ll be sure to see my most recent pictures and born January 19, 1809 in Boston, where his mother had been employed as an actress. Elizabeth Arnold Poe died in Richmond on December 8, 1811, and Edgar was taken into the family of John Allan, a member of the firm of Ellis and Allan, tobacco-merchants. After attending schools in England and Richmond, young Poe registered at the University of Virginia on February 14, 1826, the second session of the University. He lived in Room 13, West Range. He became an active member of the Jefferson Literary Society, and passed his courses with…

Thank you for sending us your photo, John! The truth is out there, we just have to find it… hope to see you soon on GhoSt Augustine’s Total Paranormal Tour. The tour that lets you investigate and teaches you the proper ways to conduct an investigation, plus tells you the history of Parapsychology and where the studies began. Approx. 4-4.5 hours long, it combines the walking Haunted St. Augustine Tour and the Hearse Ride. You get the best of both worlds. For more details just give us a call at 904-824-8840 or check this website for more details.

We at GhoSt Augustine want to wish everyone a very Happy 2011! Hope all the skeletons in your closet are happy ones!! Happy Hauntings! The GhoSt Augustine Family

I just love it when my tour guides email me about awesome experiences they have on the tours. Tina, one of our hearse drivers couldn’t wait to share her story with me she emailed me as soon as she got finished with her tour. This is what she had to share: “Just got back from an amazing tour and had to share! Tonight (Thurs. Dec. 2nd, 2010) on my 11:30 I had a mother and son. The son is stationed at NAS Jax and is in the Navy. The mom is visiting from CA. They were on the Total Paranormal tour. At the Lighthouse, as I always do, we walk up to the Keepers house and I point out the 2 doors, 2 windows and the 2 out buildings explaining how it was the “original duplex” and how the Head Keeper…

Sunday, December 5th we at GhoSt Augustine had a special guest on our Haunted St. Augustine Tour. Santa Claus!! Apparently even Santa is into the paranormal and joined us for our scientific ghost tour. Mr. and Mrs. Claus had a wonderful experience on the tour and even experienced a little paranormal activity while on the tour. Some major cold spots were recorded at the Castillo de San Marcos fort while getting readings on the K2 EMF Meter.  You never know what you may experience while on the tour… or who you will run into! Happy Hauntings!

BRAND NEW IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!! VOODOLLS!!! We are the only company in the United States selling these unique little guys! They will make a fantastic Christmas gift or stocking stuffer! Each VooDoll has its own specific characteristics. These can be used to achieve both short and long term goals. And if that wasn’t enough, there is a bunch of old, shrewd rituals to be performed to juice up one’s VooDooll(s). Voodoo originates from an ancient form of wisdom combined with magic. It stems from the darkest parts of Africa and is better known as the forbidden religion. Voodoo was shipped with the slave ships to Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean and has since grown to billions of practitioners around the world. Voodoo has negative connotations today, and is often associated with black magic and various malicious rituals….

Everybody has a ghost story. But how many people have filmed theirs? Hear true and unbelievable stories of the paranormal as told by the people who lived through them–and actually captured their hauntings on tape. These harrowing eye-witness accounts of the unexplainable are transformed into more than tales with terrifying visual evidence. You’ll have no choice but to believe your eyes. Jonas Brihammar Executive Director of GhoSt Augustine and Tour Guide Tina Verduzco are being interviewed in Los Angeles, CA for Biography Channel’s My Ghost Story. We will keep you posted when the episode will air and they will share their pesonal experiences with you! Happy Haunting……

In late 1835, John Jay Smith, a Quaker and librarian, recorded in his diary: “The City of Philadelphia has been increasing so rapidly of late years that the living population has multiplied beyond the means of accommodation for the dead…on recently visiting Friends grave yard in Cherry Street I found it impossible to designate the resting place of a darling daughter, determined me to endeavor to procure for the citizens a suitable, neat and orderly location for a rural cemetery.” Smith’s very personal experience ultimately had very public implications, as less than one year later, this grieving father founded Laurel Hill Cemetery with partners Nathan Dunn, Benjamin W. Richards and Frederick Brown. When Smith conceived of Laurel Hill, he envisioned something fundamentally different from the burial places that came before it, and the site has continued to hold an important…

Halloween costumes are outfits worn on or around October 31, the day of Halloween. Halloween is a modern-day holiday originating in the Pagan Celtic holiday of Samhain (in Christian times, the eve of All Saints Day). Although popular histories of Halloween claim that the practice goes back to ancient celebrations of Samhain, in fact there is little primary documentation of masking or costuming on Halloween before the twentieth century. Costuming became popular for Halloween parties in America in the early 1900s, as often for adults as for children. The first mass-produced Halloween costumes appeared in stores in the 1930s when trick-or-treating was becoming popular in the United States. What sets Halloween costumes apart from costumes for other celebrations or days of dressing up is that they are often designed to imitate supernatural and scary beings. Costumes are traditionally those of…