This may well be a series of personal anecdotes from the three and a half years that I lived in St. Augustine which is widely heralded as one of the most haunted cities in the States. My various roommates and I had several ghostly encounters over the years we were there, including a haunted table and a mysterious smoking man. It’s easiest just to start from the top of the weirdness and begin with my Freshman year.
It’s a bit of a hazing tradition to hear about the creepy things which happened at your school. I know my first week at high school (in the U.K.) several helpful fifth years told us that there was a ouija board in the upstairs toilets, a student who was walled up into the drama room and a spirit in the bell tower above the assembly hall who had hung herself over her O-Level results. All very tragic tall tales. Probably.
Anyway, this meant it wasn’t surprising to hear various stories of terror surrounding Flagler College. There are quite a few rumors that Henry Flagler built the college in certain ways because he was into black magic and also that one of his wives believed she was talking to the Tsar of Russia through a ouija board and thus stabbed her husband in the leg with scissors. There are tales of the fourth floor ballroom being so haunted by dancing guests that they cannot use it for the students, and that on certain nights the elevator will mysteriously take people up to the fourth floor where they are overrun by the ghosts. Then there’s the story that Flagler kept one of his wives locked up in the Mirror Room at the front of the third floor (where the girl’s dormitories are) surrounded by, not surprisingly, mirrors, and that she went mad and killed herself either by jumping out of the window or by cutting her wrists and/or neck with one of the broken mirrors.
Adding credence to this tale is the fact that the Mirror Room was not used as a dormitory while we were there. As Freshmen we were told the Mirror Room was storage, so naturally, my room mates and I had to go check it out. We sat outside the room trying various ways to peek in and see what was in there and given that area of the corridor was ten times cooler than the rest of the, at that time, non air conditioned dorm we would gather around there and read tarot to each other and chat. We discovered that there was nothing spectacular about the room but that there was also nothing in it.
However, sadly we didn’t have any ghostly encounters either. I never did experience anything at the Mirror Room in all my three years — on the Mezzanine, however.
When you come into Flagler College from the main entrance you are faced with a double stair case which goes up and then curves around the entry way. If you only go up that first flight of stairs you go straight into what is now the dining hall. If you follow the stairs around to the first floor they take you up to a large landing where there is a television and chairs flanked by two fire places. This is the Mezzanine.
During one of those college nights where you stay up the entire time studying I was up on the Mezzanine with my friends whom I’ll call M & G. We were on the Mezz because M was helping us study and guys are not allowed into the girls dorms and there was too much football crowd noise in the open halls in the guys’ dorm lounges. By this point there was no one else in the Mezz and the fourth time G fell asleep M left her to it and we sat for a while talking about random things. I kept feeling like someone was watching me from behind to the point that I moved to the other side of M so I could face that side of the landing but all that was over there was an empty fireplace with a shield over the top of it.
“What is going on?” M asked me.
“There’s someone watching me. Don’t you feel it?”
He shook his head, “No. People always seem to feel freaky (stuff) going on around me but I never see it. Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Like there’s someone watching me from over there.” I pointed.
“P always says if he half closes his eyes some times he can sorta see the ghosts.”
Me being me I tried it. I didn’t see anything but I suddenly felt like I wanted to burst into tears. I opened myself to it the way I do when I’m reading the tarot and then it became clearer. I told M about the woman she was horribly upset because she couldn’t find her child and she was going to keep waiting for him because he was supposed to be up there but she couldn’t find him.
I return my focus to M and find him staring at me like I have two heads. There’s about five minutes of back and forth where he accuses me of winding him up and goes on about campus urban legends.
Eventually I find out that there’s a story which goes around the girls’ dorms of a little boy who fell off the Mezz during the time the college was a hotel and how he’ll go into the girls’ dorms and move things around and how some of them but little toy cars and things out for him. The story is that the mother was not paying attention as he was playing up there and his ball fell down through the Mezz railings and he went right over after it.
The impression of the lady is one of the tamer experiences that I had while living in St. Augustine but it’s also the first so I hoped it would be a good place to start.
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