Not For the Faint of Heart

I have been entertaining myself, as well as kind of creeping myself out, by sitting up late at night, after Blaze has gone to sleep, reading ghost stories about Kingsley Plantation on the internet. The Kingsley House is the oldest plantation house still standing in Florida and it is unoccupied, so what better subject for some good old fashion ghost stories?

I was wandering around by myself after hours last weekend at dusk, and it can seem pretty eerie.  I think that's just because it's so quiet, and empty houses always seem unnatural and spooky. Also, big old twisted trees draped in spanish moss look ghostly in the fading light, especially if there is a breeze. There are many such trees, some of them dating back to the plantation era.

This particular tree has a ragged rope dangling from that lower outstretched branch. Four years ago, when we started coming here, it was still obvious that it was the remains of a rope swing. The weather has erased all signs of the swing seat over the years, though, so it would be easy to wrongly interpret why the rope is hanging from the tree.



The most common story I came across was "Old Red Eyes"
Old red eyes, the story goes, was once one of the Kingsley plantation slaves. He brutally murdered some of the female slaves (stories differ on how many. One source said two young girls, another said several women). He was found guilty of the crime and hung from a branch of the old oak tree that grew over the driveway. If you walk by that tree at night, you will supposedly see two glowing red eyes watching you.

Every "haunted" place needs to have a ghostly woman in white, and Kingsley is no exception. Anna Kingsley, dressed all in white has, supposedly, been seen on porch of the house at night.

The Kingsley House in the gloaming:



Excerpt from a Haunted Florida Book

Even a walk on the beach can have it's creepy moments, like this hand beckoning from the water.


I found this white rubber glove laying in the water, with a single finger floating above the surface. The motion of the moving water was making that finger move up and down, so it really did look like a summoning gesture.