After I was writing my ebook Secret Jacksonville, the folklore of the area loomed massive. Folklore is the unofficial tradition of a group, and helps join folks to their metropolis and one another. Jacksonville has no scarcity of nice tales of ghosts, witches, aliens, mysterious creatures and extra; listed here are 9 of my favorites.
Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty.
Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty, also called Public Faculty Quantity 4, has a popularity because the “most haunted constructing in Jacksonville.” An energetic college from 1917 to 1960, it later served as administrative places of work till being shuttered in 1981. Being each spooky wanting and extremely seen – it’s simply seen from the I-95 interchange – the deserted college subsequently turned the town’s premier vacation spot for legend tripping, the ceremony of passage wherein younger adults show (or no less than scare) themselves by venturing to horrifying places.
As all good legend-tripping locations want a scary story to set the tone, Annie Lytle Elementary acquired a number of particularly memorable, if completely specious, legends. Mostly, the constructing is claimed to be haunted by schoolchildren killed in a boiler explosion or, extra outrageously, by a psychotic janitor or cannibal principal. Impressed by up to date hysteria over satanic cults, the college additionally got here to be seen as a web site of satan worship, incomes the nickname “Satan’s Faculty.” Sadly, all this consideration has taken a toll on the construction. After years of vandalism, break-ins and fires, native preservationists labored with neighbors and police to shore up the constructing and shield it from additional intrusion.
One other fashionable legend-tripping vacation spot of the previous was the “Ghost Gentle Highway,” alias Greenbriar Highway. From no less than the Nineteen Sixties till 2001, this quiet grime thoroughfare in then-rural St. Johns County drew guests at evening with a singularly disconcerting expertise: a lone spectral headlight that appeared to strategy vehicles earlier than vanishing into the right darkish. I can personally testify that the Ghost Gentle was a really actual phenomenon. My mates and I noticed it quite a few instances from 1997 to 2001, no less than just a few instances with out intoxicants concerned.
Like several good haunted place, Ghost Gentle Highway had an explanatory legend. Based on the model I heard, the ghost was a younger motorcyclist whose father had warned him about dashing on the grime highway. Sooner or later, the younger man’s brother strung a rope throughout Greenbriar. This prank merely would have unseated the cocky rider had he heeded his father’s admonition, however tragically he gunned the engine and misplaced his head. Thereafter, his ghost shined his headlamp down Greenbriar in a nightly vigil. Non-supernatural explanations for the phenomenon which were provided through the years embrace swamp fuel, UFOs, and indicators for drugrunners. Extra possible, it was an optical phantasm brought on by an uncommon bend within the highway, a concept supported by the truth that the ghost mild hasn’t been seen because the highway was reworked in 2001. The ghost story stays fashionable, however the mild itself now shines solely within the recollections of legend-trippers previous.
Wallace McLean’s drawing of the St. Johns River Monster, from The Tampa Tribune, January 18, 1976.
For many years, of us from Kissimmee to Jacksonville have reported recognizing the St. Johns River Monster, also called “Johnnie,” “Pinky,” or “Borinkus,” Florida’s model of the Loch Ness Monster. In 1953, Kissimmee reptile park proprietor Owen Godwin described a 30-foot horned beast on the river and provided a reward for anybody who captured it alive, sparking an explosion of sightings throughout Central Florida. Retired State Lawyer J. W. “Jesse” Hunter claimed he’d seen most of the creatures within the 1910s, and that one citrus baron had even captured some to drag ferries. In 1976, sightings began in Jacksonville after a bunch of mates fishing on a Southbank pier reported encountering an enormous serpent the colour of boiled shrimp (therefore the title “Pinky”); in addition they offered a relatively unconvincing drawing. Extra stories adopted and have continued sporadically since.
Wildlife specialists consider the sightings could be defined as manatees, eels, or a line of otters enjoying, however true believers scoff at these mundane options. To them, the St. Johns is and at all times shall be the house of a legendary sea monster.
Subsequent web page: Extra Jacksonville legends