Primary entrance to Evergreen Cemetery.
Based in 1880, Evergreen Cemetery is Jacksonville’s oldest cemetery that’s nonetheless in operation. The 167-acre cemetery is the ultimate resting place of 14 Jacksonville mayors, 5 governors of Florida, 4 U.S. senators, and even town’s founder Isaiah D. Hart. It additionally comprises the graves of tens of 1000’s of on a regular basis Jaxsons from nearly each neighborhood, background, and stroll of life. Represented there are veterans from many wars, survivors of the Titanic, paupers and plain of us. A stroll by way of Evergreen Cemetery is a stroll by way of 15 many years of Jacksonville historical past.
Unsurprisingly, the historic cemetery has accrued its fair proportion of ghost tales. Evergreen turns up incessantly in articles and lists of “Jacksonville’s most haunted locations” that publications wish to run in the course of the October spooky season. Examples embody the Jacksonville Day by day File in 2001, EU Jacksonville and News4Jax in 2018, Jacksonville Journal in 2019 and Folio Weekly in 2022. Even The Jaxson has been unable to withstand the lure of this seasonally common style.
Accounts of Evergreen’s ghosts are usually transient however remarkably constant. For twenty years, most such items have included the identical three ghosts and the identical handful of explanatory particulars. My colleague Ennis Davis’s model from The Jaxson is typical:
Evergreen is alleged to be haunted by a number of spirits, together with the “Woman in Violet,” a person in old school apparel close to an unmarked mausoleum, and the ghost of a lady close to the “Ugly Angel” tombstone.
This transient snapshot and others prefer it increase additional questions. Why violet? Why is the mausoleum unmarked? Simply how ugly is that this Ugly Angel, precisely? And the place did all this come from?
Cowl of the October 1999 Ghost Trackers Publication, that includes Lee Holloway’s “Encounters at Evergreen Cemetery.”
Seemingly, the tales of Evergreen Cemetery’s three ghosts are so constant as a result of all of them derive from the identical supply. In 1999, a Jacksonville ghost researcher named Lee Holloway revealed an article in a magical e-newsletter that seems to be the earliest account of Evergreen’s resident specters. Her piece, “Encounters at Evergreen Cemetery,” was the duvet story of the October 1999 subject of the Ghost Trackers Publication, “the official paranormal publication of the Ghost Analysis Society.” Based in 1978 by Martin V. Riccardo and nonetheless energetic to today, this group revealed Ghost Trackers from 1982 to 2001.
Holloway appears to have been closely concerned within the paranormal scene within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s. She was an everyday columnist for Ghost Trackers, contributing a number of tales about ghosts in Florida and New England together with “The Spectral Women of Flagler School” and “Fort George Island’s Haunted ‘Fort’.” She was quoted in various books on haunted locations, and appears to have performed a big position in spreading a few of the First Coast’s finest identified ghost tales.
First web page of Holloway’s article “Encounters at Evergreen Cemetery.”
In accordance with her Ghost Trackers byline, Holloway lived within the Carriage Home Flats in Arlington, now often called the Chelsea Courtyards. This advanced, significantly Condo 40, has a popularity as one of the vital haunted locations in Jacksonville, showing incessantly in articles and books on Florida ghosts alongside historic websites like Kingsley Plantation and Annie Lytle Elementary, the “Satan’s College.” That is shocking contemplating that in contrast to Kingsley or Annie Lytle, the residences should not historic, and even particularly fascinating or spooky-looking. It appears very probably that Holloway helped popularize their ghostly popularity.
Holloway’s articles are distinguished by their consideration to element and witness interviews. Her piece on Evergreen Cemetery options quotes from three people who say they noticed spirits on the grounds, and consists of descriptions and pictures of the landmarks the place the encounters had been reported. These are the identical three spirits talked about in virtually all the quite a few articles on Evergreen’s ghosts revealed since then: the “Woman in Violet,” the “man in old school apparel” by the anonymous mausoleum, and the ghost on the “Ugly Angel” gravestone.
Holloway’s picture of the “Ugly Angel” tombstone.
First up in Holloway’s article is a ghost related to an elaborate stone gravestone within the western a part of the cemetery. “Among the many granite and marble headstones, statuary and vaults, there stands an extremely unattractive male winged creature,” wrote Holloway, noting that it got here to be often called the “Ugly Angel.” The ornate gravestone – which isn’t all that ugly, because it occurs – marks the grave of Belle Hightower, who died December 12, 1932 on the age of 34 (Holloway miswrites her identify as “Bette”). Different family members are buried close by.
Holloway attributed her ghost story to a Jacksonville lady named Barbara Wimberley. Wimberley instructed Holloway that as youngsters, she and her siblings would run off to go to the “Ugly Angel” on their household’s frequent journeys to the cemetery. Someday within the early Nineteen Sixties their grandmother, who had simply misplaced her brother, accompanied the youngsters to Hightower’s grave, the place they noticed the apparition of a lady “clothed in a light-colored gown swimsuit.” Removed from horrifying the household, the apparition introduced Wimberley’s grandmother a way of peace.
Belle Hightower’s grave immediately.
Wimberley reported seeing the ghost once more within the Nineteen Nineties, shortly after the dying of her personal brother, and he or she felt the identical sense of peace. “I feel no matter it was seems to people who find themselves grieving to consolation them and allow them to know there’s life after dying.” Holloway didn’t specify that the ghost is Belle Hightower, or notice every other sightings.
The Woman in Violet is alleged to have appeared close to the doorway to the older, jap part of the cemetery.
Holloway located her subsequent ghost, the Woman in Violet, within the older, oak-lined jap a part of the cemetery. “It’s on this setting of shadows and gloom {that a} woman wearing violet as soon as walked and maybe, she walks right here nonetheless,” she wrote. The informant for this ghost is Mary Frances Hilliard, who reported seeing it along with her aunt, uncle and cousins within the Forties. Whereas wandering round close to the gate, they noticed a “lady in an old school violet-colored gown” and a “black hat with some form of plume on it like an ostrich feather.” Primarily based on her outfit, Hilliard guessed she had lived within the Eighteen Nineties. As violet was a coloration of mourning within the Victorian interval, Holloway speculated that “the girl is probably going the apparition of a lady who, in life, incessantly visited the grave of a liked one.”
Hilliard mentioned she was fascinated with the apparition, however her aunt practically fainted with fright and needed to be taken again to the automotive. Again residence, the aunt dramatically reported what that they had seen, and Hilliard’s grandfather dryly responded that “folks had been seeing the spirit of a lady within the cemetery way back to he might keep in mind,” and that “anyone who noticed the ghost would have a dying within the household in just a few days.” Holloway questioned whether or not he was honest or just attempting to get an increase out of his hysterical daughter-in-law, however mentioned the aunt’s father died just a few days later. She writes that there had been no additional experiences since Hilliard’s.
Holloway’s photograph of the mausoleum the place the “ghost lover” Thaddeus was reported.
One other photograph of the mausoleum from the article.
The third story is probably the most fascinating, but in addition the largest stretch in that Holloway’s informant by no means claimed to have really seen the ghost herself. Vicki Wallace instructed Holloway that in her senior yr in 1969, she was in a artistic writing class with an odd classmate, Betty. Betty contributed an particularly vivid story about assembly a “ghost lover” at Evergreen Cemetery close to “a splendid tomb of unknown origin.”
As Wallace remembered it, Betty’s story concerned her encounter with a “blond, blue-eyed apparition, attired within the duds of one other century” throughout the “cobweb-shrouded doorway of an previous mausoleum.” The ghost launched himself as Thaddeus, and he and Betty turned an merchandise. When Wallace teased Betty about making up such an odd story, Betty responded, “Who mentioned I made it up?” Betty’s depiction of the mausoleum was so detailed that it was clearly an precise tomb; in reality Betty and her associates had been capable of find it. The picture of this tomb graces the duvet of Ghost Trackers Publication and is featured within the article.
The now restored Dodd household mausoleum.
In 1995, Wallace revisited Evergreen along with her stepdaughter, who was “actually into the gothic scene and appreciated taking footage of previous graveyards and issues like that.” Wallace experiences that her stepdaughter noticed a person in quaint garments within the door of an previous mausoleum. Once they approached it, Wallace was “shocked to search out they had been standing earlier than the unmarked tomb her bizarre classmate had written about greater than 1 / 4 century earlier than.”
The tomb Betty referred to, or at the very least the one in Holloway’s footage, was certainly unmarked on the time. It remained in order just lately as 2015 when author Tim Gilmore visited it for Jax Psycho Geo. At present, nevertheless, the tomb has been restored and it’s now not unmarked; the identify “Dodd” is emblazoned above the doorway. Furthermore, the names of the relations are inscribed on their niches and are clearly seen by way of the grated door. Regrettably, none are named Thaddeus.
The train of monitoring down the primary written report of Evergreen Cemetery’s ghosts reveals lots about how legends and folklore unfold in a group. Particulars and incongruities have been shaved down over time, however even many years after the unique sources have been forgotten, the kernel of the tales continues to unfold on-line and in yearly information items on Jacksonville ghostlore. Whether or not or not the Ugly Angel ghost, the girl in violet or Thaddeus the ghost lover ever existed, they’ve achieved a form of immortality within the collective reminiscence of town.
Extra Jaxlore
Article by Invoice Delaney. Contact Invoice at wdelaney@moderncities.com.
Invoice’s guide Secret Jacksonville, a Information to the Bizarre, Fantastic, and Obscure is out now. Order a signed copy at thejaxsonmag.com/books.