Paranormal Adventures

St. Augustine, Florida: Part One

St. Augustine, Florida is known as the oldest city in America. It is also known to those who have visited as the most haunted city in America. I'm not going to tell you the whole history (because I know a lot of people find it boring), but I will tell you that St. Augustine has endured several battles throughout it's time and has seen more bloodshed than most. It also endured diseases, such as yellow fever, which killed so many people within the city that they had to bury many people outside the walls of the cemeteries. It's no surprised that this place is crawling with ghosts.

I found out just how much I loved St.Augustine when my friend invited me to go on vacation with her family there. Her aunt owned a beach house on Anastasia Island (home of the St. Augustine lighthouse which has been featured on many ghost TV shows), so I was pretty excited about it. Little did I know that the house I would be staying in would be home to some of my future paranormal experiences.

The first experience I remember having there left me very confused after it happened. During the week that it happened, my friends and I had been having a prank war. My friend Ashley and I teamed up against her brother Tyler and his friend Ben. It was pretty funny and half way into the week no one trusted anyone. We scared them a few good times to the point where they were both running and freaking out, so Ashley and I were just waiting for their revenge.

I remember walking through the game room cautiously, when I seen someone run by on the balcony outside. Now at the beach house, there are three doors that lead to the balcony (one to the left which leads to the outside hallway, one in the middle which I was looking out of, and the other on the right that I had a clear view of) and every time they open a little alarm thing beeps to let everyone know that someone has opened the door. When I seen the person run by, I noticed my friends dog seen them as well. He even ran up to the door and looked around curiously. In my mind I was thinking "Ha ha, nice try. These boys don't know how to be stealthy at all."

I approached the sliding glass door that lead to the balcony, thinking that whoever was on the balcony would only have one door to run through since they ran to the right. I quickly slid the door open and jumped out, attempting to scare whoever was hiding outside the door. My heart dropped when I realized that no one was there. Even the dog looked seriously confused. I knew I had seen someone run out on the balcony. I wasn't imagining things. The dog reacting to the person running validated what I had seen. 

I quickly ran back inside and told my friend what had happened. It wasn't very much longer till I seen the running person again. This time I was sitting in the kitchen when I seen it run into one of the bedrooms. I was determined to find out what this thing was. I quickly ran to corner whatever or whoever it was into the bedroom, but again... nothing. The lights were off and there was no one in the room or the conjoining bathroom.

I think it was about a year later that I experienced my next paranormal encounter at the beach house, only this time I feel like it might not have been a ghost that was originally in the beach house. The night this experience occurred, we had been on a ghost tour of the old city jail. While we were at the jail, I experienced something pretty strange. 

First while at the jail, I began feeling very crowded and not just by the people around me. I felt as if there were other people there, staring me down. As the tour guide started to tell us stories of the prisoners, I started to feel what felt like a hand around my ankle. It was almost like a spider-web feeling, but thicker. I didn't think much of it, so I just brushed it off. Later I realized that I was standing right in front of the area where they kept the ball and chains. I couldn't help but think that maybe it was an old prison guard trying to chain me up, because he had mistaken me for a prisoner. Or it could've been a prisoner trying to show me what they felt. Either way, something showed interest in me at the prison.

The rest of the night I felt very nervous. It still felt as if someone was standing over me, staring me down. After a few more hours of feeling pretty freaked out, I decided to call it a night and go to bed. Sometime during the night, I woke up to what felt like someone shaking my bed. I tried to ignore it, because I just figured it was morning already and maybe my mom (who was in a bed across from mine) had woken up and was getting something out of my bag. I couldn't seem to fall back asleep, so I rolled over and realized that my mom was still fast asleep. Our door was also shut and no one else was in the room. I looked at my phone to seem that it was still 2 or 3 in the morning. Everyone in the house was asleep, but me. I quickly covered my head back up and forced myself to go back to sleep.

I still find it strange that I never had a problem with something waking me up at the beach house before or after this incident. I feel as if maybe it was a prisoner or someone who followed me home, trying to get my attention or just still trying to cause mischief. 

Now this last part isn't a personal experience, but it is the latest update on the haunting at the beach house. My friend Ashley and her husband went to the beach house a few months back and they were on the third floor. Ashley said that she was sitting in the hot tub when she heard her husband come up the stairs behind her. She then asked him, without looking back at him, to go get some shot glasses from inside and  he replied "Okay baby". She then heard him walked back down the steps to the second floor and into the house. A few minutes later he came from a completely different direction with no shot glasses. She questioned how he got up there to her and why he didn't bring the shot glasses. He looked at her like she was insane and told her that he had not walked up to her and she never told him to get shot glasses. Normally this guy would be like "Yeah, it was me" because he thinks anything paranormal is crap. He tries to debunk absolutely everything, even if he knows it has no explanation. He would never try to get her to believe there was a ghost, because just the topic of them annoys him.

I will hopefully be returning to the beach house soon, so if I experience anything else I will definitely write about it, but for now that is all I have for the beach house.