Paranormal Adventures

St. Augustine, Florida : Part Two

As I stated in the previous chapter, St.Augustine, Florida is extremely haunted. Every time I go there I do everything I can to get a glimpse of the paranormal, which means I visit at least one haunted place every time. 

I'm going to start off with one of my favorites. It's called the Huguenot Cemetery. This cemetery was a place for protestants to be laid to rest between 1821 and 1884. It was mainly created because of the yellow fever, which was a huge problem in St. Augustine and killed many of it's residents. It is said to hold over 400 graves and that because of the large amount of deaths, there are many buried outside of the actual walls.

Now there are quite a few interesting ghost stories about this ghost story. There's one about a judge who is buried there who is often seen hunting something, which is pretty ironic since it is said that grave robbers actually broke into his grave a long time ago and stole many of his possessions that he was buried with. They were caught and ordered to put everything back, but they kept one thing. His golden teeth. Sadly I have not seen the judge yet, but I look for him every time I stop by this cemetery.

Although that is one of the biggest stories of the cemetery, I feel like the best ones are the stories that are completely unexplained and looked over. I learned first hand that the popular ghost you hear about aren't the only ones hanging around the cemetery.

This experience starts with my family, my best friend, and I walking around St. Augustine one night while on vacation. I had somehow convinced everyone to go walk by this cemetery with me. My dad had never been there, so he was pretty fascinated by it. I began telling them the story of the cemetery (because I was pretty much their tour guide the whole trip), when my dad noticed how old the graves were. I told him about how many of the graves held the bodies of people who suffered from the yellow fever. While we were talking about this, he took out his phone and started to take a picture of one of the graves next to the wall. At first his phone wouldn't focus, but then it started going insane. It was going in and out of the camera and blinking, and glitching extremely. My dad, who doesn't believe in ghost, looked at me and said "What is it doing!?! Why is it doing this?! It never does this!!!" I could see that he was both afraid and amazed. I just said something like "I guess it either wants you to know it's here or it doesn't want you taking picture of it's grave." Later he laughed it off, trying to act like nothing happened, but I feel like for that moment my dad was a believer. Just for a second, he realized that I'm not as crazy as he thinks.

Another location that I've had an experiences in is the beautiful Castillo de San Marcos fort. If you watch Ghost Adventures, then you know what I'm talking about. I also think that Ghost Asylum was there not to long ago and the episode is due to premiere soon. Just by that you can tell that it is a very haunted place. It also a very historical place. 

The Castillo de San Marcos was built from 1672 to 1695 by the Spanish. The city had previously been under attack, so they decided they needed a strong fortress to defend the town. Throughout the forts history is has belong to four different governments : The Spanish Empire, The Kingdom of Great Britain, The Confederate States of America, and The USA. So it has been through quite a lot. It has seen plenty of death and plenty of battles. Now I don't want to bore you guys with anymore history, so I'm going to jump into some of the haunted part of this story.

At the fort there are many places that hold ghost stories. The dungeon, the carcel, and even the cannon deck. One of my favorite places to visit is the wall they call the "Execution Wall". If I remember the story correctly, they would line prisoners up on this wall and shoot at them till they were all dead. This place is my favorite because it is truly fascinating. It's like history was preserved in the fortress'  walls. There are still bullet holes all throughout the wall and it just makes you feel sorry for those who spent their last moments right there. I have never experienced anything there, but every time I visit I get my family or a friend to walk down to the fort with me. Usually nobody will go with me to the execution wall so I end up walking down there by myself. I always wish to see something, but it's extremely dark there and I'd probably run if something jumped out at me.