by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
The idea that’s there’s something more than this mortal existence is what makes belief in ghosts so appealing. Sure, they’re scary, but ghosts give us hope that death isn’t the final act. When I’m around, ghosts don’t tend to do those little scary things they’re known for, and they certainly don’t appear before me, grinning in graveyards and waving. I went on the Ghost Tour hoping to learn a little history, but I wasn’t, like many people who go on the tours, expecting a ghostly encounter. I’ve been to my share of haunted sites and never seen or felt even a shadow of the dead, much to my disappointment. I’m pleased to say that this time, something freaky did happen.
I use my trusty Olympus Digital voice recorder to record interviews. I used it to interview the folks giving the ghost tour prior to the tour and also during the ghost tour. The recorder can take as much as sixteen hours of recording time, so it was perfect for the walking ghost tour, which is over an hour. At the end of the tour, I looked at the recorder, stopped recording and noted the file it was in. The next day, when I went to transcribe the tour, the file was just gone. I checked all the other folders because I was sure it couldn’t possibly have been erased. Erasing anything on this recorder is such a pain that I actually have to follow the manual’s multi step-by-step instructions and it always asks “are you sure” before you press the final, fatal button. Despite that, it just wasn’t there. Luckily, the preliminary interview in which I asked the ghost tour guides about their history and experience was still there. I went to get a snack and when I came back, the file on the ghost tour guides was gone. None of my other files were erased and nobody else was in the house. Maybe something followed me home.
I did check for mundane explanations, like a recorder malfunction. First, I called another reporter who uses the same voice recorder. I asked her if she’d ever had a problem like this, but she hadn’t. Then, I combed through all the Amazon reviews of the product and Googled it to see if any other users had experienced similar problems. The only thing users complained about was the transfer software that uploads the digital recording to your PC. Since I hadn’t uploaded any files since recording the ghost tour, that couldn’t have been the issue. It wasn’t a battery problem either. This particular recorder is known for its long lasting battery and the battery icon indicated that the battery was still full.
One of the scariest things you’ll learn about St. Augustine is that whatever pleasant little brick street you’re walking down, you’re probably stepping on somebody’s gravesite. Indian burial grounds, cemeteries that have graves beyond their walls and hospitals that basically buried their dead in the street are just a few of the graves you’ll walk over. Simply put, St. Augustine is brimming with the dead.
You’ll get the skinny on the scary in St. Augustine with the Ancient City Tours. If you want to know which romantic St. Augustine Bed and Breakfast has a history of hauntings and was formerly a mortuary, which cemetery someone actually died in, or what busy restaurant has a ghost in the ladies room, this is the tour to take. My tour guide was Melissa Tomasino, who most often dresses as the “lady in white” a famed St. Augustine ghost. By day, Melissa’s an accountant. By night, she takes her guests on a spine tingling tour of St. Augustine’s ghostly hotspots.
We visited a number of old cemeteries, though we couldn’t go in the gates. Tolomato Cemetery has a number of spirits that sometimes come out to play when the tours come by. The well-known Lady in White, buried in her gown just before her wedding day, is known to haunt the cemetery and two houses nearby. Judge John B. Stickney is known to still be looking for his body parts in the Huguenots cemetery, as a result of a sleeping grave digger who was assigned to dig up his body for shipment and drunken pranksters, who smashed the good Judge’s head just to steal his gold teeth.
Some of the interesting tales told on the tour aren’t about ghosts, but rather about something related to death or St. Augustine history. You’ll learn about the exploding Bishop, who was placed in a nearly airtight metal coffin with a glass window, for about two weeks in the heat of the summer, so that everyone would have a chance to travel to view him. He took the opportunity to explode in the middle of his memorial service (as a result of the decay gasses building up in his coffin). As prestigious as he apparently was in life, people always talk more about what happened to him afterwards.
The scariest spot we stopped at was the Spanish Military Hospital, where the tour has its HQ. Underneath the street in front of the hospital are the bones of amputees and those unlucky enough to die in the hospital. Tours start from either the Military Hospital (site of countless deaths, at least one suicide) or the Old Drug Store (on top of an Indian Burial ground). Ghost tours don’t just run in the month of October, you can go anytime you please, although reservations are highly recommended. Call 904-827-0807 to make a reservation. Go to www.ancientcitytours.net to check them out, but buy your tickets either over the phone, at the Military Hospital or at the Old Drug Store.
Modern day Halloween traditions owe a huge amount to the Celts, who celebrated a holiday called Samhain. The holiday marked the end of summer and the beginning of fall. Contrary to the mythology presented by Christian religious groups Samhain was NOT a Celtic god of the dead. When his name does crop up in old Celtic lore, it’s in reference to an obscure Celtic hero. The references to Samhain as a god of the dead began in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s when scholars decided to connect the Celtic mythos with Hindu mythology. Samana or “the leveler” was a Hindu god of the dead that writer Godfrey Higgins equated Samhain with in an attempt to prove that Celtic traditions sprung from the Hindu religion, circa 1827, in his book The Celtic Druids. Although Higgins’s knowledge of Celtic ritual was extensive, later scholars refuted his theories, in part because his knowledge of the Hindu tradition was a bit spottier and because he tended to make large leaps of logic to support his theories. Still, the idea of Samhain as the Celtic god of the dead stuck, and has been repeated so many times that it’s accepted as fact, especially by those who wish to demonize the Pagan religion. Higgins’s pet theory was pandeism (not pantheism) defined by Higgins as the worship of a pantheon of gods which are collectively universal.
In China people celebrate what is known as the “Ghost Month” in the seventh lunar cycle of the year. On the 14th night of that month, they hold a Ghost Festival. The Chinese offer food to the dead, not unlike the Mexican Day of the Dead. They also release floating lanterns on the water as a method to “show the spirits the way.” They also burn fake money known as “Hell money” to placate visiting spirits and give their ancestors something to spend in the after-life. Denominations of Hell bills are always large and feature the bank of Hell on the back. Keeping the bills around is bad luck, and it’s considered a severe insult to give a hell note to living person, as it is tantamount to wishing them dead.
One commonality you find across many cultures is the tendency to want to feed the dead food. The Chinese offer food to the dead, as do Santeria traditions, Mexican traditions and a host of others. The root reason for this offering is mired not only in a need to please and honor the dead, but also because of the niggling fear that if the dead are hungry, they just might choose to feast upon the living. It’s best to keep them fed. Just to be safe.
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