Alcohol was not involved.
Today I know that I had too much city in me to find the turnoff — I was young and I expected drives to have clear markings, I suppose. Pretty sure I saw a good ol' boy and not a ghost, but if I said I had seen a ghost, there'd be no shortage of people to assure me I had. See, every culture, regardless of how much contact it has with other cultures, has three things: mermaids, Bigfoots and ghosts. Cedar Key is no exception. Do I believe they're true? As with mermaids and Bigfoots, let's leave it at this: I want to believe.
My skepticism doesn't make the re-telling of the ghost stories any more fun and Cedar Key — a tiny outpost a couple hours north of Tampa Bay in Levy County — has awesome legends: Murder, pirates and ghost dogs. Let's break down the three most popular.
The Ghost Dog
There's a shell mound near where the Suwannee River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, and it supposedly has two otherworldly residents, Annie Simpson and her dog. Seems that poor Annie accidentally found buried pirate treasure — and don't ask how it could be an accident; I don't know — and the pirates killed her and her wolfhound to keep her quiet.
So, of course, guess who still hangs around the murder site? Well, the locals say it's Annie, but what they describe is a floating white light with no arms or legs.
My money's on the dog.
The Massacred
Rosewood, along State Road 24 on the way to Cedar Key, gives me chills when I pass it. It's the site of one of Florida's most gruesome racially motivated massacres: In 1923, a white woman told her husband a black man had beaten her. In reality, her white lover had beaten her, but she didn't want her husband to know about her infidelity. What ensued was a pack of white men — many of whom had traveled to the area specifically for this purpose — coming to Rosewood and, with Nazi-like hatred, exterminating the black men, women and children. Multiple accounts exist of black men being forced to dig their own graves before getting shot in the face. Locals today say they hear screams in the woods and often see a black man fall to his knees, beg for his life and vanish.
Today, Rosewood's mostly a ghost town — in at least two senses of the word.
The Headless Pirate of Seahorse Key
Jean Lafitte was kind of a big deal, as far as pirates go. In reality, he looked like a bit of a fop, but he was both a badass and an asshole. One of his loyal disciples, Pierre LeBlanc, promised to guard Lafitte's treasure, so Lafitte left LaBlanc and a palomino on Seahorse Key, a postage stamp of an island off the coast of Cedar Key.
As you may well imagine, it was a lonely existence, and so when a stranger happened by, LeBlanc eagerly made friends and — we assume also eagerly — accepted the stranger's rum. So much so that he passed out and — shocker — awoke to find the man helping himself to Lafitte's treasure. When LeBlanc tried to stop him, his new friend beheaded him, which is just as well, because Lafitte would have killed LeBlanc for losing the treasure.
Today, Seahorse Key has a thriving cottonmouth population and at least one headless horseman.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2016.