Amelia Island

1. Headless Man in Auto Parts Store
     This is one of those “if only” tales. If only I hadn’t gone into Fred’s and bought that military style sweat shirt, and if only I hadn’t gone into that store to get a key made . . .

2. A Shining Spirit
     A large glistening ball unfolded and stood up—it was human—a man whose entire body sparkled. He wasn’t one particular color—he was all colors.

3. Amelia Island Pilot Crashes. Cause Unknown
     Scooter was now afraid to fly. He didn’t know when one or more of them would join him. But he hated not flying. Finally, he flew. He was over the Atlantic when he felt a change in the air, and he knew he was not alone. Each girl he’d murdered joined him—

4. Ana of Kingsley Mansion
     Zephaniah Kingsley moved to Haiti in the early thirties. His wife, Ana, didn’t go with him. Her ghost hangs around, wearing a white dress. She stays near a well where screams can be heard. It is assumed these are her child’s cries.

5. Battle of Amelia Island at McClure Hill
     The apparition turned toward me, looking like a pale blue tornado. I saw for the first time it had eyes and a mouth. Now it displayed arms and reached out for my neck. I staggered back, grasping for a weapon– anything. I finally held two sticks up in front of its gaping mouth in the sign of the cross. It seemed to fold into itself at the middle. Its eyes beseeching mine.

6. Blount’s Branch, Yulee
     The biggest factor in this story is Timothy Len Walton. Timmy was a sad, funny little kid whose mother had hung herself after his daddy left them, and his grandmother was raising him and his brother by herself. He’d begged to come on the overnighter, but Edwin turned him down—until Timmy promised to show him the magazine his brother Kyle Lawrence hid in his closet. and so the deal was stuck. The brat would come with us.

7. Bones Tell a Tale
     Believe it or not, I got this report straight from the ghost himself. Sorting through the day’s mail is usually an uneventful chore. So, the day I saw an envelope with these words scrawled across it: To the women going around asking about ghosts, I was excited.

8. Coffee, Tea, or Me?
     I was startled to see that a woman stood there, wearing an airline hostess uniform.
     “Where did you come from—you can’t be real.”
     That was a stupid thing to say—I knew immediately she was not real. There was no question that she was not real. Wondering if I was coming down with something, I felt my forehead to see if I was running a temperature—fearful I might be hallucinating—and equally fearful I wasn’t.

9. Eagan’s Creek, Amelia Island
     In this 300-acre protected oasis lies the great treasure that Pirate Pauly hid. He killed all his accomplices—they could have pointed out his hidey-hole. To find it again, Pauly looped a chain over one of the tree limbs. Near that tree, he dug a deep pit to bury the treasure chest and his victims. People still look for that chest.

10. Forgotten Valor
     It took a few moments for me to spy the source of the music. A Confederate army uniform sat on a fallen tree, in a form that seemed to be occupied by the body of a man—except it wasn’t. It was empty. The sleeves were bent upward at the elbows, toward where the mouth should have been. The harmonica was being played by the breath of a ghost and guided by non-existent hands.

11. Great White Hunters. Big Black Hearts
     This was long after the Civil War, about February of 1909, but not enough time had passed. Some Southerners had not forgiven the Northern Aggressors . . . you understand that Mr. Stokes was a Yankee. He was driving this brand-new Ford—a 4-cylinder Model T Roadster which would go-a mind-boggling, head-swimming, twenty miles per hour. If he chose to go that fast, that is.

12. It Takes One to Know One
     I was shocked the first time I spotted the ghost who appeared without warning in the shallows near the beach. Even though I believe in ghosts, I’d never had one just pop up in front of me like that. Unfortunately, this ghost’s body and its head had separated. As I watched, I saw that at times they functioned in sync with each other and other times they were almost at odds with each other.

13. McQueen’s Swamp, Yulee
     The old ghost story—the one you always hear, is that a female without a head hides a cadaver in McQueen’s Swamp. Then she was just gobbled up by greenish vapor or something—disappeared into thin air. That part is true. But there is so much more to the story.

14. Razor Wreck
     I kept my head turned forward, but my eyes wouldn’t move from his head, just over my left shoulder. Then he simply evaporated.
     I was so happy, I gunned my car and remember thinking how chilly it was from the window being down and the rain blowing in, when I heard a groan coming from the backseat. I looked back over my right shoulder and saw a flash of white. He was sitting in the back seat. It was only then I knew the white was because he had no flesh on his skull.

15. Root Beer High
     I spotted a figure resting near a bus stop. He glanced up at me. Apparently, he’d made up his mind not to immediately vanish. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Root Beer.”
     I’d noticed a crate of bottled soda near his feet. Over the years I’ve learned that ghosts are much like magicians in that whatever they need or want will simply appear, conjured out of thin air.

16. Rubble Trouble
     Way back, there were a lot of railroad men in this neck of the woods. A rivalry started up between two locomotive engineers. I think it all started when they both were sweet on the same girl. Well, she was a high-spirited lass and played those boys, one against the other and in the long run, she up and married some other fellow from Kingsland. But still, each suitor believed he was robbed of his chance for happy-ever-after because of the other one.

17. Schoolmarm’s Ghost
     Truma was on the ground floor when she smelled the smoke. The boy was still upstairs. Truma could have escaped easily, but she ran upstairs to rescue the boy. She carried him to safety. But when the boy sobbed that he had hidden his beloved dog in the cloak room, she turned and ran back into the flames.

18. Silvery Moon on Amelia Island
     You couldn’t miss him–almost seven foot tall. In life, Sir Sil had a promising career in the theater playing an alien from Mars.
     Wardrobe departments were not always able to come up with appropriate costumes because of his height so they used silver spray paint to cover the parts that the costume didn’t. The paint contained lead.

19. Smith’s Point, Yulee
     The ghost shot at Bobbie Denton. He fell and didn’t move. We were all screaming now. I knew we couldn’t leave him laying there to die, but she was hovering right over him. And Bobbie was bigger than any of us—and older—he was already twelve. We figured it would take three of us to carry him. Dead weight and all.
     We huddled back behind a big boulder and decided that Tad, Sal, and I would carry Bobbie out, Larry and Mel would go on ahead, so someone would know what happened to us—collaborating witnesses—if the four of us never came back alive. We armed ourselves with sticks and put rocks in our pockets.

20. Tibby Lou Rightside
     She told me he chopped up Bill-Almond Calhoun first, then hacked at her until her left arm and left leg were gone. Yeah. Seems like she’s always looking for one of them or the other, looking down into the water like that. I always called her Tibby—well, that’s a nickname, actually. I dubbed her Tibby Lou Rightside on account of her having only one right arm and one right leg.

21. Two Bears and Yellow Flower
     This is the story I heard from my granddad, as to why the Indian chief is here, and why he won’t go away. This Indian chief, who was named Two Bears later, on account of his killing two bears—I’ll come to that—fell in love with a young maiden by the name of Yellow Flower.

22. Vampire in Central Park
     She talked very fast, her voice shook, and her breath came in gasps.
     “After I stabbed him,” she said, “I dropped the cross, but it caught on my cloak’s button and hung by its gold chain, dripping blood onto my white dress.