Still, the saloon is no doubt haunted. Anita Pierce works at the bar and says that the pool room, which is located over an old cistern, is especially eerie. She won’t go in there by herself, nor will Trent Binder, a balladeer who performs at Captain Tony’s regularly.
One of Anita’s friends used to date the bar manager and would wait for him there while he closed up at night. One night she was sitting at the bar while he went “up the hatch” to lock up the evening’s receipts. After a few minutes, she thought she saw him come down and go directly into the women’s restroom. A moment later, he came down from upstairs again.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“A minute ago I saw you come down the stairs and go into the ladies’ room.”
“You’re crazy,” he replied. “I just came down from upstairs.”
They both went over to the ladies’ room. They could see light under the door and they called out. No one answered. Hard as they tried, they couldn’t get the door open, although they could see that the locking bolt was not in place. A little unsettled, her boyfriend told her to call the police. At that moment, a blast of icy air blew the door open and almost knocked the two to the ground. Completely unnerved, she went outside to wait. As soon as her boyfriend locked everything and started to leave, all the doors flew open and then slammed shut. When he walked around to secure everything again, all the doors were already locked.
Some people have supposedly photographed the Lady in Blue, and one woman reported an episode in the restroom. She, her sister, and her small son were walking by the bar one warm day and decided to stop in for a soda; during the daytime the bar provides an acceptable atmosphere for families. When they were finished, her sister went to the restroom while she and her son waited outside the door. When her sister came out, her son decided he needed to use the restroom also. Not wanting to send him into the men’s room alone, she let him in to the ladies’ room, knowing no one was there. A few minutes later her son came out almost in tears.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? What happened?”
He replied, “There’s a blue lady in there. She told me to get out.”
Angry and confused, the woman rushed into the restroom. It was empty.
For color and Key West atmosphere, Captain Tony’s Saloon is a great place to pass the heat of the day or an evening. The entertainment is great, the beer is cold, patrons are friendly—and maybe you’ll get to meet the Lady in Blue.
CHAPTER 4
Audubon House & Tropical Gardens
KEY WEST
I WAS STANDING ON THE SIDEWALK with a group of people, talking to Jon Engel, our ghost tour guide from The Original Key West Ghost Tours, when there was a commotion on the far side of the group.
“Look! Look!” someone called out.
We all turned to see what the person was so excited about. The man and his two companions were pointing at a third-story window.
“What are you pointing at?” everyone began to ask.
Breathless, he said, “There was a small face in that upstairs window. It was looking down at us, and then it just disappeared. We all saw it.” The other two nodded in agreement. They’d seen it, too.
Jon smiled. He hadn’t even started talking about the Audubon House where we stood, and already things were happening. Sometimes on the tours people saw curtains moving, which might well have been caused by the air conditioning, or an occasional light switching on and off, if anything. But this was great. It was fun for him to watch people’s reactions, and it was good for business. He knew Brant, his boss, would be pleased to hear about this experience.
After the excitement died down, Jon began his talk.
“Looks like the ghosts are trying to preempt me this evening,” he laughed, “but, ghosts aside, this house—the Audubon House—has a fascinating history.”
The house had been built by Captain John H. Geiger, a prosperous harbormaster and wrecker, one of those daring men who braved pirates and sometimes stormy seas to rescue passengers and salvage cargo from scuttled shipwrecks. Some think it was built in 1830, because in 1832 John James Audubon visited the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas aboard the Revenue Cutter, Marion. He allegedly sighted and drew eighteen new species of birds, many in the one-acre garden of the house, while he resided there as a guest. Research of tax rolls, deeds, and old newspaper articles, however, strongly suggests that he did not. His writings reflect that he stayed aboard the Marion to avoid the “fevers,” as he had promised his wife. Also, he never mentioned the Geigers or the house in any of his writings. Also, the style of the house is American Classic Revival, and it was almost certainly built after the disastrous hurricane of 1846, probably about 1850, but not in 1830.
In 1829 Captain Geiger married Lucretia Sanders, a woman from the Bahamas, who bore him twelve children. Captain Geiger and his wife both died in the house, as well as five of their children, one falling from a tree in the garden. Geiger descendents lived there until 1956, the last being Willy Smith.
After Mr. Smith died, the house sat empty for two years. It was saved from demolition by Colonel and Mrs. Mitchell Wolfson, who purchased it in 1958, renovated it, and opened it as a museum in 1960. The house was Key West’s first restoration project and is still considered the crown jewel of all of the island’s restoration efforts. The house has been furnished with twenty-eight first-edition Audubon paintings and with furniture typical of the prosperous elegance of nineteenth-century Key West. The garden, too, was restored to historic authenticity. It is now run by the Mitchell Wolfson Family Foundation as a nonprofit, educational institution, which provides tours of the house and garden and conducts art classes.
And there are the ghosts. I talked to Robert Merritt, the operations manager, who gave me much more of the history of the house. He admitted that from time to time inexplicable things happen. Light bulbs are unscrewed. The rocking chairs on the porch rock back and forth on their own.
He told me that recently, while he was closing up one evening, he found beads from one of the several festivals on the island scattered around the living room floor. He surmised that some child had broken the string and just left the beads strewn around the room. He picked them all up, threw them in the trash, and finished locking up. He never gave the beads another thought. When he returned the next morning, he discovered the beads again scattered about the living room floor.
Visitors sometimes hear children laughing on the third floor or whispering to each other. And, of course, there is the occasional face in the window that I almost saw. In fact, the third floor might well be heavily haunted.
During the 1800s, yellow fever epidemics regularly swept across the Keys, one of the reasons Audubon’s wife didn’t want him to stay ashore when he visited in 1832. When you contract yellow fever, time is the only cure. If you catch the virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, your body either destroys the virus or you die. And yellow fever is very contagious. So when one of the Geiger children got sick, Mrs. Geiger isolated the child on the third floor of the house. Several of her children were infected with yellow fever; four of them died.
Willy Smith, the last Geiger descendent to live in the house, was an eccentric recluse, so the story goes. No one knows for sure when his peculiar behavior began, but in adulthood he never left the house. He seemed to spend most of his time on the second floor, where passersby would often see him looking out the window. The water and electricity in the house had been turned off, so he would lower a basket from a second floor window, and people would put food and water in it. Then he would hoist the basket back up. That was his only communication with the outside world.
Many years later, after the house had been restored