Willy was probably not the cleanest person. Occasionally, when a docent takes a party upstairs and into Willy’s room, a strong scent of urine pervades the area. Fortunately, the docent will simply say in a stern voice, “Willy, get out of here and don’t bother us,” and the smell dissipates instantly. Willy appears to be as reclusive in death as he was in life.
But perhaps the most bizarre story concerning the Audubon House is about the doll, variously called Mrs. Peck, Bye-Lo Baby, and the Demon Doll. Lore has it that the doll was made in England in the middle-to-late 1800s. The fashion at the time was to use a painting or oil-o-gram of a person, often a baby or young child, and create a doll in its exact likeness. This was especially popular when a young child had died.
When this particular doll was completed, it was placed next to the dead infant from whom it was copied, and no one could tell the difference between the two. Some speculate that the spirit of the deceased infant entered the doll. Others think that perhaps the spirit of one of the dead Geiger children possessed it. No one knows how the doll came into the Geigers’ possession. In any case, someone in the Geiger family put the doll in a baby carriage in the third floor quarantine room, and many people insisted that its eyes followed them as they walked around.
Apparently, the doll did not like to be photographed. At one point, after the house had become a museum, its security system experienced a rash of what was thought to be false alarms. Each time the police and the museum director responded, but each time nothing had been taken, and there was no evidence of forced entry. Still, as a precaution, Bonnie Redmond prepared a photographic inventory of all the dozens and dozens of items in the house. When she got the photos back, she was stunned. All of the pictures of the doll had thick, black marks across their faces, as if Mrs. Peck were saying, “No pictures.”
A few years later a BBC reporter working on a documentary of Key West came to the house. He took numerous pictures and interviewed several staff members about the history of the house and all the antiques, and he asked if there was anything unusual about the place. When the staff told him that they had a haunted doll, he laughed.
“You Americans, always making jokes.”
At the end of the day, the Brit left the house, threw his camera and notebook in the passenger seat, and drove off. A half-block down Whitehead Street, his camera case popped open, the film fairly jumped out of the camera, and the roll of pictures he had just taken of the doll unraveled, destroying all the exposures. Needless to say, he was unnerved. He returned reluctantly the next day to reshoot the pictures he’d lost, but the doll was gone. Did a disgruntled docent remove her, or did she decide on her own that she was tired of being photographed? No one has ever figured out where she went, and there has never been any evidence to indicate what might have happened to her. The Weekly World News offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for the doll, dubbing her the “Demon Doll,” but she is still out there roaming somewhere, the reward never having been claimed.
Even though the doll has left the premises, Willy Smith and the Geigers have not. The house continues to be very active. When Bob Merritt talks about the Audubon House he stresses the history and opulent décor—but he does admit it is haunted.
Spotlight on Chokoloskee
Nestled deep in the Everglades among the Ten Thousand Islands along the southwestern Gulf coast of Florida is the tiny village of Chokoloskee. It is at the end of the road—literally. You can’t get any farther south except by boat. And at the end of the one main road in Chokoloskee is the Smallwood General Store, sitting on stilts, the waters of the Gulf lapping against its pilings as they have for over a hundred years. It was here on the shore next to Smallwood’s that Ed Watson met his demise in 1910.
Ed Watson had come to the area several years before and was farming very successfully on forty acres a few miles south on the Chatham River. He was a quiet, angry man who kept to himself, but was often in trouble with the law because of his violent temper. He had many enemies in the neighborhood.
Because he was so standoffish, he was cloaked in mystery. No one knew much about him. Folks wondered how he was able to do so well with his farm in such a hostile environment, until disemboweled bodies began showing up in the waters around Watson’s farm. Someone finally figured out that he had been hiring migrant workers and then killing them instead of paying them, disposing of their bodies by burying them on his farm or feeding them to the alligators.
The local sheriff formed a posse and proceeded to Watson’s place to arrest him. Watson wasn’t home, but the posse found a mass grave with dozen of bodies and body parts. Back at Smallwood’s, the posse waited for Watson to show up. Because of the gruesomeness of the apparent murders, they dispensed with normal legal proceedings and shot him dead as soon as he appeared.
Many of the locals think Smallwood’s is haunted by Ed Watson and that it’s not safe to go among the pilings under the store. Maybe that’s true, but there is no doubt that Watson’s old place is filled with the ghosts of his murder victims. Many people have tried to make a go of the farm, but very little ever grew there after Watson died, and everyone has been overwhelmed by the ghosts. After many years, an old woman moved into Watson’s house. She, too, encountered the phantoms, and one night, while trying to fend them off with a lighted knot torch, burned the place to the ground. Since then, snakes and vegetation have reclaimed the farm and the house.
Ed Watson may or may not be around, but the ghosts of his many victims still certainly occupy that forty acres on the Chatham River a few miles south of the Smallwood General Store in Chokoloskee.
CHAPTER 5
Marrero’s Guest Mansion
KEY WEST
SARAH MARTIN* PICKED UP HER CLOTHES from the bed and turned to hang them in the armoire against the wall. She stepped forward and reached out to open the armoire when a woman floated out of it—right through the doors. Sarah screamed, dropped her clothes, and almost fainted. Moments later Sarah and her husband, Robert, were downstairs confronting James Remes, the owner of Marrero’s Guest Mansion and innkeeper at the time, and asking to check out.
“We saw a ghost,” Sarah said, still shaking. “She walked right out of the armoire, and the doors were still closed. Then she just vanished.”
James tried to give the Martins a sympathetic smile.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “The ghost you saw was Hetty Marrero, the wife of the man who built this house. Come on in to the parlor and have a glass of wine. I’ll tell you the history of this place and its ghosts. Maybe I can convince you to stay; I’ll even put you in another room, if you wish.”
The Martins followed James into the parlor.
Francisco Marrero was a Cuban and had been thrown into prison during a revolution in the 1870s. He wasn’t there long. He bribed his way out and fled to Europe. While he was in Spain, he met and fell in love with Enriquetta Gonzales Ruiz, a striking Andalusian beauty from Seville. Still on the run from Cuban authorities and with limited resources, Marrero was unable to convince her to marry him. Dejected, he left for New York, where he learned the cigar-making business and then moved to Key West to start his own cigar factory.
Within a few years he was a wealthy man with six hundred employees and a business worth half-a-million dollars. Enriquetta, “Hetty,” was still on his mind, so he built what became known as the Marrero Mansion on Fleming Street, then left for Spain in hopes of winning her hand. A few months later he returned to Key West with his bride and took up residence in the mansion.
As far as anyone knows, Hetty and Francisco were happy in their life together in Key West. She