THE STORY
Reported Haunting
St. Augustine National Cemetery is associated with reports of ghostly soldiers and unexplained activity among its historic graves. Visitors have described apparitions, mysterious footsteps, and unusual sounds that some attribute to military personnel buried within the centuries-old cemetery.
It is Florida’s oldest national military cemetery, and it dates back to 1763. In it are buried soldiers from the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), and it is said to be very haunted. A bloody massacre led to the burial of more than 1,400 soldiers in three mass graves marked by stone pyramids, and here witnesses have captured apparitions and orbs on film as well as electronic voice phenomona. The ghost of a Civil War soldier is also said to walk in the yard of the old Union Military Hospital across the street. He smokes a pipe, and disappears when he is approached. A shadow of a headless woman also has been seen, said to be a 1974 victim of decapitation by machete three houses down.