Believe it or not! A Ghost Tour

One of St Augustine’s attractions is Ripley’s Believe it or Not. We’d not bothered because we’d been to one in Los Angeles and were fairly busy. But we did decide to take their Ghost Tour.

We collected at the “museum” and were issued with a disposable camera and electronic ghost detectors (actual EMF meters) so that we could detect and take pictures of the supernatural events we were about to witness.

We were led by a lady and gentleman dressed in Gothic clothes who spoke really slowly and spookily. The man made lame Daddy quality jokes. They narrated the tour through the streets of St Augustine as night fell telling tales of murder, massacre, and betrayal. We visited the “oldest house” where a wife waits for her husband each night, a park where children play as ghostly orbs in the trees, and a cemetery that was once outside the city walls where yellow fever claimed the lives of many. We were told of the practice of putting string connected to bells on the fingers of corpses as they were laid in their coffins so that if they weren’t really dead once they were underground, they could let people on the surface know! As we went we took photos and checked the em meter -- no ghosts around that night...

Our final stop was the museum itself. Here our guides left us claiming that it was more than their pay packet was worth to enter the museum at night. A new guide took over and led us through the rooms of what was once a chic hotel where a double murder might have taken place and been covered up. If you haven’t been to a Ripley’s museum, imagine rooms stuffed with oddities, human and animal: tallest, shortest, fattest, ugliest. Think of the old fashioned “freak shows” and you’ll see why it was such a good place to scare people in the dark.

We survived and although we haven’t had the photos developed yet, we’re fairly confident that we won’t see ghostly orbs in the trees, on the stairs, above our heads!