Haunted Tampa Bay: Paranormal Places To Visit For Halloween

TAMPA BAY, FL — If you’re looking for a scare this Halloween season, paranormal author Mark Muncy has some spooky Tampa Bay-area haunts to suggest. As an expert on haunted Florida, he’s written a trio of books on the topic: “Eerie Florida,” “Creepy Florida” and “Freaky Florida.” Here are some of his favorite haunted stories from this region.

May-Stringer House

This Brooksville home-turned-museum “is one of the most haunted buildings in Florida,” Muncy said. “It has six ghosts, if not many more.

The May family built the home in the 1850s. The family’s patriarch died in the Civil War and his wife remarried Dr. Stringer. He expanded the home to three stories with 12 rooms and turned it into his private practice.

They had a daughter, Jessie May Stringer, who died at a young age, when she was still a toddler. Hers is one of the ghosts that can be seen at the building.

“She is often seen on the second floor in her room and can be heard many nights by the numerous paranormal groups that investigate this location,” Muncy said.

Another spirit at the location is James May. He served in World War I and when he returned, “found his true love had married another,” Muncy said. “He climbed to the third floor and hung himself.”

Today, the home is owned by the Hernando County Historical Society and is filled with artifacts.

“Some of these artifacts have brought their own ghosts,” he said. “In the attic is an actor’s make-up trunk from the turn of the 20th century and it has an onerous spirit called Mr. Nasty. He is known for shouting obscenities and being rude, and pushing and shoving, particularly female visitors to the May-Stringer House.”

The May-Stringer House is located at 601 Museum Court in Brooksville. More information can be found here.

The Cuban Club

Ybor City’s Cuban Club is often referred to as one of the top most haunted buildings in the world, Muncy said. “No one knows how many people have died there officially because records were not kept, and police were only allowed in Ybor City and into the Cuban Club if they were asked.”

The Cigar City Mafia and other groups controlled the area at the time and many prominent Tampa figures were caught up in their activities, he added. “So, they kept a lid on everything there.”

One ghost is a little boy in the basement, which housed a pool at one point. Sometimes those who host ghost tours in the building leave toys out for the boy and find them in strange places the next morning, Muncy said.

On the main floor, where the theater was located, “a noted playwright and actor killed himself in front of the audience when he forgot the words to his own play,” he said. “His spirit can be seen in the men’s room, often in the reflection of the mirror as he cries about his failed performance.”

The third-floor ballroom features a ghostly bride who fell down the stairs on her wedding day and died. She can frequently be heard crashing down the stairs.

“She repeats the trip over and over for eternity,” Muncy said.

The Cuban Club is located at 2010 Avenida Republica de Cuba in Tampa. Find more information online here.

Sulphur Springs Water Tower

This Tampa icon is located off I-75 near the Tampa Greyhound Track. In the 1920s, it was the source of water for Maeve’s Arcade, one of the first indoor malls in America, Muncy said.

The Tampa Electric Company dam was sabotaged, causing a flood that wiped out many of the businesses in the arcade, he said. “This was the start of the Great Depression. Many people lost everything. So, many business owners climbed the nearby tower and used it as a convenient place to end their lives. Their spirits are seen jumping off that tower over and over and over again to this day usually by people stuck in traffic on 75.

Police are used to getting calls about jumpers from the tower, he added. They frequently investigate and find no bodies.

St. Pete Haunted Spots

Two iconic St. Petersburg hotels, The Don CeSar and The Vinoy Hotel, are famously haunted, Muncy said. Visiting baseball teams are no longer allowed to stay at The Vinoy – a decree from the MLB – after the Pittsburgh Pirates complained of “ghostly events keeping them up and preventing them from playing properly.”

The Don CeSar is haunted by nurses and solders from when the hotel was used as a hospital for World War II soldiers. It’s also haunted by its original owner, who built the hotel and allegedly died missing his lost love, Muncy said.

The Vinoy Rennaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club is located at 501 5th Ave. NE in St. Petersburg. Learn more here.

The Don CeSar Hotel is located at 3400 Gulf Blvd. in St. Pete Beach. Learn more here.

But these are stories that many have already heard, he said. He prefers, instead, to share some lesser known haunts, such as Comfort Station Number One. The haunted bathroom sits at the corner of Bayshore Drive and Second Avenue.

It was designed by Henry Taylor, who also designed the Vinoy. The stone bathroom resembles the basilica of a nearby church.

There’s an urban legend that Taylor was upset about not being paid for building that church, so he built the bathroom to look like it, “which is a great story, but it’s not true,” Muncy said. “He built the bathroom first to see if the design would work when he built the big church.”

There are several ghosts in the comfort station, he said. “Women hear echoing voices; men hear screams. The homeless population in the area avoid it like the plague.”

Nearby, the St. Pete Museum of History boasts a 2000-year-old Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus that clearly isn’t hers because it’s only 1,300 years old, he said.

The museum acquired the mummy in the 1920s when a traveling circus couldn’t pay their bill at the St. Pete Pier, so they donated the mummy to cover it.

“The mummy apparently has a guardian spirit that haunts the museum when people are rude to her,” Muncy said.

The identity of the mummy is still unknown, he added, though it’s been studied by the Smithsonian Institute numerous times.

The St. Petersburg Museum of History is located at 335 2nd Ave Ne in St. Petersburg. Learn more here.

“The darkest legend of St. Pete,” though, is the Mini Lights, he said. “Ask anyone on the south side of St. Petersburg and they will tell you beware of Mini Lights. Don’t stay out after dark or Mini Lights will get your children.”

While working on his books, Muncy decided to find the origin of this urban legend and wasn’t prepared for what he learned. On the north side of St. Petersburg, the legend goes that if you say the name Mini Lights three times ghostly lights will dance around you.

In another version of the tale, it’s actually about Mini Lightning, the voodoo queen of St. Petersburg, and she sends her little alligator men to get people if they don’t pay her tolls or respect her, he said. “She is the reason we have so many thunderstorms in Tampa Bay, some say. Others say the reasons hurricanes steer away from us is because she’s a weather witch.”

Some think the legend actually traces across the bay to Gibsonton, where a circus fire broke out, killing a Mennonite woman and some performers.

“But the truth is much scarier than the legend,” Muncy said.

In the 1930s, St. Petersburg was considered the alligator farm capital of America, he said. Visitors to the area would make sure they stopped at one of these alligator farms.

“To make them more exciting, the farm owners would go and kidnap small children, usually African-American children, sadly, and put them into the pits with the alligators to be chase,” he said.

He learned the horrifying truth after finding a flyer for such an event in the St. Petersburg Museum of History archives.

“It’s horrifying,” he said. “So, that’s the real reason you don’t go out at night and the lights that chase you are the men from the farms coming out with lanterns looking for easy prey to throw into their alligator pits.”

Take a day trip to Solomon’s Castle and Bloody Bucket Bridge

Solomon’s Castle in Ona is “a fun place to visit” and an easy day trip from Tampa Bay, Muncy said. “It’s a beautiful castle made of recycled materials in the middle of Florida swamp.”

It was built by Howard Solomon, “a mad genius artist full of puns and it’s a magical place to visit.”

For instance, Solomon built a lighthouse made of balsam wood, he said. “So, it’s a light house, get it? That’s this guy’s humor.”

He also suggests a spooky stop to make on the drive to Solomon’s Castle – a visit to Bloody Bucket Bridge.

According to legend, there was a midwife in the early 1800s that serviced the nearby town of Popash, which no longer exists, he said. She thought the families were having too many children, so “she decided to implement her own birth control program by killing the newborns and claiming they died in childbirth.”

Then, she’d take the babies and dump them off a nearby bridge into the river, he said. “It didn’t take long for the town to realize this lady had a high number of infant fatalities, so they chased her out to the bridge and banished her from the town.”

Her spirit can be seen dumping a bucket of blood into the river over and over.

“And the story goes that on full moon nights the water under the bridge runs red with blood,” Muncy said.

In the area, there’s a modern bridge on Griffin Road and there was once a Bloody Bucket Bar located there. Some people think the legend came from this bar’s name, but even today “babies are heard crying, a lady is heard sobbing and the waters do sometimes take a reddish tone,” he said.

Solomon’s Castle is located at 4533 Solomon Road in Ona. Learn more here.

Sunshine Skyway Bridge

The Sunshine Skyway Bridge is another famous haunt in the Tampa Bay area. In 1980, a freighter struck the bridge, killing 35 people. Several cars as well as a Greyhound bus plummeted from the bridge.

Today, people have seen “the bus driving off the edge over and over and over again,” Muncy said.

Then, there’s the ghostly female hitchhiker. Drivers have reportedly picked her up only to find no one in the car with them. Sometimes they’ll see her along the side of the bridge, and she’ll disappear.

“She’s so famous that if you tell the toll keepers about her and that she vanished, they’ll just say, ‘Oh, you just saw our ghost,’” Muncy said.

Then, there’s the ghostly sounds of a shipwreck heard from time to time. Many believe it’s the haunting of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Blackthorn, Muncy said. In 1980, the Blackthorn collided with a tanker near the bridge.

Bali Hai Beachfront Resort & Spa

This Holmes Beach resort has “a peculiar ghost that walks the beach behind it in a bridal gown on the nights of new moons,” Muncy said. “She looks to the water as if watching for a lost love.”

After wandering the beach a bit, she wades into the water. When she gets about waist level, she “fades into the morning mist,” he said. This mist drifts south to other nearby beaches, “where it turns into a dark mist, a black mist, before fading away.”

The phenomenon has been noted on some U.S. Navy charts as far back as World War II when they were protecting the area from Nazi submarines.

“Even they had no idea what (this mist) was,” Muncy said.

The Bali Hai Beachfront Resort & Spa is located at 6900 Gulf Drive in Holmes Beach. Learn more here.