Location: St. Francis Inn; St. Augustine, FL
Date: March 23-24, 2010
On our first visit to St. Augustine three years ago, we had gone on a ghost tour of the town with Ripley’s Believe It or Not. One of the stops on that tour was a small park across the street from the St. Francis Inn that had been built in 1791. A servant girl named Lily reportedly haunted the inn. Lily worked at the inn sometime during the 19th century, and it was there that she fell in love with the owner’s nephew. When their relationship was discovered, Lily was dismissed from her position and the nephew hung himself in the attic out of sorrow. The attic was later remodeled into more rooms for the inn, and the corner room where the nephew had died was named Lily’s Room.
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| Lily's Room |
So of course when my parents and I decided to return to St. Augustine over spring break this year we knew we had to stay in Lily’s Room. Because of fire codes we had to book two rooms on the third floor; my mom and I stayed in Lily’s Room, and my dad stayed down the hall in the Graham Room. We booked the rooms for two nights, and luckily we had some interesting things happen.
We set up a camera in the corner of the room and recorded the first night of our stay in Lily’s Room. So while we didn’t get any orbs in our pictures or any voices on our audio recorder, we did get a few quirks with the camera. The first night of our stay we went downstairs to play cards in the dining room. Before leaving, my mom and I got our glasses of tea out of the refrigerator and closed the door, and that event was recorded on our camera. When we returned to our room that night our refrigerator door was standing wide open. After some discussion we decided it had to have been the work of Lily. To affirm our belief in that, my dad soon came down the hall to tell us that his keys had been hidden under his bed pillows while we were downstairs as well.
After getting ready for bed, we decided to review some of the footage from while were gone in hopes of catching the refrigerator door open. But because of the refrigerator’s position below the camera, nothing was captured. What we did find on the tape was a series of events involving ourselves that neither my mom nor I recall happening. On the video, my mom walks into the adjoining bathroom (which is very small, hardly big enough for one person to comfortably shower and use the toilet), and I follow her inside. The bathroom door shuts, according to the tape both of us stay inside for over a minute before I exit, the toilet can be heard flushing, and my mom steps outside as well. For the life of us, neither of us recalls ever going in the bathroom together and closing the door, much less staying in there for that long.
Other than that odd, unexplainable occurrence, we had no luck with our equipment. At some point during both nights of our stay, my mom was awoken to footsteps and tapping. We were both awoken the second night as well to the sound of someone tapping on either the window or the ceiling above the window. While none of that was caught on video or audio recording, it did help affirm our belief that either Lily or her beau was at the St. Francis Inn with us those nights.
Hayley.
It wasn't noted when you two went into the bathroom... was it at night and possibly a result of sleepwalking? Or during the day?
ReplyDeleteOn the recorded tape, that incident occurred in the late afternoon. Trust me, though, if you could see the bathroom, you'd understand how it would be quite uncomfortable for two people to hang out inside of it. There was barely room to squeeze past the bathtub to stand at the sink or reach the small tunnel the toilet was situated in.
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