Researching a ghost.

While living in Fort Jefferson, it was very obvious that the place was haunted. The bedroom I slept in was more than 150 years old. The house was surrounded by the massive brick fort which had served as a prison, sheltered a yellow fever outbreak, and very simply looked spooky.

There are signs that the fort is haunted. Half of the fort is pitch black at night, so dark that you can see the night sky through the second floor arches. There are cracks in the brick walls and memorials to those who died in the yellow fever outbreak. I would have sworn there was a cemetery in the center of the fort too. But apparently, there is only a single burial, one of lighthouse keepers buried on garden key. Then there are the actual signs: the many Do not enter signs which block off sections of the fort. (For completely legitimate reasons, nothing exists inside those old powder magazines but rotten wood, scorpions and a century + of dust.) And, the guide signs of a civil war soldier which lead people around the fort always struck my as a bit eerie.

Of course the fort was haunted! Like any older building. Except, who were these ghosts? If you’ve read the previous blogs, then you’ll know that the spot I found the creepiest was also the section of the fort in which I spent the most time. But there are no ghosts associated with the Rec Room as far as I can tell.

I had heard whispers that someone was buried in the fort walls. I’d heard other rangers discount the notion. It made me leery of traversing the darker sections of the fort at night, but that was a given fear anyway. I daydreamt about shadows walking across the parade ground at night. I sprinted across the brick path to keep myself in the well lit sections of the fort. But who was I afraid of?

Fortunately, I soon had a name to put to my fear. Private Winters. There were varying accounts of who he was, and how he had died. They all revolved around a hasty exit from the southwest turret’s stairwell, a gunshot, and a swift and tragic death. But here was the story of someone who had died tragically, in an easy to locate place.

Rangers had seen him. Archeologists had been spooked by him. While I lived out at the fort there were a lot of Private Winters stories. Though I never saw him myself. He was, I can say with a sarcastic smile, the talk of the island.

Only, who is Private Winters?

And what about the other ghosts?

I’m typing this while watching and episode of an old show called Haunted Highway in which a couple of ghost hunters actually sail out to the Dry Tortugas. There’s a guest appearance by a friend and former co-worker, which thrilled me. And he mentioned a version of the story I had heard, about pens and papers being knocked off a table. Other guests came around later to talk about strange sounds, and odd pokes.

Sadly, I had not found the episode before I began my ghosts of the Dry Tortugas series. Fortunately, I’m not a park ranger or archeologist, because I also witnessed a rather blatant disregard for park resources, and archeological context very early in the episode.

Sorry, this isn’t supposed to be an article critiquing a decade old ghost hunt in my old haunt.

But I bring it up for another reason. For whatever the reason, the ghost hunting crew focuses on the turret beneath the harbor light, not the southwest turret at all. They find some poltergeist activity, as promised by the special guest. Under the harbor light. There’s no mention of a Private Winters at all.

None of their eyewitness guests: Key West Historians, artists, or former tour guides mention him by name. There is no thread connected the stories they tell to the ones I remember. They did identify Bird Key as potentially haunted because of the washed away cemetery, so that tells me I may have a future in ghost hunting but if you recall (ha) from when I mentioned it in the previous blog, I suggested Bird Key might be a place which was haunted.

The episode focuses on the space beneath the lighthouse, and Dr. Mudd’s cell.

Mudd was pardoned, and sent home from Fort Jefferson where he died 14 years later. While his time in the Tortugas was probably traumatic, its probably safe to say that He might have been the biggest name associated with the fort, but the Fort wasn’t the biggest thing for him. So what would draw him back to Fort Jefferson? Fame?

Why are there so many famous ghosts? Like a disproportionately large amount of them?

Who was Private Winters?

When I was writing the book, I tried to answer that question more clearly. This is, probably, more an indictment of my research skills than anything else, but there wasn’t much to find. The closest I came to finding any account of an incident like the one said to have killed Private Winters was a line from Emily Holder’s journal about a group of soldiers goofing off, one of whom was shot and injured. (Read Emily’s account of life at the fort which starts before the civil war and ends sometime after the yellow fever outbreak. It’s very interesting… Also very of it’s --civil war era— time.) https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/t/tortugas.htm

There’s a chance that Private Winters story comes from after her time at the Dry Tortugas. But there is also a chance that his story never happened, at least the way that I heard it when I was a kid. Private Winters from Dry Tortugas, is a ghost. And not the kind which haunts a certain corner of an old brick fort, but the kind which cannot be found online. Which left me to ask. where did the story I’d heard come from?

Where are the records now? Supposedly, a theatre troupe came out to reenact his death. Where had they gotten their information from? How did the rangers know to tell his tale on the rarely offered nightly ghost tours?

I know where the ghost hunters got their information from, an old fort guide, a couple of people who know the keys really well, and no one who knew the story of Private Winters.

Is that because he didn’t exist?

Is that because his story has been forgotten?

Is that because his story has changed? (There is an entirely different article I could and will write in the future about how ghost stories change like words in a hurried game of telephone)

It’s interesting that we seek out ghosts. It’s interesting that when we go looking we often look for the familiar. It’s interesting how the ghost hunters didn’t even clock the two most obviously haunted places when I was out at the fort. No mention of the obviously haunted Rec Room. No time spent in the sheltered southwest corner beside the small powder magazine.

It’s almost as if the ghosts we look for are influenced by the stories we tell.

Or we can only find the ghosts we are looking for.

Or we find ghosts only because we know where and how to look for them.

Draw conclusions however you may, about what this means for ghost stories.

But that’s why I wanted to share these last 4 blogs. Not because I’ve witnessed the shadow of Private Winters skulking through the night, nor because I am traumatized by terror of the only room with a game system and a pool table. But because these are the ghost stories I knew about the fort, and I couldn’t find them online. Maybe these stories have been forgotten as the people who told them moved away. Maybe they have been replaced by other ghost stories.

Or maybe, simply, much like the islands themselves, ghosts simply migrate over time. So, if you go ghost hunting out at the fort, check every dark corner, call out into the flooded cistern in the walls and listen to the sounds of the island at night, because you never know what you may find, or where you may find it.

Just don’t pick up any artifacts off the protected seafloor. (Or bring props to your ghost hunt and claim them to be artifacts.)

It was photoshop all along!

Same photo. You can already see some of the edits in process, Also there’s my dad. That stop sign has been there since I lived out at the fort. I imagine it’s been touched up a few times since then.