Mystery, paranormal, and the unexplained.Hosted by Shane Waters, Josh Waters and Kim Morrow49 min episode
St. Augustine Ghosts | Older Than Jamestown by 42 Years
Transcript
826 segmentsShow Notes
St. Augustine, Florida, 1565. Spain planted a city on this coast forty two years before Jamestown and fifty five years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, and most of what happened next was fire, hurricane, siege or slaughter. Shane rode the Ghosts and Graveyards trolley through it at night, four other people on board and the sides of the bus folded open, and came back with the history and the ghost stories tangled together the way they are down there.
The gang walks the oldest European city in the country, from the spring that is supposed to make old men young to the coquina fort that cannonballs could not crack. Then the graveyards. There is a boy buried where he landed, under the tree he fell out of, alone at the front of what the tour calls the oldest European burial ground in the country, and the locals will tell you he still plays out there after dark with the friends he used to talk about.
Timeline of Events
1513: Juan Ponce de Leon reaches Florida. The story tying him to a spring that makes the old young again does not appear in writing until 1535, fourteen years after he died, and his landing place is disputed to this day.
September 8, 1565: Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds San Agustin, named for the saint whose feast day fell when his fleet first sighted land. He holds a mass of thanksgiving and shares a meal with the local Native people, fifty six years before the Plymouth feast of 1621.
September 20, 1565: Spanish troops take the French Fort Caroline, near what is now Jacksonville, while most of its defenders are away at sea.
Autumn 1565: Jean Ribault's fleet is wrecked by a hurricane. Roughly three hundred French survivors are put to the knife at the inlet south of town. That inlet is still called Matanzas, which means slaughters.
May 1586: Sir Francis Drake arrives with twenty three ships, takes the town and burns it. The residents rebuild.
1599: A fire and then a hurricane hit in the same year.
May 1668: The pirate Robert Searle sacks the city, kills sixty residents and carries others off for ransom or for sale. Spain decides it is done building in wood.
October 2, 1672: Work begins on the Castillo de San Marcos, out of coquina shellstone quarried on Anastasia Island.
1695: The first major construction phase ends. The Castillo was never taken in battle. It only ever changed hands on paper.
1780: After Charleston falls, three signers of the Declaration of Independence are held prisoner inside that fort.
What You Will Hear
Why coquina, a limestone made of packed seashells, swallowed cannonballs instead of shattering, and who was forced to quarry and lay it.
What the Florida Historical Society actually says about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth, and what archaeologists found under the park instead.
The boy buried under the tree he fell from, and the gatekeeper's daughter said to walk the same ground.
One of the earliest patented Ouija boards, a folding portable embalming table, and a wall of death masks.
Why there is always a fire, and what it costs us every single time.
Sources
National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument
Florida Historical Society on Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth legend
City of St. Augustine historical record, and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park excavations
Period accounts of Drake's raid of 1586 and Searle's sack of 1668
Ghosts and Graveyards night tour, St. Augustine, ridden September 2026
If you liked this: Episode 170, Lady in Red and Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel. Another old building that never quite emptied out.
The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker
Episode 187 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide
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Credits
Shane Waters, Founder & Host
Josh Waters, Co-Host
Kim Morrow, Co-Host & Lead Editor
Produced by Myths & Malice
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