Ashley's Restaurant

At Ashley's Restaurant in Rockledge, Florida, the haunting happens mostly in the ladies' room. Patrons describe a young woman's face in the bathroom mirror. In 1982, a former manager named Judy Cowles reported a pair of feet under the next stall in old-fashioned footwear — boots, she said, like "old pictures of people at the turn of the century." When she checked, no one was there.

The story that's grown up around her starts in 1934, and it isn't pretty.

That November, a man driving the river road between Rockledge and Eau Gallie saw buzzards circling over the bank of the Indian River and stopped. What he found was the body of Ethel Allen, a 19-year-old from Cocoa. Her throat had been cut, the right side of her face crushed, one leg nearly gone. The body had been burned and put in the water. She was identified by a ring and a tattoo on her right thigh.

She'd last been seen three days earlier, stopping at a packing house to say goodbye to a friend. She was leaving town, she said, headed to Wauchula to visit her mother, and a man named Bill was taking her. The only suspect, William "Billy" Wilson, loaded his car and left Rockledge the day her body turned up. No one ever caught him. The case is still open.

The building was a speakeasy-era roadhouse called Jack's Tavern then, and the lore holds it was one of the last places Ethel was seen alive. By 1985 it had cycled through half a dozen names and become Ashley's. Staff today report being pushed on the stairs, glasses breaking untouched, whispering after closing. A 2023 study ranked it the most haunted restaurant in America.

The Brevard County library genealogist who dug up the murder records found nothing tying Ethel Allen to the tavern, and nothing saying she was killed there at all. So the woman in the mirror may not be Ethel. She may just be someone they decided to call by her name.