Captain Tony's Saloon

There is a tree growing up through the middle of Captain Tony's Saloon in Key West, Florida — a living one, sprouting twigs and leaves inside the dim room, its trunk punching out through a hole cut in the roof. The bar calls it the hanging tree. By its own telling, pirates and at least one woman were strung up from its branches, back when the building at 428 Greene Street was an icehouse that doubled as the town morgue.

The ghost they talk about most is the Lady in Blue. The story goes she was hanged for killing her husband and children, in a blue dress stained with their blood, and ghost hunters say they've photographed blue shapes in the bar. There are gravestones inside, too. One marks a woman named Elvira, dug up during 1980s renovations and now propped near the pool table. The other, for Reba Sawyer, sits under the tree — dragged in, the legend says, by a husband who found letters proving she'd had an affair here. No one is buried beneath it.

Staff and ghost-tour sources report the usual: a cold hallway by the ladies' room, stalls that lock on their own, voices with no source.

The records that survive don't mention a gallows. The building was a telegraph station that reported the sinking of the Maine in 1898, a cigar factory, a speakeasy, the original Sloppy Joe's where Hemingway drank between 1933 and 1937. The hangings are another matter. Local historian Tom Hambright holds that the morgue, the icehouse, and most of the death toll were invented by the bar's mid-century owner, Captain Tony Tarracino — that even the names Reba Sawyer and Elvira came from him. He was a charter-boat captain who understood that a good story keeps the drinks moving.

So no court record confirms a single hanging. The count runs 17 by some tellings, as many as 75 by others. The best-documented ghost in the place is the story someone made up.