Casablanca Inn on the Bay

On a clear, moonless night, people across Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida still report the same thing: a single light swinging back and forth atop the roof of the Casablanca Inn. Boaters see it from the water. Pedestrians see it from the far shore. The inn's own account puts it plainly — a light shining bright atop the building when there's no moon to explain it.

People tell it as a signal, and one that used to mean something.

The building went up in 1914 as the Matanzas Hotel, a two-story Mediterranean Revival on the bayfront. During Prohibition in the 1920s, its proprietor — a widow who'd done well for herself running with the rum trade — helped smuggle liquor in from the sea. When federal agents came to town, she had a method. She'd take a lantern to the roof and wave it back and forth, telling the bootleggers' ships to keep going, move on to the next port. The swinging light meant danger. It meant don't land.

She's the Lady with the Lantern, and the inn admits her name is lost — "her name remains unknown to this day," its own page says. One local history calls her the widow Bradshaw; most accounts say she was never named at all.

There's a sadder version some tellers add: that she took one of the rum-runners as her lover, waved him off one night to protect him, and lost him to a hurricane that caught him still at sea. The inn's own page mentions the lover; the storm and the heartbreak come and go between retellings.

The rest of it holds across the tellings. Staff and guests report her on the stairway and in the halls, a cold drop in the air when she passes. Footsteps in empty corridors. Children playing in rooms with no children in them. A wispy fog drifting through the building. She's said to be buried across town, in the Huguenot Cemetery.

But the part outsiders see is the one she can't seem to put down — the lantern swinging on moonless nights, warning off ships that stopped coming a hundred years ago.