In Brief
The Devil's Chair is a squat brick bench wedged among the graves in Lake Helen, Florida. Leave an unopened beer on it overnight, the legend says, and you'll find the can empty by morning but still sealed. Sit in it at midnight, and the devil leans in to talk.
The Full Story
The Devil's Chair sits in a cemetery in Lake Helen, Florida, and it grants two favors to anyone brave enough to test it. Leave a sealed can of beer on its flat brick top overnight, the legend says, and you'll come back at dawn to find the can drained but still unopened, as if the devil drank straight through the metal. Or sit in the chair at midnight, and he'll lean in and talk to you.
The chair itself is nothing to look at. It's a red-brick bench, four little walls and a flat top, easy to walk right past. Folklorist Charlie Carlson set the legend down in his book *Weird Florida*: sit there at midnight, he wrote, and the devil will communicate with you. Some tellings go further and say the devil appears to anyone who dares the seat at all.
It's filed under "Cassadaga," the old spiritualist town next door, though the cemetery is technically in Lake Helen. Cassadaga has no cemetery of its own. The bench is one of three brick "mourning chairs" scattered across the family plots here, built so the living could rest a while at the graves. This one sits in the Thatcher plot, and it won the legend mostly by being the easiest to reach.
The beer, it turns out, had a flesh-and-blood explanation. People used to drink out here among the headstones, and the ones who came after took the leftovers. "It wasn't the devil drinking the beer," said Rev. Louis Gates of the Cassadaga camp, who grew up nearby. "It was us teenagers."
Which is the part the warning signs and the legend never mention. The cemetery shuts at dusk, ringed now by a metal fence, and the Lake Helen police have arrested hundreds of people over the last decade for slipping in to sit in the chair. The devil never showed. The cops always did.
