Fort Pickens

In the brick corridors of Fort Pickens, on a barrier island at the western edge of Florida, visitors keep meeting someone. A figure with very long, silky black hair turns up in the casemates — the arched rooms built for cannons — then isn't there. People hear footsteps in empty rooms and voices with no mouths behind them. "I've heard voices and seen lights and have also been tapped on the shoulder when I'm alone," one visitor wrote.

They mostly say it's the Apache.

The fort was built between 1829 and 1834 out of 21.5 million bricks, the largest brick fort on the Gulf. But the thing people drive across the bay for happened later. On October 25, 1886, sixteen Apache men arrived by train in Pensacola and were ferried out to the island. Among them were Geronimo and Naiche, the youngest son of Cochise. Their wives and children were sent the other way, to a fort in St. Augustine.

The men were locked in two casemates on the south side. They strung netting against the coastal mosquitoes and worked seven-hour days clearing weeds and stacking cannonballs. And Pensacola sold tickets. Admission was fifty cents for adults, twenty-five for children, ferry across the bay included. On one Sunday in early 1887, 459 people made the trip just to stare at Geronimo.

He never went free. A yellow fever scare in 1888 moved the Apaches off the island, and Geronimo died still a prisoner at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909. One of them never left the island at all — She-gha, one of Geronimo's wives, died here and was buried across the bay at Barrancas National Cemetery.

The story tour-tellers pass around is that Geronimo cursed the land, so anyone who leaves is drawn back. Run the math on that and it falls apart. Geronimo wanted off the island and died trying to leave one. The only Apache who couldn't go was She-gha, in the ground across the bay. And the people who really keep coming back — 459 of them one Sunday, fifty cents a head — paid for the privilege.