In Brief
The figure tour guides see most often at Orlando's Greenwood Cemetery is Fred Weeks, standing in front of his own mausoleum. He built it as a monument to the men who swindled him, and the story goes that even sealed inside, he never stopped guarding their names.
The Full Story
The figure tour guides see most often at Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando stands in front of his own tomb, keeping watch. They say it's Fred Weeks — and the thing he's watching is a grudge he carried into the ground.
Weeks was an Englishman, swindled in the late 1800s by local attorneys who sold him land that turned out to be half useless swamp. He did not let it go. He carved a Bible verse about thieves into a stone at the cemetery entrance, and beneath it, the names of the men who had cheated him. They returned his money to kill the bad publicity. It didn't satisfy him. Around 1910 he bought a plot and built a mausoleum by hand, inscribed with Luke 10:30 — "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves" — aimed squarely at the same men.
The obsession, the way the story goes, cost him everything else. His wife left and took the children. He died alone and was sealed inside the tomb he'd built. The names beneath the verse were later chiseled off, leaving a blank square. Guides on the cemetery's rare night tours say Weeks is still there, standing in front of it, still keeping watch over names no one can read anymore.
Greenwood is Orlando's oldest burial ground, founded in 1880, and Weeks is far from the only one people report. The hardest section is the one they call Baby Land — three plots reserved for infants and children five and under, buried together. Visitors there say they hear music-box tunes and children's laughter, and feel small hands tugging at their clothes. Some of those children came from Sunland Mental Hospital, which closed in the 1980s; their unmarked graves are here too.
The grounds go fully dark after twilight. There are no big power poles inside, so guides gather their groups under a single street lamp by the offices, one of the last lights anyone will have, and then walk them into it.
