In Brief
The Huguenot Cemetery sits just outside St. Augustine's old City Gate, half an acre of fever dead. The story goes that a girl in a white gown perches on the iron arch after midnight and waves. She has no name and no marked grave.
The Full Story
At the Huguenot Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida, the iron entrance arch reads "Huguenot Cemetery" in welded letters, and the story goes that a girl sits on top of it after midnight. She wears a flowing white gown. She wanders the graves, and she's been known to wave to the people standing below.
She has no name. Some accounts call her Elizabeth, but most leave her nameless, because there's no record to name. What's documented is the year: 1821, when yellow fever swept St. Augustine the same year Florida became a U.S. territory. The story is that she was around fourteen, left dying at the Old City Gates as the epidemic burned through the city, and buried here with the rest of the fever dead.
This ground exists because of that fever. The only cemetery inside the walls was Tolomato, and Tolomato was Catholic. So the new American administration opened a half-acre of dirt just outside the gate for everyone Tolomato wouldn't take. The name fooled people then and fools them now — "Huguenot" just meant "not Catholic." No actual French Huguenots are buried here.
The other ghost has a name and a record. Judge John B. Stickney died in 1882 and was buried here under a marble monument nearly ten feet tall. Years later, his grown children had him dug up and moved north to Washington so they could be near him. The gravediggers, the story goes, left the casket open while they took a break in the heat — and came back to find thieves had stolen the Judge's gold teeth.
His body went to Washington. His monument did not. The blue and red marble shaft stands ten feet tall over an empty plot, and the staff and the tour guides say a tall dark figure paces the graves around it, by daylight and after dark. Ask them whose it is and they answer the same way every time: Stickney, come back to guard a grave that buried nothing of him but his gold teeth — and even those got stolen first.
