Kingsley Plantation

In the woods around Kingsley Plantation, on Fort George Island northeast of Jacksonville, people have been reporting a pair of red, glowing eyes since 1978. They call it Old Red Eyes. A notable sighting came from a visitor named Tes Rais in 1993, and the report has been catalogued the same way ever since: two red points, low in the brush, watching.

The story attached to the eyes is the worst kind. As locals tell it, they belong to an enslaved man who murdered girls on the plantation, until the other enslaved people discovered the crimes and lynched him from an oak tree. None of it is written down anywhere. No record names the man, the murders, or the tree.

A park ranger named Emily Palmer offers a different account. "No historical evidence supports the Red Eyes story," she says. What people are seeing, she suggests, is possums in the underbrush, their eyes catching the brake lights of passing cars. The name itself gives the legend away too: "Old Red Eyes" is an old folk nickname for the devil in South Carolina, and the version where you chant his name three times only surfaced after the 1992 film *Candyman*.

The real Kingsley is heavier than any of that. The main house, built in 1797 and 1798, is the oldest surviving plantation house in Florida. Zephaniah Kingsley ran it from 1814 with Anna Madgigine Jai, a Wolof woman from Senegal he had bought in Cuba at 13, freed at 18, and who went on to co-own the place. Behind the house stood 32 cabins of tabby, that gritty mix of lime and crushed shell, laid in a semicircle. 23 still stand.

Which is why the other sighting lands wrong. Visitors report a woman in white on the back porch and call her Anna. But Anna never lived in the main house. She had her own quarters in the kitchen house, and she had been gone from the island for over 30 years when she died.