Koreshan State Park

At Koreshan State Park in Estero, Florida, the buildings stand the way the believers left them, and visitors on the trails report shadows that don't keep pace with them. The man who built this place promised his followers he would never die. He was wrong about that. He may have been wrong about everything.

His name was Cyrus Teed, a New York physician who, in the autumn of 1869, took a severe electrical shock during an alchemical experiment. He said his soul left his body and met a divine woman who told him the truth about the world: we live on the inside of a hollow Earth, the sun a battery-powered contraption at the center. He renamed himself Koresh, declared himself the messiah, and in 1894 led his followers to a stretch of the Estero River to build a New Jerusalem.

For a while it worked. The settlement peaked at over 250 people who practiced celibacy and held everything in common. They ran a bakery, a sawmill, a printing house, and a power plant that lit up southwest Florida before the rest of the region had electricity. Edison and Ford came to hear the Koreshan orchestra play in the Art Hall.

Then Teed died, on December 22, 1908. He had told them he was immortal, so they did not bury him. They propped the body up and kept watch for days, until county health officials forced them to stop. They moved him to a beachside mausoleum and kept a 24-hour vigil there instead, certain he would rise. They waited 13 years. In 1921 a hurricane tore the mausoleum open and washed his body out to sea. The headstone they pulled from the wreckage is said to read "Cyrus, Shepherd, Stone of Israel."

The hauntedplaces.org accounts describe "shadow people who disappear on the trails," voices in the empty buildings, a woman in a white dress in a Planetary Court mirror. One visitor wrote of a group of shadow figures with "one skeletal male apparition in the center who felt like he was the leader."

The Koreshans believed he would come back. Some say they're still waiting for him.