Lightner Museum

The deep end of the swimming pool at the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida is a café now. The water is long gone; the tables sit on the floor of the basin. And tour guides say that if you stand in the center, close your eyes, and listen, you'll hear a girl splashing — one who is said to have drowned there.

There is no record of any drowning. No newspaper, no death certificate, no name. The story lives entirely in the retellings the ghost-walk guides pass along, and it is the single most repeated piece of lore the building has. Believe it or not, the pool is where people listen hardest.

The pool was real, and it was enormous — the largest indoor swimming pool in the world when Henry Flagler opened the Hotel Alcazar here on Christmas Day, 1888. The railroad magnate built it to pull wealthy winter tourists down his Florida coast: steam rooms, sulfur baths, a three-story ballroom, all in Spanish Renaissance Revival. Then the Crash came, and the hotel closed after the 1931 season. A Chicago publisher named Otto Lightner bought the shuttered building in 1947 and filled it with his collection.

That collection doesn't help the nerves any. A shrunken head. An Egyptian mummy. Mechanical music machines that play themselves.

The one documented scare came in 2015, when WJXT anchor Jessica Clark felt her hair pulled twice while filming inside. She turned around both times; no one was there, and the camera showed nothing. "I realized someone, or some ghost, was playing with me," she said. Management mentioned that a paranormal team had run a two-night investigation a couple of months earlier and, in their words, "found a lot" — especially on the fourth floor, where the hotel staff used to sleep.

The guests who line up for lunch are eating in a drained pool, listening for a child who, as far as any record knows, was never there.