May-Stringer House

The May-Stringer House in Brooksville, Florida is a four-story, seven-gable Victorian on a hilltop, now the Hernando Heritage Museum. Paranormal teams have catalogued at least eleven spirits inside it — museum staff put the count as high as 23. The one they fear has a name, a foul mouth, and a piece of furniture.

The staff call him Mr. Nasty, and the name comes from the behavior. He keeps to the third-floor attic, curses through spirit-box sessions, and bristles at women. Where he came from, no one agrees. One account says a tenant hanged himself in the attic after finding out about his wife's affair; another ties the entity to an old trunk that came into the house. The trunk is the part everyone repeats. It's said to be the single item that's drawn the most activity in the building, and in 2020 Travel Channel's *Kindred Spirits* built an episode around it. By the show's account, the team decided something dangerous lived there and advised visitors to leave it letters and gifts.

The rest of the house is gentler. John May built the original four-room home in the mid-1850s and died of tuberculosis a few years later. The Victorian shape came later, when Dr. Sheldon Stringer added ten rooms during his family's run from 1903 to 1961.

The tours, though, are built around someone smaller. Jessie Mae Saxon was born in the house in 1869; her mother, Marena, died about six weeks later. Jessie Mae lived only to about three. Her old nursery is the focal point of every walk-through, and visitors say they hear her there: a child crying, calling for the mother who died before she ever knew her.

Around eighty ghost-hunting groups have left their findings in a museum binder. "It's like Grand Central Station for ghosts," one docent says. Most of those teams come for the toddler, or the man in the trunk. They leave the trunk a gift on the way out.