In Brief
At Old Town Manor in Key West, Florida, guests hear an old typewriter clattering in the halls late at night. The story goes it's Dr. Warren, who ran his medical practice from the house and worked his speeches after dark — and never quite left.
The Full Story
Somewhere in the hallways of Old Town Manor in Key West, Florida, a typewriter clatters after dark. An old machine, working away where no machine is. The people who report it have no idea why that detail matters.
It matters because of Dr. William Richard Warren. He and his wife Genevieve bought the house at 511 Eaton Street in 1913, and Warren — a Key West native, trained as a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania — ran his medical practice out of it. The front porch was his waiting room. The front rooms were where he examined patients and operated on them.
The house itself was older than the doctor. Samuel Otis Johnson built it in 1886 as a grocery and butcher shop, just after the Great Fire tore through Key West. It has the tallest cistern in the Keys, three stories high, from the days the island lived on rainwater alone. Genevieve barged topsoil in from the Panhandle to lay a garden over the coral, orchids and rare palms and a jacaranda that blooms blue. The inn keeps that garden today.
Warren's great-grandson, the inn tells it, came back to visit and mentioned that the doctor used to sit up late typing his speeches. Guests who'd never heard that — who had no way to hear it — kept reporting the same sound after dark.
The rest of the lore comes mostly from the inn's own telling: a woman in the garden said to be Genevieve, a couple walking the brick paths hand in hand. But the guest book has its own entries. One woman wrote in 2015 that she heard footsteps all night, and that "someone kept covering me up when I would fall asleep."
Warren built his whole life inside the house. The practice closed a long time ago. The typing, by the sound of it, kept its old hours.
