In Brief
Before Castle Warden became the first Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum, it was a hotel where two women died in a 1944 fire. Staff and ghost-tour groups in St. Augustine say both women are still inside — and that Robert Ripley, who couldn't buy the castle alive, only got it after his death.
The Full Story
At the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, staff and ghost-tour groups say two women never left the upper floors. They died here on the morning of April 23, 1944, six years before the first oddity was ever put on display.
Back then the building was the Castle Warden Hotel, run by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who won the Pulitzer Prize for *The Yearling*, and her husband Norton Baskin. The couple lived in the top-floor apartment. Around dawn, a fire broke out on the third and fourth floors. Officials blamed a carelessly dropped cigarette, though no proof of one was ever found. Two guests died: Betty (sometimes spelled Bette) Richeson and Ruth Pickering, both from smoke inhalation.
How they died is where the accounts split. Ripley's own telling says both women were found in bathtubs, wrapped in towels, with no burns on them. A separate account, citing the St. Augustine Record, says they were seen standing and screaming at the windows of their rooms before the smoke took them. One version reads as a tragic accident. The other does not.
And then there is the man who signed the register only as "Mr. X." Guests said they saw him carrying something that looked like a rolled-up rug through the hotel just before the fire started. He was never seen again. No source has ever named him or said what was in the bundle.
The mystery was never solved. Robert Ripley had tried for years to buy the castle and failed every time. He died in 1949. His estate bought it in 1950, and the world's first Ripley's museum opened here that December.
The story goes that the two women stayed through all of it. In 2009, the *Ghost Hunters* team logged cold spots on the third-floor staircase and EMF spikes when they asked about the women who burned — sharpest in the room where one of them was found.
