St. Francis Inn

There's a young woman in a white nightgown on the third floor of the St. Francis Inn in St. Augustine, Florida, and you almost never get her face — guests see her from behind, then she's gone. Most of it centers on Room 3A, the place staff now call Lily's Room. Guests describe being touched or gently kissed in bed at night, lipsticks and small items turning up in the wrong spot, lights flicking off and on, faucets running on their own.

The owners don't treat any of this as a marketing line. Asked in a 2022 historical-society interview whether the building has ghost stories, the innkeeper answered, "The answer is a definite YES! Her name is Lily and she was well known even before we bought the inn." They call her a "playful poltergeist," and after decades in the building they say she has never once done harm.

The house is among the oldest in the city, built in 1791 for a Spanish sergeant named Gaspar Garcia. The third floor where Lily turns up isn't original — John Wilson added it, along with the mansard roof, in an 1888 renovation.

The legend behind her is older than any of that, and it doesn't hold still. The common telling: a young soldier living with his uncle, the inn's 19th-century owner, fell for Lily, said to have been an enslaved woman from Barbados who worked the house. The uncle discovered them and ordered it stopped. After that the accounts split. Some say the nephew hanged himself. Some say Lily did. No primary record confirms Lily existed at all, and a historical-society researcher will tell you flatly that for most of the town's ghost stories there isn't a kernel of truth.

So the building keeps two stories that don't reconcile. The records can't find Lily anywhere. The people who run the place put her name on the door, hand guests the room she's said to haunt, and tell them they always believe what they bring back down.