Tivoli High House

On the ghost tour that stops at Tivoli High House in Pensacola, Florida, guests say the empty rooms give off cigar smoke, that footsteps cross floors no one is on, and that a gunshot will go off with nothing there to fire it. The phenomena are all themed to one thing: the place was built for gamblers.

Or rather, the building it copies was. The Tivoli you can walk into today is a 1976 reconstruction, raised for the city's bicentennial by a local architect working off old photographs. The original went up in 1805 as a boarding house, tavern, and gaming house, with an octagonal dance-hall rotunda beside it built, as a 1810 description put it, as "a small neat rotunda for public balls."

For over a century the place pulled in frontier-town trouble. Future First Lady Rachel Jackson is said to have visited and come away describing a crowd "mixed with all nations under the canopy of heaven." Don Francisco Moreno bought it in the 1840s, tore down the ballroom, and turned the main house into a hotel; Union soldiers occupied it during the Civil War and called it the Spanish Barracks. It ran as a boarding house under one owner after another until it was finally torn down in 1937.

The gunfighter the lore leans on hardest is real. Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, said to have killed more than thirty men, was captured in Pensacola in 1877 — though that was at the train depot blocks away, not here. The tour says he "allegedly stayed" at the Tivoli; no record ties him to the building at all. Same with a tale of Doc Holliday brawling in a saloon on the site. Both are stories the guides tell, not history anyone can document.

So the gunshots in the empty rooms answer to gunmen who were never proven to have set foot in this copy of a building that no longer exists.