Tolomato Cemetery

There's a boy in the oak just inside the gate of Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida. The tree is old enough to have been here for everything, and the story people carry back out of the gate is that a little boy is sitting up in it. Five or six years old, in old-fashioned clothes, legs hanging off a branch and swinging, smiling down at whoever notices him. One tour account puts it plainly: "he was transparent…you could see right through him."

Tour lore gives him a name. They call him Little James, after James P. Morgan, who died on November 28, 1877, at age five. The story goes that he climbed that same oak just inside the gates and lost his grip. His death record lists the cause as unknown; the fall, and the boy in the tree, come from the people who tell it, not the paper. His mother is said to have seen him first, sitting up there swinging his feet. Grief, everyone assumed — until other people started seeing the same boy in the same tree.

The ground he plays in is the oldest planned cemetery in Florida. It was laid out in 1777 over a vanished village of Christian Guale Indians, when Father Pedro Camps got a British governor's permission to bury his Minorcan refugees on the old mission grounds. Walled inside the city, it was consecrated Catholic earth, and for over a century it was the parish burying ground. About 1,000 people went into it. Only around 100 markers still stand.

At the end of the central path sits a small white chapel, built for the Cuban priest Félix Varela and later given to Augustin Verot, the first Bishop of St. Augustine. Somewhere in the same walls, in an unmarked grave, lies Jorge Biassou, a general of the Haitian Revolution and the first Black general in America.

So much of the place is sealed and recorded and named. The one figure everyone leaves talking about has no marker, no proof, and no grave you can stand over — just a branch by the gate, a pair of feet swinging, and a smile aimed at the next person to look up.