Some belongings are difficult to part with. Around here, a few have acquired reputations that would make you think twice about keeping them. This week’s ghost stories concern haunted objects.
AI-generated photo using the doll that appeared in Liz Reed's story.
An elderly couple in Bradneton woke up one morning to find Ellen on their bedroom dresser, staring at them. The antique doll was supposed to be in the spare room. They had also heard children whispering and found her in places neither remembered leaving her, paranormal investigator Liz Reed recounts in Bradenton Magazine article.
At their old home in St. Augustine, Ellen had been tucked away in a guest-room closet. She belonged to their deceased daughter, who had collected dolls and paid to have this particular one restored, complete with a new head of real human hair. The rest of the collection had been sold after her death, but Ellen remained.
Their son packed her for the move to Bradenton, assuming his parents wanted the keepsake. At the condo, Ellen took over a chair in the spare bedroom. Soon, his parents began calling about strange happenings. He suspected forgetfulness until his mother asked him to inspect Ellen’s room.
It was swarming with flies. He searched for spoiled food or a dead animal and found nothing. Even with the door open, the flies stayed in the room with Ellen.
After the elderly couple died, their son and daughter-in-law began clearing out the condo. Now they were the ones finding things moved or missing. Lights they had switched off were on when they returned. One day, they arrived to find the air conditioning turned down and a radio blaring.
Then they heard the children.
The whispers seemed to come from a different place wherever they searched. They left for the evening. When they returned the next morning, the missing belongings were piled in the middle of the otherwise empty living room.
Ellen’s chair was empty. They found the master-bedroom door closed, although they had left it open. Inside, the doll stood upright in the middle of the room. The whispering started again, growing louder.
They left and called the Paranormal Society of Bradenton.
Ellen eventually went to a member who collected haunted objects. Reed writes that she was placed in a case surrounded by salt, beside another haunted doll named Katherine. At the time Reed published the story, she reported no further activity from either doll.
Original letter found in the closet of the couple's home.
The attachment at Palmetto’s Harllee House was less reluctant. Its former owner loved the place enough to write it a letter.
“My home is a part of my life,” she wrote in 1991. “It owns me and I will never go away and forget it.”
Addressed “My Old House,” the handwritten note explains that the home had shared her grief and joy. All the things she had done and learned were written into its walls. She considered it a member of her family.
It’s an understandable sentiment. A house holds the marks of people’s lives long after the furniture is moved out. Most owners, however, leave the new occupants to make their own breakfast.
At the Harllee House, later residents reportedly discovered the letter in a closet. They also had stories about someone apparently making herself at home.
On one occasion, the children’s grandmothers were babysitting while the parents were away. One morning the grandmother stying upstairs was awakened by a commotion in the kitchen and assumed the other grandmother staying downstairs was preparing breakfast. However , the kitchen was empty and the other grandmother was fast asleep. The women laughed and attributed the noise to the house’s former owner.
Another time, a mother trying to rest heard heavy footsteps upstairs. Thinking her husband had awakened her, she called for him to come down. When he didn’t appear, she went upstairs to find out why.
The room was empty. Her husband was outside with their baby.
Alongside those accounts, the letter’s promise never to go away takes on a different meaning. Still, its closing thought is affectionate: “Really I consider my house a member of my family!”
Greyhound bus being salavaged from a barge. Photo: St. Pete Times.
A bus traveling overhead would ordinarily be an unremarkable sound to someone fishing beneath a bridge. The Skyway’s phantom Greyhound story depends on what happens next.
The actual disaster occurred on May 9, 1980, when the freighter Summit Venture struck a support pier of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. A section collapsed, sending a Greyhound bus, a pickup and six cars into Tampa Bay. Thirty-five people died, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s accident report.
The ghost story appears in Bill Miller’s collection The Tampa Triangle: Dead Zone. A 2022 Creative Loafing retrospective describes people fishing beneath the old bridge who reportedly heard a bus driving overhead. In that telling, the bus vanished before plunging into the water.
The published account does not identify the witnesses or say when they heard it. There is no comparable uncertainty about the real bus or the people lost aboard it. Their deaths belong to the historical record; the phantom journey belongs to the folklore that followed.
Ellen’s story ends with a case and a ring of salt. The bus has no such enclosure. In the legend, someone is still below the old bridge, listening as it comes.
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