Hunt The Haunted Tonight!

Hunt ghosts with the Ghosts, Mysteries & Legends tour of Old Fort Lauderdale, www.fortlauderdaleghosttours.com, Fort Lauderdale’s premier ghost tour. Ghost Guides introduce visitors and locals to Fort Lauderdale’s “other night life” as they walk along the banks of the New River in the city’s historic district.

The ghost tour takes guests to the city’s most haunted places right in the heart of downtown, where the Tequesta Indians lived when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived and where the city as we know it today began.

The tour’s chief ghost guide, Christian Rieger, says, “We concentrate our tour in the area where Fort Lauderdale started as a modern city — where the Flagler railroad came through in 1896.

“The freeze of 1895 that killed the citrus trees through central Florida, caused Henry Flagler to extend his Florida Eastcoast Railroad from Palm Beach to what is today Miami.

The city’s first hotel, built because the railroad’s coming through, was built next to the tracks at the river. Historians say that it is this area, where we have our ghost hunting, that the city, as we know it today, began.”

Ghost tour guides, wearing a cape, top hat and carrying a lantern, tell stories of the fabled New River, trading posts and 100 year-old mansions. Is the Ghost Train that speeds silently over the tracks the train that caused the death 500 people in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935? Some locals who claim to have seen it think so.

Visitors on the tour will discover the mystery of the woman in the white wedding dress and why she stands alone on the balcony of the city’s oldest standing hotel building. Guides also tell tales of Seminole Indians that still haunt the river, the ghosts of early settlers, and the haunts of a popular restaurant.

“It is great family entertainment,” says Rieger, “something for the family to do after dinner besides watch television in the hotel room. It also works great for local families, because ghost tours are a clever way of introducing local history to children — a way of making history interesting and easy to listen to.”

“And bring your digital camera. We have had many guests who have photographed various images in the spirit world.”

by Christian Rieger