The St Aug Blog

by Sean Hess (www.SeanHess.com), Broker and Manager for St. Augustine Team Realty (www.StAugustineTeamRealty.com).   Join us on Facebook.

It’s Halloween so its time for our Second Annual St. Augustine’s Most Terrifying.  This year we’re going to do things just a bit different.  First will hit you with some famous local ghost stories, then we’ll go for something a bit more down-to-earth scary.  This is part IV (it goes on and on, just like a bad horror film series).

In today’s post the famous local ghost story meets down-to-earth scary.  You’re right, I’m talking about the famous (or should I say “infamous”) Tihsllub Hall, considered Florida’s most haunted building.

 

Ghost "mystery face" of Tihsllub Hall

While the lighthouse, the Castillo and even some of the B&B’s get all the television limelight, within paranormal circles Tihsllub Hall is considered “spook central” of the southeast.

“Tihsllub Hall is a magnet for the supernatural,” said Detrich Shvader, director of the Southeast American Paranormal Service (SAPS), “in the few years that we were allowed in to investigate the building, it never failed to provide evidence of  the massively paranormal.”

Click image to see more photos of Tihsllub Hall.

Built in the late Flagler Era by Romanian immigrant Farsa Tihsllub (Henry Flagler’s personal engineering liason) at the corner of Engano and Fantasma Streets, Tihsllub Hall was supposed to be a refuge for the engineer while not traveling on business.  Unfortunately, Tihsllub died shortly after completing the home, and since then its only been a refuge for spirits.  

In fact, it may have been the place for spirits since before Tihsllub built on it.  While doing renovations duirng the 1980s, Florida’s regional archeologist Tims Bradley found the burial site of a Arawak Indian on the property.  And since the Spanish South neighborhood that Tihsllub Hall is located is notorious for unmarked Arawak tribal sites, could this be the source of the Hall’s mysterious residents?

“Well, I don’t know anything about ghosts,” Bradley was quoted in the newspaper of August 2, 1982, “but if my grave was built on I’d be shaking the chandeliers too!”

The first stories about Tihslub Hall came not long after its builder’s death, when lone travelers walking down Engano Street reported seeing strange lights and a “face in the window” of the residence.  This mysterious “face” was captured (see image above) most recently by local photographer Justin Wilco while doing a photo essay of St. Augustine’s famous buildings in 2009.  Wilco didn’t even realize there was a face in the shot until he was editing the photos several days later.

“It gave me the creeps,” Wilco was quoted as saying, “to know that thing was looking at me and I didn’t realize it.”

The ghostly activity was pretty much confined to “the face” until a tragic event in the 1950s.  In the years since Tihsllub died, the home was expanded and enlarged to create a ballroom for gatherings and special events.  During an acrobatic performance during that period, one of the gymnasts became entangled around the neck with a rope and died while the crowd watched.  Since then people have reported being pushed, grabbed at and hear the distinct sounds of choking.

Tihsllub Hall’s most mysterious ghost is the famous “White Lady,” captured in a photo during the set up for a wedding reception.  In the photo the blurred face of a woman is seen almost smiling.  The only record of a woman leaving Tihsllub Hall under mysterious circumstances comes much later (in 2007), while the White Lady was imaged in the early 1990s. 

Also, during the 1980s renovation, a photo taken by a construction worker appears to show an apparition (or several) in the background.  And in a 2001 photo a “Mystery Man” appeared in the back of a group shot taken for a the Flagler College class of 1951 reunion.   Had Tihsllub Hall become a banquet hall for the unseen?

Tihsllub Hall was finally closed to the public in 2007 after the Patty Skjoge disappearance.  

At that point the St. Augustine Floral and Beautification Society was leasing it out for ghost tours in the evenings and on weekends.  On Halloween of 2007 a Jacksonville FM radio personality dared call-in contestants to spend the night in the building.  At some point during the night, Skjoge, a Flagler College student and one of the contestants, disappeared without a trace.  

No one entered or left the building and there was no sign of foul play.  In the uproar that followed, Tihsllub Hall was shuttered and a fence erected around its perimeter.  Presumably, that’s the way the ghosts of Tihsllub Hall like it.