Book Review: Haunted Daytona Beach

A woman who anticipated someday becoming a bride but died young, a peanut vendor still plying his trade in Jackie Robinson Stadium, the friendly phantom dog named Brownie, the ghost on Memorial Bridge, these and other ghosts and their stories people the book, Haunted Daytona Beach: A Ghostly Tour of the World's Most Famous Beach. There are even ghost stories involving, if only peripherally, the well-known gangsters who frequented the area back in the 20's and 30's. including Chicago mob leader Al Capone and the bank-robbing Ma Barker gang,

Author Doris "Dusty" Smith comes by the stories naturally. She leads haunted tours of Daytona Beach, Florida, and is founder and president of the Daytona Beach Paranormal Group, Inc. which has investigated many of the locations, including the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse, haunted by one of the long-dead keepers.

This is a quick-reading, well-illustrated book with 24 tales.

Ghost Ship

One of the tales is of a ghost ship. Rumrunner Bill McCoy quit boat-building, a business which had gone sour, to run booze in from the Bahamas. This proved very profitable, even though McCoy, unlike many, did not water down his liquor. McCoy became the standard by which booze was measured and imbibers would ask their suppliers, "Is this the real McCoy?"

McCoy was finally caught by the Coast Guard and died peacefully in 1948. But since then, his beloved ship, the Arethusa, has been seen on the Tomoka and Halifax Rivers.

There's also the bar across from Pinewood Cemetery that bikers say they want to come to when they die, and apparently do. They sometimes flush the toilet, something they didn't do much in life. Miss Bonnie was a little lady with a footstool who stood on it to kiss her towering boyfriend goodnight after every date, until he was killed in a storm. There's the crypt in the Pinewood Cemetery that was broken into and desecrated by vandals who played golf with the bones and skull. The skull was never found and the headless ghost of the crypt's occupant is seen, presumably looking for his missing skull.

Lighthouse Ghosts

I wrote a story for Fate magazine five years ago on the little-reported hauntings at the Ponce de Leon Lighthouse including that presumably of a former keeper. I included some details from Dusty on an investigation by her Daytona Beach Paranormal Group. For this book, Dusty has written a more extensive account about the lighthouse and its haunting.

To Buy the Book

Haunted Daytona Beach is $19.99, a trade softcover published by Haunted America, available at your bookstore where it can be ordered, or through Amazon and other online bookdealers.

Dusty's site, by the way, can be visited at www.hauntsofdaytona.com