The walking tour teaches visitors about ‘real hauntings’ in the historic parts of the city.

By Margo Harakas | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted July 22, 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE — Several people say they have seen her, the 8-year-old with the blond, curly hair, the vintage white dress.

She strolls alone through the historic section of Fort Lauderdale, from Southwest Second Avenue to the old Sailboat Bend fire station at Las Olas Boulevard and Southwest 10th Avenue. She’s pleasant to those she passes, but turn curiously for a second look and she’s gone.

There’s also the unseen hand, felt on the back, guiding visitors up a staircase at Stranahan House, the oldest structure in the city. And the mysterious man in the black duster who is said to pace back and forth on the porch of the New River Inn.

“Put your face against the glass of the lobby doors, and you’re sometimes surprised by his face pushing up against yours,” said John Carr, who will then tell you these elusive characters are ghosts. As is the brown-suited man allegedly seen on occasion in the Henry Kinney Tunnel.

Carr, who says he spent part of his childhood in a haunted house, leads a walking tour of the ghosts of historic Fort Lauderdale. His trek begins on Southeast Sixth Avenue and Las Olas Boulevard and ends near the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.

“We’re talking about real hauntings,” Carr said. Sightings and odd occurrences not easily explained, but told to him by people who have seen or heard or felt them.

In the process of ghost stalking, he also reveals the history of Fort Lauderdale, including the Cooley Hammock Massacre, and the stories of pioneers such as Ivy and Frank Stranahan and the Philomen Bryan family.

“Still haunting the area,” Carr said, “because they want their stories to be told. They don’t want to be forgotten.”

Carr, whose Ghost Tour is a few weeks old, has avidly taken part — as a paying customer — in similar tours in New Orleans, Williamsburg, Va., and Savannah, Ga., among other cities.

Carr’s background is in retail sales, which he left earlier this year to pursue his entrepreneurial dream of tracking local apparitions. He charges tour participants $10 to $15 a person. The 40-year-old Wilton Manors man has a Web site (thehauntedchronicles.com) devoted to personal tales of haunting.

To put together his spooky tour, he spent weeks researching and interviewing people.

Ever since he was a kid, ghosts have shadowed Carr’s life. His first brush with the unseen occurred, he says, in Garden City Park, N.Y. on Long Island, with the remodeling of the family home.

He was 11. His brother was two years younger. Mom and Dad were redoing the house, transforming it from a Cape Cod into a two-story Colonial, and for the duration of the makeover, the family lived in the basement.

Strange things began to happen shortly before the renovation was completed. “We’d get footsteps going up and down the stairs, and windows would open and close,” Carr said.

He would hear his name called out when only he was in the house. Or “you’d sit on the couch and you’d feel someone sit down next to you.” Only no one was there.

More than once, family members noted dark shadows ascending the stairs.

Now Carr is focused on Fort Lauderdale hauntings. Among the more mysterious are the muffled screams Carr says are heard each January around sundown near Sailboat Bend on the New River. It was there, in the late 1830s, on the north side of the river on William Cooley’s homestead and coontie plantation, that the Cooley Hammock Massacre occurred.

Creek Indian chief Alibama was murdered by white settlers.

“Cooley was justice of the peace, the law in the area at that time,” Carr said.

Arrests were made, and the accused were sent to Key West for trial, but they were released for lack of evidence. Or so the story goes.

The Indians blamed Cooley whenno one was punished for the killing.

A short time later, in a January (1836 or 1838; both dates have been noted in retellings), while Cooley was off on a salvage expedition to Hillsboro Beach, an Indian raiding party swept down on his home, killing his wife, three children and the children’s tutor. The screams, Carr notes, still echo in the area each January.

Carr found a mother lode of ghostly material at Stranahan House, which through the years has been visited by ghost researchers, phantom-chasing radio disc jockeys, and hordes of others convinced that Ivy and Frank are still with us. In spirit, at least. Ivy was the city’s first schoolteacher. Frank, considered the founder of Fort Lauderdale, was a man of many trades, operating a trading post, bank and ferry.

Carr recounts stories of the woman, presumed to be Ivy, who chases away vagrants who try to bed down on the porch at night.

In 1929, Frank Stranahan committed suicide by jumping in the river behind the couple’s home.

“He lost a lot of money in 1927. He was depressed, and he was dying of what we now know was probably cancer,” Carr said.

Carr says photographs taken on the riverbank show strange orbs of light, which he thinks come from Frank.

Carr’s tour moves from Stranahan House to the New River Inn, King-Cromartie House, and the Bryan Homes on Southwest Second Avenue. Philomen Bryan built the two homes, now joined and known as the River House restaurant, for his sons Tom and Reed in 1904. Carr has taken photos in that area at night, showing dim and apparently unexplained spheres of light.

That everyone doesn’t share his belief in ghosts doesn’t dampen Carr’s enthusiasm.

“Some of us are developed to be more receptive to seeing and interacting with them,” he said.

Margo Harakas is a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

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