This rather Arc de Triomphe-lookin' structure along the Daytona Beach boardwalk is actually an enormous bandshell, built in 1937. It's sufficient to hold a small orchestra, a choral ensemble, or the cast of a theatre production.
The people who put on concerts here have a website which refers to it as "the world's most famous bandshell". I might be able to counter that claim if I thought about it hard enough, but not too many other bandshells come to mind right now.
Then there's playwright Tennessee Williams, known for such works as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending,, Small Craft Warnings, The Red Devil Battery Sign, and Sweet Bird of Youth. Though he was born and raised in Mississippi and lived most of his adult life in NYC, he got a little place in Key West and spent his happiest times there. Today the Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West pays tribute to him.
Throughout his life, Williams was very close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1943, as her behavior became increasingly out of control, she was subjected to a crude lobotomy by barbaric doctors and shrinks, and the results were (as you can expect) disastrous. She was subsequently institutionalized for the rest of her days.
The one enduring romantic relationship of Williams' unhappy life lasted fourteen years: one Frank Merlo, who became Williams' gay lover and personal secretary, provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would go insane. Soon after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with cancer and Williams returned to Florida to take care of him. He died on September 21, 1963.
As he had feared, following Merlo's death Williams descended into a period of near-catatonic depression and drug use, which eventually led to insanity and commitments to mental health facilities. He got injections of increasing amounts of amphetamines from the infamous Dr. Max Jacobson – known as "Dr. Feelgood" – and combined these with prescriptions for the dangerous Big-Pharma sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia. Williams' mental state, always fragile, became a full-blown mess after these mental hospitals and quack medicos got ahold of him.
And just as with Ernest Hemingway, the "treatment" Williams received not only failed to improve his condition, it made it far worse, resulting at last in a massive pharmaceutical overdose that some believe was a suicide. Another version of his death scenario states that he choked to death on the cap to a bottle of eyedrops, but Williams' friend Scott Kenan believes that someone in the coroner's office invented the bottle cap story to cover up the role prescription drugs played.
Usually, a "ghost tour" in any given city consists of a tour guide walking you or driving you around the city, showing you locales with haunted legends, and giving a dry discourse of specious details like "On this site in 1877, Annabelle Eglon's headless body was found in the garden with one of her shoes missing, and they say at night you can see her ghost walking the garden, looking for her lost shoe, if not her lost head." Really, you could stay home and look at the internet and save yourself the bother.
Not so in Mount Dora. There, the tour guides are actors dressed in period costume, and have woven an elaborate unified-field-theory of local paranormal legends, creating a fascinatingly theatrical mythology of how all the incidents are linked together by the characters they portray. Not only does their ninety-minute performance involve comedy, storytelling, improvisation and parlor magic, it concludes with a marionette theater show. These people are nuts, and God bless 'em.
The show's founders, Andrew Mullen and Hector De Leon, declare themselves the pioneers of the exciting new field of "Cracker Gothic", in much the same manner as when I coined the term "Appalachian Voodoo" in the 1990s to describe a number of overlapping cultural phenomena in my home state of Kentucky. The show's plot posits a rather Steampunk-ish man-made gateway in space and time, known as the Keyhole Vortex. This vortex, according to the story, teleports humans and ghosts back and forth between points on the time track and beyond. The vortex, they say, is the cause of all bizarre events throughout history, with Florida as its epicenter.
Hell, they've got me totally sold on the concept, but not as a fictional one.
Tampa's historic Falk Theatre, located at 428 W Kennedy Blvd, has more going for it than just being a cool old building and a still-thriving performance venue operated by the University of Tampa. It's also the alleged home of the ghost of Bessie Snavely, an actress who, it's said, committed suicide by hanging herself here in a dressing room on the third floor, way back in the day when this was a vaudeville hall called the Park Theatre.
As is customary for such legends, everyone who has a ghostly anecdote of their own to tell about the theatre is convinced that it simply must be Bessie - if for no other reason than it "fits in" with the now-established mythology. It's the sort of reverse-engineered ghostbusting that occurs when someone first thinks a place is haunted, then sets about consulting the historical record until a story of some past tragedy on the premises is found, and then the inevitable "aha! that explains it!" sets in and takes root, spreading and thriving in the rich soil provided by the naivete of each subsequent generation.
Unfortunately, not only have I been unable to find any valid reason why any hauntings of this building should absolutely be ascribed to the ghost of Bessie Snavely, I can't even find any evidence that an actress by this name ever existed, let alone killed herself in the 1930s. If there is indeed a ghost in the Falk Theatre, try not to piss it off any more than it already is by crediting its spooky deeds to the wrong person.
