The haunting season is here!

          After reading John Marc Carr's informative book, Haunted Fort Lauderdale, I decided to take the next step--I went on his ghost tour. I gathered my friends Kathy, Yaddyra and Lou (I was too scared to go alone) and we met up with Carr and other locals and tourists in front of the Cheesecake Factory one Saturday night in July. Our first stop was the Stranahan House.
          I discovered that Carr goes into even more detail on the tour than he does in the book. For example, Carr brought an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) player with him, and allowed us to listen to Ivy Stranahan's ghostly voice. He also goes into more detail about the history of the various locations-we learned much about a young woman named Pink who died in the Stranahan house, jilted by her two-timing husband. While the book briefly touched on the incident, on the tour, Carr's detailed account made us feel the pain of the poor young woman's final hours as he described her bleeding to death after childbirth.
            A couple odd things happened on the tour. First, a teenage girl among us fainted in front of the Stranahan House, just as Carr was beginning to tell us about the ghost of Ivy Stranahan. Yaddyra and Lou claim it was odd how she fainted-it was in slow motion, as if some unseen force was gently lowering her to the ground. At the King Cromartie House, which is said to be haunted by a "pink lady," several members of our group claim to have seen the curtains moving slightly. I have to say I didn't see anything I couldn't chalk up to an air conditioning vent, but Carr explained that on a previous tour, people saw the curtains open more dramatically, as if by unseen hands. A video of this can be seen on Carr's MySpace page. 
           Can I tell you first hand that Fort Lauderdale is haunted? Nope. But I can tell you this--a dinner out on Las Olas Boulevard will never be the same for me.

           --Susan Parsons

           As Florida counts down the days until hurricane season ends we remember that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the tragic 1928 hurricane that was perhaps best memorialized in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's characters, black migrant workers, travel from northern Florida to Lake Okeechobee to supplement their meager incomes, only to meet their deaths when the hurricane strikes. Nonfiction accounts of the storm include Disasters and Heroic Rescues: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival Florida by E. Lynne Wright which summarizes the events of the storm. "...Radio reports about a storm doing extensive damage in Puerto Rico" reached the Southeast coast Florida. "Some took half-hearted precautions, but mostly people simply remained alert...in the midst of a [radio] announcement that there was no longer a danger to Florida [a radio announcer] broke off in mid-sentence, saying the storm had hit Palm Beach and it was devastating." Wright explains that an already saturated Lake Okeechobee poured into surrounding communities when "dikes being banks of muck from five feet to nine feet high" were no match for the storm. Entire families were lost as they struggled to survive the winds and rains on their rooftops. Wright estimates the death toll between 1800 and 3000.
           Two books chronicle the storm in detail. Black Cloud by Eliot Kleinberg includes a first hand account from Carmen Salvatore, a former soldier and survivor of the storm whose house was ripped up from the foundation during the storm. Robert Mykle's Killer Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 reveals photos of downtown Palm Beach, which was reduced to rubble. All of the books explain that the storm showed the disparity between blacks and whites at the time. While bodies of the whites were buried in a local graveyard, the blacks were thrown into a mass grave. Black workers were instrumental in the clean up. Wright explains that a temporary lift of Prohibition was permitted in the area because "no one, including officers of the law, would deny workers a drink of whiskey if would help them" cope with "the hard physical labor, the heat, the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the stench and sight of decomposed bodies and body parts, the occasional heartbreak of identifying those bodies or body parts of those as belonging to someone they loved..."

       --Susan Parsons

FBR’s Esther Martinez is in Ybor City today attending Deep Carnivale: A Festival of Words.  The summer doldrums are over, and we’re happy to be entering Florida’s season of writer’s conferences, book festivals, and book fairs.  We have many listed on our Literary Links page, but I'm sure there are others we don't yet know about. We ask organizers to send us their notices and materials. (See the About Us page for contact info.)

    —Lynne Barrett 

    When I first met Stuart McIver and his sweet wife Joan (a fine writer in her own right) back in the 90s, he was already elderly and something of a Florida institution, the quiet inheritor of the traditions of Rawlings and Douglas.  Carolinian by birth but Floridian in his soul, he took life’s scenic road, as his wife recently said to Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Tom Swick.  His 12 books about Florida are essential to any who love and would know our state.
    Much enamored of all McIver’s work, I particularly enjoyed his 3-volume Florida Chronicles (Dreamers, Schemers & Scalawags; Murder In the Tropics; Touched By the Sun).  I would bump into him from time-time at book fairs and readings and writer’s conferences and he always remembered me and happily shared tales of olde Florida, and encouraged me in my own writings.  My personalized signed copies of the Chronicles stand proudly on my home-office shelf.
    McIver was best known for his Hemingway’s Key West and Death in The Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America’s First Martyr to Environmentalism.
    A gentleman, a charmer, a scribe, known as "South Florida’s tribal storyteller," Stuart McIver knew and loved Florida with a rare passion. He was what they mean when they call a man authentic.  He will be missed. His slightly outdated—but charming and authentic like him—website can be found at http://www.stuartmciver.com/
        —John Bond

John Bond's story "T-Bird" appears in Best American Mysteries 2007, edited by Carl Hiassen, and will be published as a chapbook in October by ConJelCo Publishing. His reconsideration of John D. MacDonald's Condominium appears on our Classic Florida Reads page.

    The Florida Primary is Jan 29--ten days from now.   Results on the Republican side will be a big deal, while the national Democratic Party is not counting the primary because the date was moved ahead of their desired schedule.   Today, we debut our Florida Politics page, with an interview by Tom DeMarchi of Richard Grayson, fiction-writer-turned-write-in-candidate.  And I had the pleasure of reviewing Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans, in the process learning a lot about how Florida's political scene got the way it is.  People from elsewhere constantly ask me about our politics, where we can brag that we lead the nation in both drama and absurdity. 

            —Lynne Barrett