Originally Published Oct. 31, 1994

DIRK LAMMERS
Tribune Staff Writer

TAMPA - An actress from the 1930s floats through the Falk Theatre, searching for a lost love.

Shadowy figures, creaking staircases, strange noises and babies’ cries haunt the Biglow-Helms mansion during its 86-year history.

A fleet of approaching ships in Hillsborough Bay vanishes before the bewildered eyes of an 1800s army colonel and his entire camp.

These tales are among a handful of ghost stories attached to some of Tampa’s historic landmarks.

The scarcity of lurid local legends, says professor William Heim, can be attributed to the city’s relatively brief history.

In W.K. MacNeal’s recent book, “Ghost Stories from the American South,” Florida boasts just a listing in Miami and one in Tavares.

“We don’t have the sequence of generations that leads to legend and folklore,” says Heim, an associate professor of English at the University of South Florida whose specialty is the history of Western holidays. “In England, it’s hard to find a square foot of land that doesn’t have a ghost story attached to it.”

But while the stories may not be well-known, they are out there, says Flora Zbar, a USF associate English professor and expert on classical origins of modern beliefs.

Zbar often gets calls, usually from residents of private homes and apartments, about strange occurrences.

“People don’t like to talk about this sort of thing,” she said. “Just about everybody is interested, but few want to admit to an interest or a belief.”

Bessie’s love

It’s a late night in the late ‘70s and Rosemary Orlando is the last to leave the University of Tampa’s Falk Theatre. The director of the Alice People theater group was often the last to lock up and head home after a night of intense rehearsals or emotional performances.

Orlando says she was never alone.

A lost soul desperately searching for her lost love floats throughout the theater. It’s a coldness, an unexplainable yet non-threatening presence Orlando feels. It’s “Bessie Snavely.”

Years later, theater and speech professor Gary Luter is in the Falk Theatre, just before dawn.

As he checks backstage lighting, a clamorous rhythmic beat diverts his attention to the third floor. He looks up the four-story staircases and sees the doors of an unused dressing room slamming open and closed in rapid succession.

“I thought someone had been up there,” Luter recalls.

It’s Bessie’s old dressing room. He calls campus security, but nothing is there. Must be Bessie.

The legend of Bessie Snavely dates back to the 1930s, when the former Park Theater, built as a vaudeville house, was a home to touring companies.

Snavely, an actress, reportedly grew frustrated about an unrequited love she had for a theater “techie” and hanged herself in the third floor dressing room.

A plaque bearing her name adorned her dressing room door for years until someone stole it. Her room sat unused and avoided, especially by techies responsible for backstage lighting, sound, set design - and Bessie’s sorrow.

“Nobody really liked to go up to her dressing room,” says Orlando, now artistic director of the Warehouse Theater in the Channel District. “It
was always kind of cold.”

Some psychics believe a spirit of a person who dies a sudden, violent death will stick around the location of the killing, Zbar says.

In these cases, the spirit, which often does not know how to get beyond this state, is stuck between two worlds not knowing that time has passed, the theory suggests.

Theaters are a popular locale for ghost stories. A spirit of Foster “Fink” Finley, an old projectionist, is believed to have stuck around Tampa Theatre after his 1965 death.

Biglow-Helms House

If only the walls could speak.

The ones of the stately Biglow-Helms House would no doubt orate the diverse history of a gray stone mansion that has served as a family home, a hospital, an artists’ studio and an office complex.

If those walls have maintained their silence, folklore suggests that some entity or entities have been trying to keep alive some of the mansion’s historic past.

Silas Leland Biglow, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native who moved to Tampa in 1884 and became an original city councilman, built the mansion at Gandy and Bayshore boulevards in 1908 as a family home.

When Biglow died inside the house in 1917, his widow, Mattie, sold the 10,000-square-foot house to Tampa physician John Sullivan Helms.

But some believe Biglow’s spirit never left, sticking around with the house he built for his family. Stories passed through the generations say that some may have seen Biglow’s ghost inside the majestic mansion, says his great-great-granddaughter, Kirsten Love, 28.

When Helms took over the home, he converted it into Bayside Hospital, the first private hospital on Florida’s West Coast. The building remained a hospital until 1927.

Like theaters, hospitals experience a variety of emotions such as grief, worry, terror and joy. The energy generated by those emotions over the years often manifests as echoes of the past, Zbar says.

Some claim baby’s cries could be heard throughout Biglow mansion after it served as Bayside Hospital. Others reported unknown figures that seemed to loom around the estate.

“They have a feeling of being watched,” Zbar says.

In 1927, the mansion again became a private home. Portrait artist Jack Wilson lived and worked in the home until his death in 1965. The house sat abandoned for more than two decades as several owners pondered over bold yet unfulfilled plans for its future.

The vacant estate became an eyesore in the affluent Bayshore neighborhood and for years the building was a favorite target of vandals. The mansion’s walls were covered with graffiti and satanic symbols, and developers found candle wax and blood on the walls - signs of satanic rituals.

In 1988, a Swiss family bought the mansion and designated it a landmark. Uneasy with its past and recent graffiti, developers had a priest bless the structure prior to ground breaking.

Workers lifted the 500-ton mansion off its base, moved it to the front of the 1.9 acre lot and built 24 luxury apartments behind it. The mansion, called the Biglow-Helms House, now serves as a rental hall, a catering facility and offices.

The spirits have reportedly been quiet.

The mirage?

Old Fort Brooke, now the site of a downtown parking garage of the same name, is the setting for what may be Tampa’s oldest recorded ghost story. Army officer George A. McCall tells the tale in a letter to his father, dated March 28, 1823.

Col. George Brooke and his officers were stationed at the head of Hillsborough Bay when a fleet of distant but slowly approaching vessels emerged from the mist.

As the image intensified into a discernible view of five ships, Brooke surmised that Gen. Scott was visiting as part of his inspection tour of the Southern states.

The commander quickly ordered his soldiers to shave, don full uniforms and be ready in a half hour to give the general a cordial welcome.

“Where are the vessels?” one officer suddenly yelled.

Puzzled soldiers rubbed their eyes as the ships vanished from the bewildered gaze of Brooke and the entire camp.

As the camp later pondered what had happened, McCall offered a scientific interpretation.

The ships were a mirage of five approaching sandhill cranes, which appeared larger through the mist. As they saw McCall standing with his double-barrel gun, the birds, looking like ships, flew off in unison.

McCall wrote that Col. Brooke agreed with his theory of the phenomenon. Not all the soldiers followed suit.

“There were many who talked much of the spirits of a ship’s crew reported to have been murdered by pirates off the mouth of the bay not long before,” he wrote.