Originally Published Oct. 31, 1991

JOHN LESTER
Tribune Staff Writer

BROOKSVILLE - Everyone in every city has a favorite story about someplace that is stalked by the souls of crippled children, wailing women or mangled men.

There’s supposed to be a ghost on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. An old projectionist still stalks the Tampa Theatre. Museum visitors in Brooksville tell stories of hearing a child crying.

Brooksville seems to have a scary story about every old house in town - the ones that have not been turned into law offices.

Most - if not all - of the stories about haunted houses are, of course, unfounded. But the tales are passed on and on, enhanced each time they are told.

Halloween is the day that haunted houses are the most haunted, the day that spooky stories are most spooky. It’s the one day when ghosts can roam at will, appearing in windows, scraping at ceilings and making all sorts of things move or fly across the room.

If there are indeed such things as spooks, spirits, apparitions, ghosts and ghouls, this is the day they will come out to play.

In the old Weeks House on the corner of Lemon and West Fort Dade avenues in Brooksville, the annual stories of goblins running rampant have risen again.

The scarred, yellow building has been vacant for more than 10 years and sold five times since 1978. The floors are rotten, the walls are falling and the broken weather vane on the roof completes the image of a house perfect for haunting.

The current owner lives in Maine, and family members who have lived in the house say they have warm memories of the place.

But local lore has it instead stalked by the undead. Some say there’s a woman who stands in the front window. Others say they have heard noises and seen figures through the cloudy windows.

“We had always heard my grandmother’s house was haunted,” said Lin Brightly, the now-grown granddaughter of Jim and Ava Weeks. “I think it has to do with a big old house that you can hear the wind through.”

She discards the rumors of haunts but, if so, she is sure the spirits are not evil.

“It was just a warm and wonderful place,” she said. “I would think the spirits would like a good place.”

Her father, Howard Weeks, said the rumors started when vagrants passing through town stopped at the vacant building for a place to stay. They often brought candles and residents were spooked by a flickering in the window.

Down the street from the old Weeks House is the Heritage Museum, another ominous building. Visitors to the museum always ask about the young girl who died there in the 1800s and can still be heard crying for her mother.

Such tales of terror are not confined to old towns such as Brooksville. Just about any place that looks spooky is bound to be “haunted.”

The ghost of projectionist Foster “Fink” Finley has been reported to be still making his rounds through the Tampa Theatre. Legend says he died in 1965 and decided to remain in the building where he spent much of his life working.

One of the favorite ghosts in Pinellas County has not been seen for years, but today is sure to bring out the tales again.

The Skyway Hitchhiker is a girl with long, blonde hair who used to stand near the entrance to the old Sunshine Skyway Bridge, thumbing for rides. People would stop and let her in the back seat and then when they turned around to ask her where to let her out, she was gone.

Or so the story goes.