SIT IN THIS CHAIR AT MIDNIGHT — If You Dare: The Devil’s Chair of Cassadaga

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — It is, honestly, just a bench. A big red-brick bench in the Lake Helen–Cassadaga Cemetery, built in the 1920s so a grieving widower with arthritis could sit and rest on his walks to his wife’s grave.

Florida turned it into the Devil’s Chair.

The legends, as catalogued in Charlie Carlson’s “Weird Florida” and told ever since: sit in the chair at midnight and the Devil himself may speak to you — or you may hear the voices of the dead. And leave an unopened can of beer on the chair overnight, and by morning the beer will be gone… with the can still sealed.

Now for the part that makes this story better, not worse: the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp’s own Rev. Louis Gates — a man who talks to the dead for a living — admits the beer legend got a lot of help from the living. As a teenager in the 1960s and 70s, he and his friends hid in the cemetery, drank the offerings, and set the empty cans back on the chair while the believers ran for their cars. “We did get quite a bit of beer,” Gates told News 6.

The cemetery, home to founder George Colby’s grave and generations of Spiritualists, now posts guards on Halloween, and mediums have been known to block the road. A mourning bench, a thirsty legend, and a confession from a reverend — that’s Florida folklore at its finest.

Join the conversation: Would you sit in the Devil’s Chair at midnight? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.

Sources: Wikipedia (The Devil’s Chair urban legend); News 6 Orlando; “Weird Florida” by Charlie Carlson; Authentic Florida.

Illustration: Florida Chatter (no free photograph of the actual chair exists — this is an artist’s rendering, not the real location).