THE LADY WITH THE LANTERN: St. Augustine’s Rum-Runner Ghost Is Still Signaling

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — On the bayfront in St. Augustine stands a white Mediterranean Revival inn where, boaters swear, a lantern still swings on the roof at night — a signal meant for smugglers who have been gone for ninety years.

The Casablanca Inn was built in 1914 as the Matanzas Hotel. Around 1920 a widow bought it, ran it as the Bayfront Boarding House, and later renamed it the Casablanca Inn. Then came Prohibition — and St. Augustine became a landing point for rum-runners bringing liquor up from Cuba.

As the legend tells it, the widow made a deal with the bootleggers. Her boarding house hosted traveling salesmen — and, awkwardly, the federal G-men in town hunting the very smugglers she was helping. So she became their lookout: when the agents were around, she climbed to the roof and swung a lantern, warning the boats offshore to stay away. The rum-runners paid her well, and by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the story says, she had made her fortune.

She is buried, the story goes, in Huguenot Cemetery. But guests and staff report beds unmade by unseen hands, lamps switching on by themselves, a misty female figure — and out on Matanzas Bay, a light swinging on the roof at dusk, still warning ships that will never come.

Join the conversation: Florida’s Prohibition coast is full of stories like this one. Which should we dig into next? Send your stories and tips to tips@floridachatter.com.

Sources: Legends of America; Casablanca Inn histories; St. Augustine ghost tour records.

Photo: Kiran891, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).