The Wiccan and the Ghosts of Haunted Fort Lauderdale

 

“I am a Wiccan and I believe in the after life,” says Scarlet Aslan, one of the new guides at Ghosts, Mysteries and Legends of Old Fort Lauderdale. “And no, Aslan, is not a name I adopted from the Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. It is the name I was born with.” And it works for her – part mystery and part magic . This odd character trait gives her an advantage other ghost tour guides do not have.

“I believe in the afterlife,” she says, “and that is a part of my daily life. The spirits are always with me. As they are with all of us.”

She adds, “Ghosts have felt the need to reveal themselves to me since I was four years old. My first visitation was a great aunt. I didn’t realize she was a ghost until I told my mom about the lady in my room. My mom gathered up the old photo albums and asked me to show her who was in my room. The lady I selected was my great aunt who had passed three days before I was born.”

The Wiccan and the Ghost Tour. How can you go wrong? A guide from which one can get a proper introduction to the world of spirit, an integral part of her way of life. Not your usual ghost tour guide.

Just after the sun sets, she awaits members of the tour on the NE corner of Las Olas and Andrews in downtown Fort Lauderdale. She is easily spotted. She says, “I wear the usual attire for a female ghost tour guide: black dress, cape, top hat and I carry a lantern.” But there is more. Every night she carries several aides to connect her tour with the nether world. These include semi-precious stones, crystals and incense.

Her personal tour signature is burning incense. This, she says, arouses the curiosity of the citizens of the the “other side.” She states that the spirits recognize her incense and when they smell it, guests always get more orbs in their photos.

To help search down the ghosts, Aslan uses the ancient technique of hunting vibrations of the spirit world using copper divining rods. She also uses the more modern laser thermometer to pick up temperature changes. “There are a couple of places where there are almost always dramatic temperature reductions of 30 and 40 degrees.” At one of the places, she said, a young boy saw a ghost pass from one house to another. But he was not fast enough with his camera to get a photo.

The tour takes about an hour and a half. She gives a little bit of history on the site guests are viewing and then tell the stories of the mysteries and legends that are attached to that site. “I can usually feel the energy presence of ‘the others,’ so a lot of times when we are all walking I will say take pictures! I also try to bring my camera as well. So if I am taking pictures …. you should be taking pictures!”

Aslan finalizes with, “Come with an open mind and enjoy the history and the ghosts of Fort Lauderdale that make it interesting!”

Get more information at http://www.fortlauderdaleghosttours.com/ and at MySpace, myspace.com/fortlauderdaleghosthunt where you can see a video of excerpts of the tour.

Olga Marie Pathinas-Brovanovitch, born in Moscow, U.S.S.R. in 1954 to two members of the Communist Party, was trained in espionage in a training town in the Urals, where she learned Arabic, French, Polish and English with natural accents. She has written articles, using nom de plumes, on Chinese international relations, the central banks and how capitalism does not take care of itself.

The Ship of Fire

On a certain evening every year, at the mouth of the wide Neuse River, a large bright object speeds into view. It looks like a sailing ship being destroyed by fire, its deck and masts in blazing outline. The apparition disappears, then reappears, then again disappears for another year. It burns furiously but is not consumed.

It is the ship of the Palatines. The Palatines were a group of German Protestants who left England in 1710 to settle New Bern. As the vessel crossed the Atlantic, the prosperous Palatines, pretending to be poor, hid their gold coins and silver dishes from the eyes of the ship’s sinister captain and crew. When the Palatines caught sight of the shore which they believed to be their future home, so excited were they that up from the hold and out from hiding places came all their belongings in preparation for landing. Unwisely displayed on the deck was their precious wealth, all of it in full view of the corrupt captain and his first mate.

Quickly the captain formed a plan. He announced to the passengers than no landing could be made until the morrow. The disappointed Palatines once more hid their valuables and lay down to a sound sleep in anticipation of soon landing at their destination. When all was quiet, the captain gathered his crew together and revealed to them his plan. They would murder every Palatine aboard–the young and the old, the women and children as well as the men–then gather together the gold and silver, set afire the ship filled with its dead, and escape in the lifeboats.

The strike was sudden. Many Palatines were knifed before they awoke and in a very few moments every one of them was dead. As planned, the ship was set afire, and the murderers pushed off in the small boats. From a distance they looked back at the ship. It burned brighter and brighter, the brilliant blaze of the fire shooting into the air, but the vessel did not sink into the water. And then the thing began to move.

“It continued to burn all night,” according to an old account, “–speeding on with the wind,–now passing out from sight, and anon, visible, flaming forever, back again, on the very spot where the crime had been committed. With the dawn of day, it had ceased to burn,–but there it stood, erect as ever, with the spars, sails, masts, unconsumed,–everything in place, but everything blackened, charred.” At sundown the flames leaped up again–“a ship on fire that would not burn!”

The frightened murderers could bear no more. They abandoned their boats on the bank of the river and fled into the forest. There they and their descendants lived on their “ill-gotten spoils.” To this day the crime has not been avenged, and so every year on a certain evening the burning ship appears off New Bern, and so it will continue to appear till the blood of the Palatines has been paid for in kind.

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