Ghost Stories of St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Pinellas County: Tales from a Haunted Peninsula (Haunted America)

Does the restless ghost of a murder victim haunt a Gulfport home? Does a doomed pirate search for his lost treasure at John's Pass? Are sea captains and Civil War soldiers still combing the area, years after their deaths?

With wit and style, the Queen of Haunts, Deborah Frethem, calls upon years of experience as the general manager and guide of Tampa Bay Ghost Tours to present legends of sinister deeds and whispers of the past from Florida's haunted peninsula

Captain Hubbard

In October of 1929, a traveling carnival arrived in Pass-A-Grille to play a one-night stand. The carnival was owned by George and Anna Hubbard. Their plan was to entertain in the small Gulf beach town and then move on to their winter quarters in Miami. Unfortunately, the very day they set up their tents in Pass-A-Grille was "Black Tuesday," the day the American stock market crashed. George Hubbard reasoned that if people didn't have enough money to eat, they would not be spending money on traveling carnivals. So he sold everything that he could and purchased a small hotel in Pass-A-Grille. Like so many before them, George and Anna Hubbard became permanent Florida residents.

At the time they arrived, their young son, Wilson, was sixteen years old. He helped the family during those early days of the Great Depression by doing a lot of fishing. What the family didn't need for food he would sell. In just one year he had saved enough of his fishing money to buy five little rowboats and forty cane fishing poles. Thus began the career of one of the greatest fishing guides of the Gulf beaches.

Captain Wilson Hubbard ran his business from the Eighth Avenue pier in Pass-A-Grille until 1975 when he moved his boats up to John's Pass Village. In 1976 he opened the Friendly Fisherman, a seafood restaurant bearing the same name as one of his boats. According to his daughter Patricia, Wilson was also the first person in the area to start a "dolphin watch" boat ride. She said that at the time people told him he was crazy. "Nobody is going to pay to go out in a boat to see dolphin," people said. Of course, now there are dolphin sightseeing cruises making people smile up and down the Gulf beaches.

Wilson passed away in 1994. But his presence continues to be felt throughout John's Pass Village. It seems he likes to return to check on the legacy he left behind.

A portrait of the captain hangs on the wall outside the Friendly Fisherman. The image is not a frightening one. The captain looks kind and a bit mischievous. However, no matter where you stand, if you walk from one side of the portrait to the other, the eyes of the captain will follow you! Several people have claimed that the portrait has actually winked at them.

Inside the restaurant there is a small shelf near the service bar. When Wilson was alive this shelf was home to a bottle of rum, which he frequently used to spike his coffee. Of course since his death, there is no reason to keep rum on the shelf. Drinking glasses are now stored on the shelf. But, according to Wilson's daughter Kathleen, a few times a week those glasses rattle for no apparent reason. Often, one will fall off the shelf and break. Is it the Captain searching for his bottle of rum?

A former night manager by the name of Trent says that he had several encounters with Wilson Hubbard when he worked at the Friendly Fisherman. The most vivid one was very late one evening after the restaurant had closed, and everyone except Trent had already gone home. At about 3:00 in the morning, Trent heard a slow, even, deliberate knocking coming from inside one of the walls. "Not fast and irregular like a pipe rattling," he said. "The kind of knocking that only a human hand could do." He decided to "just get out of there." But when he went to enter his exit code into the restaurant security system, the system flashed back that it could not set because "motion was detected" in the empty restaurant. Trent walked through the entire restaurant looking for the source of the motion. There was nothing and no one to be seen. Once again he tried to enter his code, and once again the message of "motion detected" flashed back at him. He decided at that point to just get out and lock the doors behind him.

The next morning when the day shift arrived, the alarm was correctly set. Could Captain Hubbard's ghost have felt bad about driving Trent away and set the alarm himself to protect his restaurant?

Renovation and remodeling often make ghosts more agitated. At the present time, the John's Pass Boardwalk and Hubbard's Marina are undergoing a full-scale reconstruction. And Captain Hubbard has been seen more frequently as a result. Besides his usual haunts (no pun intended), his image has been seen on his dolphin-watching boat, The Sea Adventure. One of the employees of the local gambling cruise ship has reported that on several evenings, when the cruise returned in the wee hours of the morning, she looked at the empty and locked The Sea Adventure and saw the shadowy image of Captain Hubbard standing at the wheel.

The image of the captain is easy to identify. He was quite tall and slender and usually had his gray hair tucked up under a sea captain's hat. He also always wore one red sock and one green sock, as a reflection of the port and starboard navigation lights on a boat. Kathleen told me that he wore those socks with his tuxedo when he walked her down the aisle. And his son Mark said, "We buried him wearing those socks."