Just in Time for Halloween, an Evening Stroll With Our Famous Ghosts

Beginning this Saturday, the region's dead rise, dress for the occasion, and start talking.

They've had a hundred years to get their stories straight.

And what a guest list!

Main Street Fort Pierce has rounded up the region's most storied dead, cast them with volunteers in period dress, and posted them around the old downtown to tell all in the first person.

Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance star who spent her last years there. Edwin Binney, the Crayola tycoon. A trio of pirates who came sniffing after the 1715 Fleet's silver. Navy frogmen. And Alfred Hair and Mary Ann Carroll, the Highwaymen painters who sold Florida sunsets out of car trunks.

Then there's the Ashley Gang, the bank-robbing, rum-running outlaws whose spree ended in gunfire on the Sebastian River bridge in 1924, courtesy of a Fort Pierce sheriff. He was our sheriff too. Until 1925, Vero took its orders from Fort Pierce, courthouse and all, which makes all these ghosts partly ours.

Each tour is an hour and about half a mile of strolling.

Five routes this year:

• Saturday, Oct. 17, noon to 1:45 p.m. WPA, WWII & The Artists that Captured Florida

• Wednesday, Oct. 21, 5:30 to 7:15 p.m. Edgartown Frontier or Cantown Frontier

• Thursday, Oct. 22, 5:30 to 7:15 p.m. Florida Land Boom or The Untamed Coast

  
  

Tickets are $15 a tour, groups set off every 15 minutes, and reservations are a must.

Book at mainstreetfortpierce.org/ghost-walk or call 772-466-3880.