SKULL ISLAND
Location: Skull Island is the local name of Solitario Island in Waccasassa Bay on the West Florida coast. The island community can be reached by ferry from Cedar Key, Florida, located on the mainland at the convergence of Highway 24 and Highway 347, eighty miles southwest of Gainesville, Florida.
Description of Place: Solitario Island is a small island community roughly ten and a half square miles in size with it's own courthouse, school and library. The ruins of an old Spanish fortress are on the cliff side of the island, dating back to the late Seventeenth Century. State employees maintain and preserve the fortress for tourists through the summer months. A resort community of about 1250, the island gets its name from the fact that the cliff side once vaguely resembled the face of the skull. Now, not so much since the erosion of the rock face by storms and tidal waves. Amidst the cottages, shops, restaurants and excursions on the island, the five-story tall Solitario Hotel is the top place of interest with its 200 rooms, grand ballroom, restaurants and beachside veranda. The opulent splendor of the Victorian-style structure provides full luxuries and annuities upon its guests.
Ghostly Manifestations: Owner and manager Lisa Van Hoff inherited her family hotel in 1977. Unlike London Tipton of the Tipton Hotel in Boston, her hometown, Lisa is not obsessed with the material opulence which her family life has afforded her. She is a shrewd and intelligent business woman, and her personality and nature makes her more than capable to withstand and weather the sort of stories that her guests report. At one point, she even invited her old class mate and best friend, Daphne Blake, to come down from Boston, Massachusetts and see if the ghosts were possibly real.
Despite the opulence of the hotel, it does have a foreboding and intimidating air about it, especially in certain parts of the older, original parts of the structure. It is something about the original wing of the hotel that guests report seeing a sinister figure in black lurking round corners and vanishing up the back staircase. This elusive figure has partially been captured on surveillance cameras, especially near the former Van Hoff family suite.
"The family suite was sealed up around 1810 for unknown reasons." Lisa admits. "All the furnishings and family possessions of the time were sealed up with it, but after I opened it back up, that was about the time that guests started seeing the presence, as I like to call it. Truth be told, I've never seen it, but I can feel the thick atmosphere of the room on me. It's like traveling back in time and and feeling the real world cut off from you."
In addition to the elusive figure in black, guests have seen phantom housekeepers turning their rooms down. A guest in 1987 entered her room to see a housekeeper turning down her room, and then vanishing before her eyes. Another guest in 1990 leaned out of his room calling to a similar female figure to bring him towels then noticed she didn't have any legs. Just empty space where her legs should have been. The petite, brunette figure wears the Victorian black and white uniform of the old Van Hoff estate the hotel was built from than the traditional light blue outfit. People who don't see her have testified to the sound of an old housekeeping cart with squeaking wheels rolling down the hall and bumping into walls. The true housekeeping staff has discovered their carts moved and rolled where they were last located.
In 1993, a young girl starting out for the first time on the top floor entered the housekeeping closet and was scared badly by the figure she surprised. Reportedly, she had pushed her cart in about so far, but when she ran into someone ahead of her, she looked up and noticed a brunette maid with white skin standing and staring her. She had black openings where her eyes should have been.
"At the time, I was covering paperwork for the hotel and had expected not to be disturbed." Lisa recalls the result but not the sighting. "All of a sudden, this bloodcurdling scream filled the hotel and this young lady came tearing down the stairs for the lobby, tripped and stumbled at the top of the third floor landing. She landed with a miserable crunch and was taken to the hospital with a broken arm and fractured neck amidst all these injuries. First week on the job and already on the hotel health plan, and she came out of the hospital telling the papers about the ghost she saw. Long story short, she wanted to quit, but I moved her to the restaurant staff."
No word yet as to whether the girl has seen the presence that has been prowling the kitchen. Two waiters, a chef and a dishwasher have noticed a non-descript figure in the cooler where the food is stored. It's a large cooler made especially for the hotel, and it seems to be haunted by an indiscernible figure rummaging and nibbling at the morsels of food in there. No one has seen him directly; he's always seen out of eyeshot, and he vanishes if you turn to look at him. Trays of hors d'oeuvres have been disturbed, boxes of cookies have been discovered opened, and both a small pie and a whole fryer have vanished.
One night, the closing chef reported he was coming through the short hall from the kitchen to the dining hall and ducked to avoid these bloody hands reaching out to grab him from the wall. There is no opening there, but a doorway used to be there that linked the kitchen to the second floor. It was sealed up during renovations to make room for the cooler, but Sara Blake, the restaurant greeter, who is an an avid ghost fan, doesn't think these hands belong to the cooler ghost. She thinks the hands are a place memory, a residual haunting imbedded in the structure, linked to a murder in the hotel's past.
During the 1985 to 1987 renovation, workmen discovered portions of supposedly human bone from the wall behind the kitchen. At the same time, they reported being startled by the figure of a woman in a long skirt as well as that of a tall, lean male figure in black traipsing through the closed off wings. Whether the female presence is the phantom housekeeper is unrevealed.
Down the beach and at the other end of the island is the old Castillo De Solitario. Sara's husband, Fred Blake, and his partner, Matt Rogers (no relation to the American Idol singer), are both state rangers in charge of the landmark and can also attest to the legends of ghosts in the old fortress. Once a fortress and later a prison, the seemingly desolate outpost overlooking the sea once once the location of intense human suffering and personal anguish from Spanish, Native American and British figures from its past. Rogers and his Great Dane routinely patrol the grounds and clean up the local graffiti and litter from bored teenagers, but every so often, something only his dog can see sends it cowering and running back to the on-site office.
"One of the more obscure legends of the island concerns a captured pirate named Old Iron Face who once sailed these waters fighting the Spanish Armada and sinking British frigates." Rogers beams with a fondness for storytelling. "According to the story I heard, half his face was blown away when he was finally captured, and the Spanish burned a metal skull to his head to keep from having to look at him. They then tossed him in a cell, but despite his grotesque deformity, he lived another twelve years trying to escape and leading the other prisoners in sieges against their Spanish captors. One general believing he was too much trouble to keep alive eventually dragged him out and shot him dead in cold blood to be done with him. When the British lay siege to the island, the ghost of old Iron Face was seen escaping the prison with the spirits of his last surviving shipmates.
"Since I've worked here," Rogers continues. "I've seen an eerie glow rolling from the old cells and down over the cliffs. I've smelled the scent of rotting flesh from the ramparts where human remains were once found and even heard voices screaming in Spanish. My Spanish is kind of weak, but it didn't sound good. During our last Independence Day festival in 2006, a tourist snapped a picture of her family at the fortress. In the background, you can see... kind of the image of a figure in rotting clothes and where his head should be is the black tarnished shape of a skull-like mask like Old Iron Face reportedly had. Around him, some people think they also see the dark distorted images of his crew... still standing by him..."
History: Spanish Conquistadors first used the island as a fortress in 1759 to house dissidents, criminals and other undesirables, such as captured local Indians. British soldiers who seized the island continued to use the outpost as a prison to hold the Spaniards that once ran the place, but they deserted it when it became too hard to maintain and released their prisoners to the American prison system. In 1895, Amadeus Van Hoff, a Dutch settler saw the scenic end of the island as something more than a prison and acquired legal custody of the island to create an estate that has stayed in his family until recent years when it was transformed into a resort. The idyllic setting proved too irresistible to leave as fishermen and artists made their homes on the island. The resort soon became known as Solitario Hotel, and in 1958, the remains of the nearly intact fortress on the island became part of the National Record of Historic Locations.
Identity of Ghosts: Linda C. Dinkley of the Levy County Historical Society was kind enough to help research the complicated history of the hotel for the Collinsport Ghost Society. no historical records could be found to bring old Iron Face out of legend and into history, but a lot of history could be found documenting the history of the Van Hoff family and that of the hotel. Far from the image of propriety that the family has come to represent, it was suggested that Amadeus Van Hoff departed his Dutch home to escape the shadow of nobleman Johannes Huff, his semi-historical Fifteenth Century ancestor who reportedly terrorized his native Brussels abducting young women to feed his vampirism fetish. Departing the Netherlands for Amadeus Van Hoff was not so much seeking a new life in Florida, but a way of getting out of his ancestor's dark shadow. Lisa Van Hoff doesn't acknowledge or speak of her family's hideous history, but Johannes' portrait and the urn with his ashes are in the hotel attic. According to Leon Van Hoff, learning of the family history reportedly bothered Lisa so much at one point that she had sleep-walking dreams that she had vampiric tendencies. It is his conviction that the ghostly figure in black near the old family suite is Johannes staying close to his ashes.
Other lurid stories from the hotel concern the 1833 slaying of a Van Hoff family housekeeper by an itinerant Spanish sailor who abducted and murdered several women on the island. His persecution was so violent and swift that his remains were fed to wild dogs. Dinkley believes he may have concealed his earlier murders in the hotel cellar.
An old 1953 article also describes the ghosts of Solitario Hotel, but it doesn't make reference to Iron Face, Johannes or the 1833 murders. It instead describes at least eleven odd deaths by employees who worked here, but none of these deaths are verifiable. Seven recorded deaths ranging from accident, heat stroke, drowning, heart attack and even one suicide have been discovered, suggesting that some employees and guests still return to the hotel even after death.
Source/Comments: Scooby Doo, Where Are You (Episodes: "Vampire Bats and Scaredy Cats" and "Creepy Case of Old Iron Face"). History and phenomenon for the hotel based on the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, California, Schloss Altebar in Bavaria, Germany, the Wedgwood Inn in Morristown, New Jersey and the Buxton Inn in Granville, Ohio. Data for the fortress based on Alcatraz in San Francisco, California, Eastern Stare Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Castillo De San Marcos, St Augustine, Florida.
The Scooby Doo episode, "Vampire Bats and Scaredy Cats," with its stories of vampires was probably partially inspired by the ABC-TV series, "Dark Shadows." Lisa Van Hoff and Uncle Leon seem to partially resemble actress Nancy Barrett and actor Louis Edmonds of that series. The cartoon vampire also superficially resembled actor David Selby who played a werewolf on the show. See the Weatherby Estate for another DS-parallel from "Scooby Doo, Where Are You."
Skull Island is not to be confused with the mythical Skull Island (King Kong - 1933), a semi-legendary "land that time forgot" somewhere southwest of Sumatra.