door, which remains closed. At other times guests will see a woman standing in the hall, and when they address her, she vanishes.
A crystal chandelier, a stunning antique piece, lights the front hallway. Hetty is a welcoming person, but occasionally someone with negative energy will come into the house. The chandelier will begin to rattle and sway, and the person will inexplicably get tense and nervous. Most often they just leave without checking in. Those who do stay usually have bad experiences and decide to check out.
Jeffery Beane* and a friend checked in one weekend and were staying in Room 18. The first morning they were there, Jeffery awoke to see a woman standing at the foot of the bed looking in the mirror and brushing her hair. Shocked, he reached over to wake up his friend.
The woman turned and stared at him, put her finger to her lips and whispered, “Don’t wake your friend.”
Startled, he grabbed his friend’s arm and started to sit up. Hetty was immediately at his side and covered his mouth with her hand. He jerked back and flew out of bed, and Hetty evaporated instantly.
John Diebold is the current owner and ran the place himself for many years. Steve and Jackie Mackiewcz visited every year for ten years until John finally lured them to Key West permanently to be the innkeepers.
Sue and I visited the bed-and-breakfast on a warm September afternoon. We sat on the porch with Steve in comfortable wicker chairs enjoying a cool breeze and watching the tourists pass by. Steve related some of his and Jackie’s experiences in the mansion. On their first night as innkeepers Jackie saw Hetty walk right through a wall. Not long after, Jackie’s laptop with a fingerprint and retina security system booted up all by itself. Recently, Steve and Jackie were enjoying a quiet evening together, sitting on a couch reading. Jackie got up to go to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Steve looked in her direction and was surprised to see her shadow moving in the opposite direction. As she rose, her shadow was actually sitting down. Moments later, after Jackie returned and sat down again, the TV came on—to a porn station!
And then there are the keys. Steve’s and Jackie’s keys continually disappear and eventually reappear in odd places. The week before our visit, Steve went to retrieve his car keys to run an errand. They were gone from the peg in the kitchen where he normally keeps them. Two days later, one of the staff found them on the front steps.
In spite of the sometimes startling experiences that staff and guests have had at Marrero’s, most seem to enjoy having Hetty around. It’s all in good fun, and very few get upset from their experiences with her.
As one guest put it, “It’s almost like visiting my grandmother’s house. It seems that Hetty gives the mansion a homey, lived-in feel. I like having her around. If nothing else, she’s a great topic of conversation.”
Spotlight on The Everglades
Everglades National Park is a vast, million-and-a-half acre wilderness, which covers most of south Florida. It’s ironic that the state’s most populated area lies just to the east of its most isolated.
On the evening of December 29, 1972, Eastern Flight 401, a Lockheed L1011 Tri-Star, was flying into Miami International Airport. Captain Robert Loft and Second Officer Don Repo began their approach and were lowering the landing gear when the captain noticed that the nose gear light and some of the other landing gear lights were not illuminated. That indicated that the nose and other landing gear were not down and locked in position. Captain Loft so informed the control tower, which directed him to circle the airport at an altitude of two thousand feet.
Although the altimeter and auto-pilot indicators were both lit, the crew realized too late that the plane was rapidly descending. The last, chilling words from the flight recorder were the captain’s: “What? We’re at two thousand feet, right … Hey, what’s happening here? Tower … Impact!” Then Flight 401 disappeared. The plane had crashed into Shark River Slough in the Everglades. Ninety-eight of the 163 people aboard, including the entire crew, perished.
Shortly after the accident, an Eastern Airline executive was flying to Miami on another Tri-Star similar to the Flight 401 plane. He sat in first class next to an Eastern Airline pilot in uniform, and assumed the man was headed home. Not unusual. But the pilot sat staring out the window, even when the executive tried to converse with him. Finally, the pilot turned to face him, and, aghast, the executive recognized the face of Captain Robert Loft. Instantly, the ghost evaporated.
Immediately after the crash, cleanup crews went into the Everglades to search for human remains and remove wreckage. The crews worked late into the night under the strong glare of large search lights, and would often hear screams, moans, and whimpering coming from the slough. Very unnerving.
One evening, a crew member in a johnboat heard moans coming from an area thick with saw grass. He guided his boat to the spot where he thought the sounds were coming from. As he plowed into the grass, he was horrified to see in the dark, tannin-stained waters the eyeless, bleached-white face of a man, his mouth open as if screaming. The crewman quickly poled his boat back out of the grass and screamed to his companions, “I found a body! I found a body!” When the others rushed to his aid, they saw nothing. There was no body.
Over the years since the crash, many have seen both Captain Loft and Second Officer Don Repo on flights to south Florida. And even to this day, airboat captains who run tours to the site hear moans and see ghastly faces in the dark waters of these haunted swamps in the Everglades.
CHAPTER 6
Historic Biltmore Hotel of Coral Gables
MIAMI
MIAMI WAS A NICE CHANGE after our time in the Keys, still leisurely but a little more exciting. Miami proper has a population of less than four hundred thousand, but Miami-Dade County has over two million people, and it’s difficult to know which city you’re in as you drive from Homestead to West Palm Beach. The area has a colorful history, which goes back only to the late 1800s, when Henry Flagler tired of St. Augustine and set his sights on the southeast coast.
In the early 1900s George Merrick, a land developer, created Coral Gables, just west of Miami, as a suburb intended for affluent residents. He built wide, tree-lined boulevards, huge Mediterranean-style mansions, lush golf courses, and country clubs, landscaped with banyan trees and tropical foliage.
In 1925 he teamed with hotel magnate John Bowman to begin construction on a “great hotel … which would not only serve as a hostelry to the crowds thronging to Coral Gables, but also would serve as a center of sports and fashion.”
Ten months and ten million dollars later, the Biltmore opened, with its spectacular tower patterned after the Giralda in Seville, Spain, a huge swimming pool for aquatic events, two eighteen-hole golf courses, canals with gondolas, a polo grounds, and cavernous ballrooms among its many amenities.
During the “Roaring Twenties” and later the Depression, the Biltmore was alive with activity and events that drew thousands. In the depths of the Depression, the hotel stayed alive with synchronized swimming demonstrations, a four-year-old phenomenon who dove from an eighty-five-foot platform, and alligator wrestling.
In 1942 as World War II developed into a global conflict, the War Department converted the Biltmore into the Army Air Force Regional Hospital, which treated wounded soldiers and aviators returning from overseas. Windows were sealed with concrete for the blackout. Marble floors were covered with utilitarian linoleum. Rooms were converted to sick wards, operating rooms, and administrative
