Boardinghouse earned its strange, spooky reputation
Norman Bates never lived at Bayou Castle, but plenty of dark things went on here.
By SCOTT TAYLOR HARTZELL
Published October 27, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Throughout the 1970s, mystery and death enveloped Bayou Castle like a mysterious fog.
If able to speak, the walls of the former boardinghouse at 5498 Fourth St. S would tell tales of seance, abandonment and decapitation. Amid reports of arson and kidnapping, the walls would whisper accounts of murder.
"I'm afraid to stay here," Lucille Crissey, grande dame of the castle, said before she moved in 1980.
"St. Petersburg's most bizarre house," the Evening Independent wrote. "Thought by some folks to be haunted."
In 1872, W.H. Benton purchased 10 acres on Little Bayou. He sold the parcel to Professor Herbert T. Wilson 13 years later. Wilson, from London, "did not take well to the new life," wrote historian John Bethel, and he sold the land in 1906 to Edward John Branch. That year, Branch constructed the castle with homemade bricks.
Crissey arrived in 1967 about age 62, after her second husband's death. She bought and sold two homes and acquired the Burlington Hotel. When the Burlington was condemned, she purchased the castle in 1970 to house her Burlington boarders.
In 1972 Crissey moved 10 2,000-pound columns from the Lord Barrington Hotel she owned in Great Barrington, Mass. "That's when the trouble started," she said.
Tales of witchcraft followed. Residents said the bones of missing cats were interred in several of a plethora of statues that contributed to the grounds' graveyard atmosphere.
"(Crissey) drove an old black Fleetwood," said Darby Phillips, 51, who boarded at the castle in the early 1970s for $15 a week. "It looked like a funeral car."
Crissey's bodyguard, Harold, marched the grounds, causing children to speed by the castle. After being robbed four times and mugged twice, Crissey also found protection in a malicious cocker spaniel and a slithering black snake. Her three Siamese cats were often tethered to the picnic table with a thick rope.
Antiques were everywhere, Phillips said. Brave kids and drunks would "leap the castle picket fence, dodge the crumbling statues, touch a wooden column and come back alive," the St. Petersburg Times wrote.
In an August 1974 case that wasn't solved for years, boarder Vernice Brown, 64, was abducted from the castle and drowned in Mirror Lake.
A month later while fighting over a bottle of vodka, John Holden stabbed boarder Charles Fears to death. "I saw (Fears) laying out as stiff as a board on the bed," Crissey said. "Charles usually slept all curled up like a squirrel, but I figured maybe he's changed."
Police never found the weapon, a bloody knife Crissey later found in the refrigerator under a loaf of bread. Holden went to prison. The knife rested on Crissey's bedroom windowsill for years. "(Neighbors) didn't like a murder," Crissey said. "It was a very quiet murder. No noise."
The Times said Crissey was loved and hated. An arsonist once destroyed the castle garage. A mother once abandoned her three children to her.
"Two weeks later the father showed to pick them up," Crissey said.
Crissey's spaniel barely survived in 1976 after being bludgeoned and thrown from a car into the path of another. Her cats were not so lucky in 1977, when they were bludgeoned and beheaded. Amid the eerie findings that day behind the castle, a live penguin was nailed to a tree.
"There's a law for killing other people's pets, isn't there?" Crissey asked police after the brutality.
In 1979, a red-haired spiritualist visited the castle and reportedly spoke for 45 minutes with the spirit of Fears, the boarder murdered five years earlier. Afterward a national spiritualist group offered to buy the castle, hoping to make it a church headquarters. Crissey balked.
Crissey moved from Bayou Castle in 1980. Sightings of a lady lurking inside the castle followed. Police later investigated reports that witches were living there and lighting sacrificial fires nearby. No one was charged.
Crissey died in December 1991. She was 87.
Debbie Eaton, 40, now lives in the 3,200-square-foot castle with her three children and James Williams, 46. Nothing strange has happened, she said, except for a stool that inexplicably kept changing location when she first purchased the 11-room castle in 2003.
"I have my ghosts hanging from the oak tree," Eaton said. "I love this house."
