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Supernatural attraction

Bonnie LeTourneau feels a special connection to the apparitions she seeks out while leading tours of a Brooksville museum.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published February 16, 2007

Jessica Weiss, 25, of Tampa and Nancy Perron, 37, of Brooksville make their way through a hallway at the May-Stringer Heritage Museum in Brooksville during a recent ghost tour.
	[Times photos: Edmund D. Fountain]

ADVERTISEMENT Jessica Weiss, right, waves an electric candle while listening for sounds of the supernatural in the attic of the museum. Legend says the house is haunted. Bonnie LeTourneau, 56, starts the ghost tour with a warning: “Nobody goes anywhere in this house by themselves. Ever.” The brake lights of a car add to the eerie look of the house where, people say, lights turn on and off on their own, doors open and close for no reason and an unseen child cries for her mother.

She told them "at least" nine entities lived here.

She said they hadn't "moved on."

"And everything I tell you tonight is based on fact," she said. "I'm not spinning ghost stories."

LeTourneau is a mother and a history buff who lives in town and works during the week in Tampa doing customer service for Jeff's Gourmet Pies. She helped last November to start the ghost tours in this house.

Those who say they can sense these sorts of things say this four-story, seven-gable, 151-year-old home on top of the hill in the center of town is "active," full of "energies," or "entities," or "spirits," or "ghosts," whatever whoever wants to call them - something, though, that makes this house an epicenter of the paranormal in a place with a long history that includes American Indian battles and Civil War dead and lynchings. Death. For people who weren't ready to go.

Two rules for the tours:

No kids under 12. There's a set-up haunted house at Halloween for fun, and that's fine, but this isn't that.

Also: "Nobody goes anywhere in this house by themselves," LeTourneau says at the start of the tour. "Ever."

She didn't come here looking for ghosts. But she found them. And that's not all she found.

A family of mystery

Bonnie LeTourneau has a relationship with a man named John May. John May died in 1858.

He built the original part of this house in 1856.

Now, more than a century and a half later, anybody who knows anything about this Hernando County town knows about this structure, and its stories.

The lights that go on and off in the middle of the night.

The doors that open and close and just won't stay still.

The sudden cold spots and the footsteps upstairs that sound like little leather pitter-patter and the orbs that show up in photos hovering above the aluminum roof and the thing that clangs through pipes and ducts downstairs and the sounds of barking dogs and children playing and the toddler that wails in the dark for her mother.

May bought the property in 1855. The original house had a parlor, a dining room, two bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen in a separate spot in the yard.

He is said to have died of tuberculosis. That comes from a brief mention in a local paper. But all other documents about May and who he was and whether that's really how he died were destroyed when the original courthouse in Brooksville burned in 1877. No photos of him exist, as far as LeTourneau knows.

The man is a mystery.

His widow remarried Frank Saxon, a Confederate veteran, a county delegate to the state Legislature, the clerk of the Hernando Circuit Court, a prominent man, and they had a son and a daughter.

The son died at five weeks.

The woman died giving birth to the daughter in 1869.

The daughter died three years later.

Her name was Jessie May.

People say she still lives here. And is very protective of her toys and dolls. And calls for her mom in the night.

Her comfort zone

LeTourneau, meanwhile, grew up in Vermont in the '50s in a house that was built in the late 18th century that she says was haunted. "I couldn't see them," she said not long ago, "but I knew they were there."

She says her mother was a "sensitive" - meaning she sensed and sometimes saw "entities" - and that her 13-year-old daughter is the same way.

LeTourneau says when she was young she slept with a light on and was terrified at night. She saw bad things happen before they actually did, like her dad falling and breaking his leg. In the middle of a class in college she started crying the minute she "felt" her grandmother die.

"And then I shut it off," she said. Went into denial. That's her term.

She lived in California for a while in the '70s. She traveled with a small circus that went from San Diego to Seattle to Chicago. She moved here in 1991.

She had her kids and drove them all over and went from here to Tampa and back for work. She used to look at this house driving by but never stopped and went in. Then, about 3 1/2 years ago, on a Saturday afternoon, she came on a whim for a standard tour and was led around - from the foyer up the creaky stairs, through the doctor's office, the school room, into the attic - and she came downstairs and told the organizers she wanted to be a part of what they were doing.

LeTourneau led a tour the following Saturday.

She hasn't left since.

"I'm so comfortable here," she said one afternoon last month. "But they are comfortable with me here because they've seen so much of me.

"They know I love them.

"They know how I feel about this house."

Renee Johnson is a reiki master in Largo and someone who says she senses these things. She came here in late December. The image in her head that night: a woman with long blond hair and ringlet curls, very pretty, very proper, in a pale blue dress, getting ready for a ball, spinning in a moment of great joy. Bonnie LeTourneau, she thought.

"I believe Bonnie lived in that house in a past lifetime," Johnson said later by phone, "and her spirit brought her back there."

About three months ago, LeTourneau went to a talk by a ghost expert from Savannah, Ga., inside an old cigar factory in Ybor City. A stranger came up to her and said she couldn't concentrate the whole time because she had been bombarded with "information."

"I don't know you," LeTourneau remembers her saying, "and I don't know this house that you're all about, but I'm telling you: You're tied to that house. You helped build that house."

About eight months ago, her daughter Michelle, who is 13 and a reluctant "sensitive," was upstairs in the house . . .

"And all of a sudden," Michelle said, "someone was telling me something.

"And all of a sudden it was John May."

And John May wanted Bonnie LeTourneau to find out the truth about him.

Moving experiences

The tours on Saturday night cost $20 and last at least two hours. LeTourneau took the group of eight through the kitchen, where it sometimes smells like just-baked apple pie.

Then upstairs through the hall where the toys and dolls move overnight.

Into the room with the wheelchair that moves on its own.

And the room where the World War I soldier in his uniform sometimes waves to cops on the late shift.

Then Jessie May's room: The last time someone took her dolls out of the room, LeTourneau told everybody on the tour, the cradle was disassembled, "part by part," when staffers showed up the next morning. Nobody takes the dolls anymore.

The tour split into smaller groups. Nancy Perron, manager of the Central Division of the Florida Ghost Team, who approached the museum with the idea of the ghost tours, took a handful of visitors upstairs into the attic, near where the doctor who lived here later kept his sickest, closest-to-death patients.

They sat still and quiet on low couches in the A-framed part of the attic.

"Mr. Saxon?" she said. "Are you here?"

"Jessie?"

Darkness.

Stillness.

Silence.

"Mr. May?" Perron said. "Are you here?"

A spoken promise

On Saturday afternoons before the tours, and again on the following Sunday mornings, LeTourneau comes here alone, and gets quiet, and sits still, and talks to them.

She tells them on Saturday that people are coming later and that it's important to do all this stuff so the house can make money so they can still have their place to live.

She tells them thank you on Sunday.

Bonnie LeTourneau is 56. She has found her place. She has found her purpose.

"I'm not nuts," she said toward the end of the tour. "I know who I'm talking to."

She was on the second floor off to the side and away from the others.

"You didn't die of tuberculosis, did you?" she said to the room. "You were hurt, weren't you?

"I'll find out for you," she said to John May.

"I will."

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkuse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

IF YOU GO

May-Stringer Heritage Museum

601 Museum Court, Brooksville

Guided tours are offered from noon to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Requested donation: $3 adults, $1 children. Please allow 45 minutes.

Ghost tours begin at 8 p.m. Saturdays. $20. No children under 12. Allow two hours.

Information: (352) 799-0129 or www.hernandoheritage museum.com.

[Last modified February 15, 2007, 20:49:00]