Ellen Ruby Blog's: Don’t Be Scared! Friendly Ghost Awaits New Owner of a Pensacola, FL, Victorian

Tuesday 15 June 2021

Don’t Be Scared! Friendly Ghost Awaits New Owner of a Pensacola, FL, Victorian

A Victorian home in the middle of downtown Pensacola, FL, offers great income potential—as long as potential tenants get along with Fred.

Fred is a ghost who, some say, resides at the historic house, now on the market for $750,000.

“We had no knowledge of the situation until the day we purchased the house,” says the seller Gene Church, who bought the house with his wife, Jeaniene, in 2012.

And Fred is simply the name given to the ghost by someone who owned the home in the 1970s. The apparition’s real origin story is likely to have been related to the original homeowner, Thomas Finch, who died during an epidemic of influenza in 1908. At least that’s the story the Pensacola Ghost Tour sticks with when it talks about this house.

A local jeweler who had previously owned the 5,960-square-foot house showed up the day the Church family closed on it and spent about 3.5 hours telling them everything about their new abode.

“He said, ‘You have some friends who live here,’ and that was the first time that we heard about the ghosts,” Church says. “There have been some interesting things that have happened at different points in time.”

Entry to home in Pensacola, FL
Clint Rackers

Gene himself hasn’t had any supernatural encounters, but says that his wife once heard someone screaming. When she went to check on all the kids, he says, everyone was sound asleep. His son claims he once saw dark figures on the porch.

“In another instance, my mother-in-law was staying in our home when we were gone, and she called to say that all of the cabinet doors in the kitchen swung open and shut,” Church says. “We said, ‘It’s probably just a draft or something,’ and she said, ‘No, the doors are all closed, and all of the cabinets swung open and shut.’”

The six-bedroom, four-bathroom house has served as a successful vacation rental for the Church family. An apartment on the home’s top floor measures a sizable 2,100 square feet and has three bedrooms, its own kitchen, and access to the widow’s peak.

“While people think that there’s not a need to have a house this big, the house has tremendous income potential—plus the opportunity to live in it,” Church says. “The house is so solidly built, so you don’t hear anything from one side of the house to the other.”

Even when people were staying in the other part of the house, he says, the family couldn’t hear them.

Several apartment areas are accessible using the main entry hallway, which has retained its historic charm. Interestingly, that is in relatively short supply in this part of town.

“One of the nice things about this house compared to others in the North Hill historical area is, most of those houses were largely gutted on the inside and wholly modernized,” Church explains.

Unlike them, he says, this house maintains much of the character it had at the time of its construction, in 1900.

That includes not only woodwork on the walls and floors, but even the connectors for the original gas lighting in the ceilings and on the walls.

Previous owners added on to the property several times over the decades.

“In the 1940s, there was a shortage of housing in Pensacola with the Naval Air Station, so it became a patriotic thing to do to offer housing for the military. At that point in time, there were some changes made,” Church explains.

The original dining room area was transformed a small apartment, and other parts of the home were devoted to military housing. At a later point, the home was used as commercial space, with offices throughout.

“The neighborhood was happy to see it turned back into residential, which is what we ended up doing with it,” Church says.

The Church family also installed a huge modern kitchen, claiming what had once been a bedroom and a bathroom to carve out the kitchen space. Now, there are two large islands, as well as plenty of prep space.

“We installed granite tops in the kitchen there. A friend of mine who sells granite said, ‘Nobody can use a whole sheet of granite,’ but he used the entire granite sheet in this kitchen and still ran out. We went to butcher block.”

The house has two other kitchens, one in the upstairs apartment, and the other in another small apartment space that comes with a separate outside entrance.

Gene and his wife are leaving the friendly ghosts behind and selling the house so that they can move to a slightly smaller house on the water.

“There haven’t been any truly frightening experiences about any of this,” he says. “We have joked about it and all, but it has been a pretty friendly experience the entire time, and it certainly hasn’t run us out.”

Historical photos of the home are housed at of the Library of Congress, in a Historic American Buildings Survey describing outstanding houses in the nation.

“The joke was, on Amazon I could purchase pictures of my own house for 30 bucks,” Church jokes. He didn’t buy any.