October 24, 2012

As a private residence you can’t go into, this doesn’t have any chance of getting into the book. But it was a related story to the “Off The Menu” entry about the Four Oaks Restaurant (p254) and features an eyewitness account/interview….

Just a stone’s throw away from the empty Four Oaks Restaurant at 1508 N. Beverly Glen is a building that was known as the Old Roadhouse. Long since gone, it was rumored to be the place where one man lost his true love – and another his life.

The story goes that a wealthy landowner, finding his wife in bed with another man, cut off the head of his wife’s lover in one furious slashing stroke. Caught red-handed, the landowner was executed for his crime and his widow got every cent of his money – but would never be with the man she truly loved. The murdered man loved dressing in yellow, and it was said that a headless phantom dressed in yellow was often seen on the road outside, waiting eternally to be reunited with his lover.

Residents in the 1960s even performed an ad-hoc exorcism after hearing the ominous footsteps of what they thought was the husband climbing the stairs once again, and in the 1970s an actress named Corinne Broskette reported that she had felt the presence of a ghost who would try to comfort her – once by stroking her hair – when her love affair was on the rocks.

Today Broskette is the executive director of the Venue Actors Studio in Pinellas Park, Florida, but she still recalled the former Old Roadhouse – and spoke about some mysterious events that occurred after her time there:

“It has since been remodeled through the 1990s and 2000s to be a single residence, but the Old Roadhouse is still underneath. Once the stairways were opened up during the remodeling all sorts of strange things happened, like the electric on the third floor not working yet all was well in the electrical box. I believe they have since exorcised the ghost(s).”