The Island Girl is on the Academic Team at her school. It's a lot like Jeopardy - there are two teams and a moderator asks shockingly hard questions and whichever team gets the most right answers wins.
They've been going up against high schools from all over Northwest Florida for a while now and came out on top of each game.
Pensacola High School has also come out on top so the two teams met at the Saengar Theater in Pensacola on Tuesday for a match to determine the number one team.
The match was filmed by Cox Cable and of course parents were invited.
My parents and my sister met us there to watch the match.
None of us knew any of the answers but it was fun to watch.
Unfortunately, Pensacola High won the match, thus coming in at First Place but our team came in Second so that's not too bad.
We also enjoyed being in the Saengar Theater again.
It's beautiful in there!
Because it was my birthday - and the Island King's the day before - my parents wanted to take us out to dinner after the match.
That sounded good to me but there was something else I wanted to do as well.
I wanted to go hunt 3 night caches in downtown Pensacola.
Three caches that are all hidden in some of Pensacola's well known haunted spots.
My sister, mother and daughter all chickened out immediately but my Dad, the Island King and the boys were all for it.
We went to dinner and after dinner, when it was good and dark, the girls left and the boys and I piled into the van to go find some caches and maybe spot a ghost or two.
Our first stop was the Old Christ Church in Seville Square.
Three rectors were originally buried in the now nonexistent churchyard. They were buried at some point during the mid 1800’s.
In the early 20th century the bodies were exhumed and reburied just beyond the churchyard due to renovations.
Later the University of West Florida was involved in an archaeology project which again unearthed these tombs.
As the dig went on the bones were stored at the Lear-Rocheblave House next door.
Although this house was equipped with an excellent security system somehow the bones were found strewn everywhere the next morning as if they had been dancing about.
After the project was completed, the bodies were reburied under the church floor. During this well attended ceremony one student saw three monks walk through the crowd.
Later when asking questions of all involved in the project, the carpenter who built the new coffins admitted to seeing three men in religious garb staring and smiling at him while he was working.
Since the third and final burial, no well documented encounters of these spirits have been found. Perhaps once put back in their original graves under the church floors they felt as though they could finally move along.
The geocache is supposed to be hidden along the fence on the side of the Church.
We looked for quite a while and never found the cache or saw any ghosts.
We moved on to the old Escambia County Jail - which is now the Pensacola Little Theater.
In the middle of the building is a courtyard and that's where all hangings took place, until the last one, which was July 1930.
It's said the last man to be hanged still roams in and out of the building and is known to be an "angry ghost" who makes his presence known often.
We found the cache and spent some time peaking through the gate at the courtyard but again, no ghost.
Our last stop was just down the street at what is now the New World Landing Inn.
The ghost of a man who died in a car crash here is supposedly often seen wandering around, perhaps wondering what happened to him.
The interesting thing about this cache is that it's hidden under the window of one of the rooms at the Inn.
It's hard to look for this cache without appearing to be a Peeping Tom but on this night we were lucky because I don't think anyone was in the room.
I always wonder what people think when they drive by somewhere and see something like this.
You know they have to wonder what on earth those people are doing.
We finally found the cache but only after making my Dad crawl up under the tree.
And again, we found no ghosts.
The boys were really disappointed that they didn't get to see a ghost but we still had fun wandering around downtown in the dark.Labels: Done
