There’s more to downtown Fort Myers than what meets the eye. From historic brick buildings that line the narrow cobblestone streets, to what lies beneath them, the City of Palms embodies an endless trove of tales, local legends, and lore.
But there’s something different about the stories that built the downtown area—something Joanne Iwinski Miller, a Lee County historian, said many Southwest Florida residents are unaware of—they aren’t tales; they’re true.
“The paranormal is everywhere,” Miller said. “I’m not talking about scary, ghosts or goblins or anything like that. You know, you can feel something and you don’t know what it is. Or you can hear something, and you don’t know what it is—there’s no explanation. But really, there always is.”
Miller said that the explanation often lies in historical events. She also said the downtown area, a community on the National Register of Historic Places, sets the perfect backdrop for how she defines paranormal to prosper.
“We go way back as far as the fort, the Seminole Indian Wars, and the Union Fort was here, not the Confederate,” Miller said. “A lot of people died here suddenly, and they were buried just about anywhere where they dropped.”
Gina Taylor, former director of the Southwest Florida Museum of History and member of the Southwest Florida Attractions Association, said this rich history is why she started True Tours, a tour company in downtown Fort Myers.
“Downtown Fort Myers has the largest concentration of historic structures still standing in all of Southwest Florida, which makes us totally unique,” Taylor said. “So, there are no other places—Naples and Bonita Springs and Punta Gorda and Sarasota—that have what we have.”
Before Taylor started True Tours, she said she did not believe in paranormal activity as a historian and still does not. As time passed, however, she said she could not help but grow skeptical of personal experiences she attributes to historical events. She said the most notable series of experiences that come to mind began in 1990 after she started as the original director of the Burroughs Home, a Georgian Revival-style mansion built in 1901.
“I can tell you that there were too many odd things that were happening there that made me believe that there’s something to this,” Taylor said.
Taylor said the maintenance man went into the historic home on a Monday looking for a broom that he could not find, so he had to turn the alarms and motion detectors off to look for it. That’s when he found the bathtub on the second level was filling with water.
Shortly after, he exited asking Taylor, “Were you in the house?” to which she replied, “No, why would we go in there on a Monday?”
Taylor said that it’s normal for house-museums across the country to be closed on Mondays—a typical maintenance day. She said she typically would never open the house on Mondays, working from her office in the carriage house located behind the property.
She said this did not happen once, but three times, all on Mondays while attendants were not present in the home.
“I will say, I don’t know if I’m going to tell you I’m a believer, but what I am going to tell you is, there’s too many weird things that are completely unexplained, and now there’s something to this,” Taylor said. “I just don’t know what that is.”
This gave Taylor the idea of starting True Tours in 2010 with the main goal of presenting content through a lens of accuracy, drawing on historical events that she said lend themselves to a sense of credibility.
“We’re going to try to be as historically accurate as we can, and trying to infuse credibility into what we suspect could be paranormal activity,” Taylor said.
As a Lee County historian, even referencing herself as “the history police,” Miller said this is what sets True Tours apart from other history tours around the country—prioritizing fact over fiction and education over performance.
“It’s called True Tours for a reason,” Miller said. “The fact that they are true, that she’s (Taylor) researched everything. It’s not these fabricated stories where blood has filled up a bathtub…her tours are based on facts.”
Miller said Taylor’s commitment to the facts bolster her hope that in a world of constant progression, the times and experiences that allowed us to reach our current societal status will remain alive and well in the minds of many.
“We’re losing our history,” Miller said. “People are trying to erase our history, and I think the younger generations should always know what our history is—good and bad. We can’t change the past. We can change the future. But we have to learn from our history too, and I think Downtown Fort Myers has so much to offer.”
Both Taylor and Miller said they feel fortunate to have such a vibrant historical landscape right here in Southwest Florida—an asset both hope local residents and travelers will take advantage of.
For more information, visit True Tours and the Southwest Florida Historical Society.
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