Hearse of a Different Color: Red Rides & Restless Spirits - A Halloween Potpourri
Pumpkin spice candles lit, pugs snoring, and the veil officially thin—welcome to Paranormal Pets: Halloween Potpourri. Host Brandy Stark catches us up on a wild summer: the saga of her bright red hearse (now resurrected with a new engine), a brutal tibial plateau fracture and recovery, and Ajax the pug’s emergency IVDD surgery—and triumphant return to walkies. Then it’s story time: a galloping glimpse of the Phantom Horse of Celery Avenue from Weird Florida, and the legend (and investigation) of Morris the Casino Cat in Gulfport—beloved mascot, possible urban legend, definite good-luck charm. Brandi also teases the 2025 update of Supernatural St. Petersburg & Paranormal Pinellas, her new haunted columns for The Gabber, and local spooky events. Settle in for cozy creeps, animal apparitions, and a few real-life scares with happy endings.
Listen to Episode #134 Now:
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Paranormal Pets. I am your host, Brandy Stark, and today, a little bit of ketchup, and a Halloween potpourri episode. So, I am here with my pumpkin spice candles lit, my pug sleeping, it is definitely nighttime, and it's oh so quiet, at least I hope so, and we will tell a few scary stories, and we'll get started right after these messages.
Hello, and welcome back to Paranormal Pets Halloween Potpourri Edition. I know it's been a hot minute. Just to give you all a quick rundown on some stuff that's been happening.
Oh my gosh. So, in March, I bought a bright red hearse. He is a wonderful car.
I kept my eye on him for quite some time, until the price dropped to a thousand dollars, and I thought, okay, want to go see it? The hearse itself is actually a retired hearse from a North Carolina funeral home. They retired it at 20 years, so it's a 1998 hearse, so that would be about 2018. It went up for auction.
An artist bought it. He was the one who painted it red, and he, I guess, moved to St. Petersburg. The irony there, and St. Pete's not always the best place for a big car like that, and they are kind of expensive to maintain.
So, he had sold it off. It went to Hudson, this little rink-a-dink car lot in Hudson, where, bless his heart, the owner was into wildlife rescue, and also had a few rescued cats on his property. But, well, let's just say it was an interesting experience.
I ended up getting the hearse. Buyer beware, and it's always kind of a gamble with stuff like this, and I knew that. So, for a couple months, he did great, and then he started to overheat.
So, I took him to a local mechanic to examine. The mechanic was about 10 blocks away, and what I've done in the past, because my mom is now almost 82, and I'm her caretaker, and she no longer drives, and oftentimes it's just me doing this stuff, I got a little electric scooter, which I will not be keeping. I have done it a couple times, but I've dropped off cars, and as I said, a solitary driver, and I've taken my little scooter home, and this time, I fell off the scooter around 13th Avenue.
I hit my right side, and I broke my left leg. I had a compression fracture of the tibial plateau. I actually could not stand up.
I couldn't get my leg to lock in place. I had to call for help. I had friends coming to get me because I am poor, so, you know, no ambulance for me, thank you.
Ended up in the ER, had to go see the ortho the next day. Yes, indeed, surgery. Now, here's the irony.
Three years ago, when Ajax was a mere youngster, maybe it was four years ago now, must have been four years, Ajax, my pug, and I still had Achilles, another pug, thanks to them, between their their combined might, I actually slipped on one of three stairs that goes from my house down into my garage and broke my ankle. I have a plate and seven screws in the left leg from that at the ankle. It was a spiral fracture because when I do stuff, I do it right.
Well, I will tell you that this tibial break was the most painful thing I have ever endured in my life. I highly do not recommend it. The break was kind of the large part of the bone under the knee, and apparently it was wedged in pretty deeply.
The doctor was surprised at how much he had to work to pry it out, so all of that should tell you that this was not a good time. I spent six weeks basically not weight-bearing, so I had to work mostly from home. I leveled up by a decade on a birthday at home with just me, the pugs, and mom, and my wheelchair, and a walker.
So if you really want to have a very mortality awakening experience, there you go. Then there was two weeks of partial weight-bearing, and then there was two weeks of full weight-bearing plus all of the in-home therapy, and I have been finally freed by the doctor. I mean, this took almost until I want to say mid-July.
It was not fun. Meanwhile, I had this one mechanic look at the hearse, and he said, nope, it's dead. The gasket heads have blown.
It's gone. I had two other people tell me the same thing. I mean, I had it checked.
I had called a scrapper, and you have to understand, I mean, I felt miserable this summer. I was questioning all of my life choices, all of this pain in my leg for a car that it turns out I wasn't gonna keep, at least I thought so at the time. I literally had it signed up to be picked up for like $300 from a scrapper company when I had contacted one other mechanic, and he was the mechanic that had been working on restoring my mother's 94 Firebird, and the day before it was supposed to be picked up by the scrapper, this mechanic found a used 1998 Cadillac engine with 37,000 miles in excellent shape.
Now, yes, for those of you who know about Cadillacs, their engines, they drive very smoothly, but when they go, they go. So I'm a little, you know, I was a little concerned about that. However, if we did some preventative maintenance on this engine, so new filters, new, new, new, new, and installed it in the car, it would come with a two-year warranty, and so that's what we have done.
So it actually took me, I believe, three to four trips to get all of the nuts and bolts taken care of in this hearse. It was definitely a little chunk of money, but he is up and running. He is still bright red.
People smile when they see him. I smile when I drive him. It is like driving on glass.
The spirits of St. Petersburg did check the car. They didn't find anything, so no backseat drivers, and I believe, actually, at this point, all of the pugs have ridden in the front of the hearse with me. I'm not putting them in the back, and they've all been just fine.
But yeah, so there was the traumatic birthday, which I have been dreading since I was a child, because I knew about this birthday coming in 2025, because my mother had me on a year where it was really easy to figure out this birthday. Then, like I said, I had wanted a hearse for so long, finally found one, totally vibed with it, thought I was going to have to get rid of it, that it was a junker, that I had been completely scammed, and I might have been partially scammed. I mean, I'm gonna say maybe, but as I said, this car lot was really, really interesting to work with, and like, I never got my license plate that I paid for, and a couple other odds and ends that were kind of like, huh, really? But okay.
Broken leg, same leg, had to have surgery. Mom is no longer able to be my medical backup, so I had a friend who, bless her heart, she drove me to all my appointments, and she drove me to surgery, and she waited for me that day, and I was not alone, and I am eternally grateful for that, because you know, we're kind of navigating some new waters. No husband, no kids, and no siblings.
My mom's the only living relative I have, and you know, it was scary, and I know that, you know, she's in her early 80s, and that I will eventually be facing this again, you know, so it was definitely very eye-opening. And then to top all of that off was Ajax. Ajax is four and a half years old.
He is part of the pug group that you guys have gotten to hear grow up. He and Neo used to sound like little dinosaurs playing in the background of some of my podcasts from about four years ago, and Ajax, unfortunately, on a Sunday evening, while I was still in recovery with the broken leg, I think I was, I don't think I was even partially weight-bearing. I was at the end of the first non-weight-bearing period, but I was cheating because of the emergency.
I was using my crutches, but he couldn't stand. He started limping around five or six at night, and by 11 o'clock, he could not lift his hind end at all. So I rushed him into the vet, the emergency vet.
They determined that it was a spontaneous disc in his back herniation, that he has a degenerative disc disease. It turns out, I think it's discs 11 and 12. I had to hurry to get him to a specialist before this paralysis became permanent.
I honestly was not sure he was going to make it. I really thought, as much as this emergency vet was telling me how, you know, bad this was and, you know, time is of the essence, I honestly didn't think he was going to get in in time for this surgery, but the vet actually gave him a 60% chance of regaining his ability to walk. If he had been older, I don't think I would have put him through this, but at four and a half, with theoretically 10 years to go, hopefully more, with a will to try, because Ajax definitely wants you to be happy, and he really does try very hard, and thinking that the surgery was going to be quote-unquote only $8,000, but I'm still trying to get over that, we went ahead and tried for it, and the surgery was $12,000.
I will be paying for that for quite some time, and of course, there was still that 40% chance that he would not regain the ability to walk. I am happy to say he has. He has regained the ability to walk.
My biggest concern was walking and bowel and bladder control. This was a surgery that was very intense, and the paralysis literally meant that he could not urinate on his own. I had to palpate his bladder until he could regain control, so it was very traumatic.
I was doing physical therapy exercises for his legs, you know, on crutches or a walker with my legs, you know, almost completely stranded. I mean, it was awful, and at this point, the only decent thing was I had been cleared to drive, so I was able to drive and get him up to the vet, and he was there for five nights. I mean, this poor guy, and you have to understand, I don't let my pugs out, you know, for anything.
They stay home unless they're with me traveling, going to the art studio, or to an event, so he was nearly hysterical when I went to pick him up, but he is not as graceful as he was. There's definitely still some awkwardness and a little bit of lagging with one of the legs, but he can walk. He can support himself.
He does not jump now. He cannot build up enough pressure to jump up, so this summer, I have to say, was one of the most expensive summers I have ever had in my life, and I think it was scarier than Halloween with all of this drama. There's been drama at the art studio, and the artists are stirred up, and there just seems to be a lot of national drama, and there's, you know, even my mother's health has been very shaky these past couple of months, and so it was a really heavy summer, and so I was not doing a lot of podcasting, and I do apologize for that, but here we are, and we are back.
So now that you know all of that, let me go ahead, and actually, hello, everybody. I'm actually doing this on a YouTube live so that I can actually kind of record this, and Mark can clean it up. Our wonderful producer can clean this up.
So that was the summer, but now that you know all of my fears and hesitations, I have found a couple of interesting ghost stories. There is a book called Weird Florida. It came out in 2005, and I read it when it was out in 2005, and so now, as I went through the book again, I found a hard copy of it at a thrift store, and I would like to replace myself with that copy, and so here is one of these wonderful animal ghost stories that I have found, and it is called The Phantom Horse of Celery Avenue.
So Weird Florida is all about haunted locations and oddities in Florida. So the book actually says, and this is kind of a sad story, but also a cool one. So for all of my horse people out there, I hope you like this one.
Celery Avenue runs between the St. Johns River and the town of Sanford. Before 1940, this was the celery capital of the nation, and both sides of this avenue were lined with acres of celery fields. The east end of the road cuts through old Indian grounds where there is still a well-preserved burial mound.
For years, we have heard stories about a phantom horse on this road, but the only historical accounts connect to a horse that is on the west end of this road. It is in this area where a giant horse is allegedly buried beneath the road. The big horse, which stood 22 hands high and weighed 3,200 pounds, belonged to a local blacksmith named Sly Ernest.
When the horse died, it required a tractor to haul his heavy corpse out of the stable to his burial pit beside Celery Avenue. Since that time, the road has been widened several times and the horse's grave has been covered over. Whether this indignity to an equine has anything to do with the phantom horse story is anybody's guess, but there are stories.
And what I love about Weird Florida is that they actually include emails or website entries from this time period from others who've heard the legend and stories. So the first one is The Horse Vanished. This guy I know in Orlando told me about seeing a white horse that vanished running on the road in Sanford.
I think it was on that road that goes east and west by that old stadium. He just said that he saw this white horse galloping beside his car and it followed him for a short distance. And while he was watching it and trying to steer the car, the horse just vanished.
Next entry, Translucent Warrior on a White Horse. I live in Altamonte and one day a friend of mine was coming to see me. She was driving down that road from the Osteen Bridge to Sanford because the traffic is easier.
Anyway, she did not want to ask about what she saw because she thought it would sound crazy, so she asked me to tell you. It was about 9 or 9 30 and she was driving down that road and noticed something to her right on that side of the road. She turned and looked and said what she saw was a pure white horse with an Indian on his back and the Indian had a long feathered headdress on.
She said it was like translucent, it was white, but you could see through it. It ran along beside her car for about a quarter of a mile and just vanished. She said that she was doing about 40 and whatever it was kept up with her speed.
Have you ever heard of any ghosts on this road or has anybody else ever said anything about seeing something like this? And the third entry, it did not seem like a solid horse. Okay, this is going to sound nuts, but I know what I saw. I was going down Celery Avenue coming back from the beach and it was dark.
I was about halfway down the road when a big white horse dashed across in front of my car. It did not seem like a solid horse. What I mean is that I thought I could see through it.
I thought about it. Maybe it was a trick of my headlights, but the horse was real. I hit the brakes and looked quickly in the direction of where he had gone, but did not see him.
I don't know if it was a ghost or what, but I saw something strange. So there we go. A nice little ghost horse story for Halloween.
And what we are going to do at this point is we are going to pause for commercial messages and we'll be back right after this. And welcome back to Paranormal Pets. I am your host, Brandy Stark.
The pugs have awakened. I guess my ghost horse story was enough, but I did want to share with you that Supernatural St. Petersburg and Paranormal Pinellas, I have one more edition of it, the 2025 edition, which I expanded to two chapters and continued to try to clean up some of the file discrepancies. I discovered that there was a file corruption, and for some reason there's like this weird symbol showing up in certain words.
So I've gotten that cleaned up. I have been writing haunted articles for the Gabber, which is the oldest independent newspaper in, I believe, in Florida. So I write monthly articles about haunted locations.
It has been a blast. And so getting started, I was trying to kind of revisit some of the urban legends and the older investigations that we had had. I get to write about any haunting in Pinellas County in Florida.
And so at the same time, I wanted to clean up volume one of my book. My team, the Spirits of St. Petersburg, has been nagging me to create volume two. They're like, stop, stop messing with this first volume because you cannot do any more to it.
I mean, enough's enough. You need to start on volume two so that people have something new to purchase. So I spoke with the folks at the Gabber, and I said, well, is it okay if I take the original articles that I send to you, which are a little bit longer, and use those in a book crediting the issue where they are published as a shorter article in the Gabber? And they were okay with that.
So because the Gabber used to be called the Gulfport Gabber, I chose to write about Morris the Casino Cat. Now this is an episode of Paranormal Pets that goes way back. I want to say it's like episode 10 or something like that.
We talked about it a long time ago, and I think it actually has the Spirits of St. Petersburg, the original investigation we did. But I'm just going to read you this chapter from my book so that you can hear a little bit about it. So Gulfport.
Gulfport is a colorful town to the south of St. Petersburg. Residents refer to its origin as a party town for the soldiers of Fort DeSoto, though the city itself points to a more agrarian influence. This was also the birthplace of the artist renaissance in Pinellas County.
Small galleries are popped up all along the downtown area. As an artist, I have fond memories of a gallery called Tweeters, which hosted my first ever art show. I sold out before the show even opened, which was amazing.
I even worked for another gallery when the owner was out of town. So I love Gulfport. The Gulfport Casino.
The city of Gulfport had a rough start. It was supposed to be a port for a steamship, but that literally went up in flames after a fire and ship sinking. That's the luck of Pinellas sometimes.
While St. Petersburg had the railroad, Gulfport did not. The founders even tried to attract Civil War veterans by renaming itself Veteran City, but the oppressive heat and lack of interest quickly quelled the idea. Finally, St. Petersburg built a trolley line, which was eventually extended to the area.
True to its name, it was a port town, and the trolley was a way to connect sailors to the city. The trolleys carried passengers all the way to the end of the line, literally letting them off at the ships. Nearby, a weigh station and ticket office was built.
It had a post office, a postcard shop, and a refreshment stand. Tourists could buy seashells, candy, soft drinks, and tobacco. The structure contained an apartment for the merchants, and the second floor had a dance floor with a bandstand.
The parishioners of a local Methodist church met there as well. The dock was finished in 1905, and what is now known as Gulfport Casino was finished in 1910. It was the location where the founding families gathered to incorporate Gulfport that same year.
The casino, along with the trolley, made for an accessibility that brought people to the town and finally put it on the map. There is an odd story that abounds in Gulfport featuring a spectral feline. I first read about it in a book by Deborah Fretham, Ghost Stories of St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and Pinellas County, published in 2007.
The story of Morris the Cat, whose spirit remained after his body passed, dates back to the 1970s when employees at the casino saw a little yellow cat approach and took him in. His color and gregarious personality echoed a famous feline TV commercial spokesperson from the time for whom he was named Morris the Cat. He was an ambassador of the casino for 15 years, winning many fans from tourists and residents alike.
Upon his death, a memorial was erected in his honor. It was at this time that the rumors started. Some felt mysterious localized breezes wind by the sculpture, and others claimed to have seen him walking the property at night.
From a paranormal point of view, people report that cat hauntings will either happen for six months before the spirit moves on, or the spirit will become a permanent denizen of the location for decades. This piqued the interest of the spirits of St. Petersburg who went out to the memorial to see if we could find any trace of the spectral Morris. Very little happened while we were there.
There were no unaccountable winds, temperature drops, or anomalous readings. Nothing responded to the toys or food offerings. Even my pug, Odyssey, an animal herald to contact an animal ghost, showed no unusual reaction.
When we asked employees and locals about Morris, several knew of the story and his haunting presence, though they recounted hearing about it from the same person, a local hotel owner. We concluded that this is likely a remarkable example of a localized urban legend. Morris was a very beloved four-legged figure to the area.
Gulfport has a few other ghost cat stories in the general area of the memorial, and there are other places who have living feline mascots. These stories may have merged over the years to create the Gulfport Casino ghost cat. As for night sightings, perhaps a living cat has moved in on Morris' old territory.
We did have one woman report to us that Morris has descendants. A ginger cat colony lives near the beach. She wonders if perhaps its offspring were mistaken for the original cat.
She also told us that she regularly brings people to see the sculpture and pay tribute to Morris. She likes to pet his head for good luck, but to date has had no ghostly cat encounters. So there you go.
I was really excited because we did get response on the article, and this one woman just really loved Morris, and apparently one of her family names is Morris, and so she was just really, really into the cat legend. So with that, I think we will end this first Halloween Potpourri for paranormal pets. I will probably have one more for you, and that will be our next episode.
I thank you so much for listening and getting caught up with me. If you are in the St. Petersburg area, we are doing the National Day of Ghost Hunting, September 27th, and we are also doing Spooky Czar, Spooky and Bizarre, with 13 hand-picked local artists at Art Lofts, so we hope to see you there. Until then, I wish you a good night and happy hauntings.