From Thrift to Thrill: Haunted Finds & Furry Phantoms
On this Halloween potpourri of Paranormal Pets, host Brandy Stark cozies up with sleeping pugs, candlelight, and a stack of spooky curios. From the pages of Weird Florida come animal afterlife legends—Old Bob, the hearse-pulling horse; Brownie the Town Dog; and Key West’s rooster graveyard—plus a shoutout to a thrift-store treasure hunt that funds a local women’s shelter. Brandy also unveils her newest museum oddities: a 1960s “biting” nun doll with EMF surprises and a granite tombstone for Buttercat from a New Orleans pet cemetery—complete with a mob-tinged backstory—currently riding in her bright red hearse. Rounding it out: reported ghost-cat visitations to a team member’s kitchen. Pour something warm, dim the lights, and settle in for heart, history, and hauntings.
Listen to Episode #135 Now:
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Paranormal Pets. I am your host, Brandy Stark, and today, a little bit of catch-up and a Halloween potpourri episode. Let's light the candles, get your loved ones close, all of my pugs are sleeping around me, and we'll get started with this episode right after these messages.
Hello and welcome back to Paranormal Pets. So, last episode, I kind of caught you up on all of this summer's tragedies, which were extensive, and we did a ghost story about horses and a local ghostly legend about Morris the Cat. I am here with the same book that we talked about last time.
It's called Weird Florida by Mark, looks like Sherman and Mark Moron, authors of Weird U.S. They Present Weird Florida, and again, this was a book that came out in 2005, and I do remember reading it. It is really cool because it does not only talk about weird things like urban legends, which are fun, it does have haunted locations, but it also talks about unique architecture, and one of the entries includes the bowling ball house, which is probably 30 minutes from where I live in Safety Harbor, and I actually know the artist who built that. It has a lot of good information in it.
It is a little dated because they do talk about orbs as if they are, you know, ghosts, but that was very 2005. We now know a little bit more about point-and-shoot cameras, and folks have really shifted over to cell phone cameras much more, but nonetheless, it is a good book. I found this particular hard copy at Casa Thrift Store, so if you are in the St. Pete area, highly recommend Casa Thrift.
It is a great thrift store. It has some coolest stuff in it. I have found some great things, including Weird Florida in hardback for like three bucks when it was, I think, 25 originally.
I've gotten art. In fact, I found a piece of art there from a light-based artist whose pieces sell for thousands. She has pieces in New Mexico local to her museums.
The artist did pass away, but she still has a YouTube channel, so I mean, it's been really, really cool, and I found this thing for like $99, and while that was a chunk of change, I don't know how to say it. I just really resonated with the piece. It must have belonged to a private collection, but it's amazing what you can find at a thrift store, and so the other thing is that Casa supports a local women's shelter for abused women, and I believe children.
They're children as well, so you know, I'm happy that that money, if I have to spend it, right? Remember last episode, I told you that it was the most expensive summer I've ever had in my life in 2025, and I mean expensive between a broken leg and surgery, emergency surgery for a pug, and replacing a car engine in a hearse. Yikes, you know? Yikes, but at least any money that I spend goes to a good cause. So again, if you're ever in the area, I highly recommend them.
So when I was going through Weird Florida, they actually have a section on animal burials, so I thought I would read that section, and then I can kind of relate that a little bit to you, because I recently acquired a rather unique item for the potential paranormal museum coming up. So this is under the chapter of Cemetery Safari, and it's animal burials. Why shouldn't animals have memorials like humans do? After all, most of us treat our pets like family members, and for some of us, our pet is our best friend.
The relationship between animals and their humans is pretty special, as reflected in the following resting places. The only non-human buried in Sanford's Lakeview Cemetery is a horse named Old Bob. Bob, who was big and white, carried most of the humans in the cemetery on their final ride.
He had pulled the hearse for TJ Miller's funeral home, and it was said that he could find his way to the cemetery without a driver. Old Bob spent a total of 28 years pulling hearses until he was retired to pasture in 1913. He died in 1914 and was buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in the shade of an old oak tree.
When his original stone marker was vandalized, Gene Hunt, the owner of a monument company, donated a new granite stone. The original marker is now on exhibit at the Sanford Museum. Bob's grave is the most popular since his burial.
Flowers have regularly appeared there, though no one knows who's placing them. In recent years, it has been plastic flowers, but the source still remains a local mystery. Pet Memorial.
This beautiful monument is dedicated to someone's beloved pets, Benny and Prince, and can be seen in Micanopy in a pet cemetery in a peaceful oak grove next to the highway, 441. It is symbolic of the love some people have for their animals. It is actually a really beautiful sculpture.
It looks like one was a horse and the other was a dog. One lived from 1987 to 1999, and that was Prince, and Benny lived from 1982 to 1997, and it's adorable. There's an angel holding a kitten, looking at the dog, and the horse is looking over her wings at the scene.
Wow. Brownie the Town Dog. In Daytona's Riverfront Park, there is a small granite tombstone half hidden in the shrubs that marks the eternal resting place of Brownie the Town Dog.
In life, Brownie made a lot of friends along the residence of Daytona, so much so that when he passed the year after, they buried him in the park with the marker. Some people claim that on certain nights, Brownie's ghost can still be seen romping through the park. Aww.
And then the last entry is the Blue Heaven Rooster Graveyard. Down in Key West, of course it's Key West, at the Blue Heaven restaurant on Thomas Street is a rooster cemetery. Resting at peace here are several fighting cocks and even a few cats that had belonged to Ernest Hemingway, who had lived a couple of blocks away.
The Blue Heaven in Key West's Bahamian neighborhood was once a place where gamblers came to bet on cockfights. Some of Key West's free-roaming chickens are descendants of the old fighting roosters. Luckily, we don't do the fighting anymore.
That's kind of a really cool sport. Over the past hundred years, the Blue Heaven has been a bordello, an ice cream parlor, a tavern, a dance hall, and a pool hall, and was once known for its Friday night boxing matches, which were frequently refereed by Hemingway. So I wonder how it goes from all of that to a rooster graveyard.
That's interesting. But at least they didn't not use the land. Kind of interesting.
Anyway, that is the second entry that I wanted to read to you all from Weird Florida, and I'll tell you why. But we're going to take a quick little commercial break, and we will be back after these messages. Welcome back to Paranormal Pets, and I wanted to explain why I loved the graveyard story, particularly for the pets.
And that is because I recently went to the Tabernacle of Oddities, which is an annual show, I think it's about five years old now, that takes place in the Cuban Club, which is a very renowned haunted building in Ybor, which is in Tampa. We went last year, and we being myself and Carissa of The Spirit of St. Petersburg, I think she's been on some of the prior podcasts, but when we went, we actually found a haunted doll, which was really cool. This doll is a nun doll, and it was actually marked as haunted.
And so I asked the story, because it said, careful, I bite. And I'm like, huh, well that's got to be interesting. So this nun doll, apparently the prior owner used to keep it in a shed, and the first time I guess she went to get it out of storage, when she picked up the doll, and I guess this was to happen more than once, but she felt like something was biting her all over when she picked up the doll.
So she was so terrified of it that apparently she gave it to this vendor, who looked up a price on eBay, because I found the same price, and put it up for sale. I have to say I'm very glad that I got her. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, so I have an understanding of nuns, and I will, I'm sure someday, have a midlife crisis from going to an all-girls Catholic school.
But what are you going to do? It was good on education. But I did some research on the nun doll, and it is part of a series that comes from the 1960s. I have not had any trouble with her, but she does, on occasion, actually produce EMF readings, and I'm not quite sure, you know, how to take that.
My team seems to think that there might be a presence with her, but I have just worked to treat her with respect, make sure that none of the pugs are, you know, being upset or afraid of her, and they have been fine around it. And she has a nice prominent spot where she can kind of overlook the house. I mean, I guess I would be really ticked off, too, if I was put in storage.
So this year, we went again, and it was very sad, because we didn't find any haunted dolls. I mean, there were creepy dolls, oh my gosh, yes, but no real haunted dolls. And so we were making, I think it was our third go around, and I started asking vendors directly, so do you have anything haunted? And one vendor on the first floor said, yes, at least it should be haunted, and he pointed to a tombstone, and it is a tombstone from a pet cemetery in New Orleans.
Now, I'm not quite sure how he got it, but usually if a tombstone is missing, there's something that happened. But it actually said that it was in memory of Buttercat, and he said, yeah, let me tell you the story about this. So I actually did record a video of him telling the story, but essentially, the short of it is that this woman owned the pet cemetery.
Apparently, she also owned Buttercat, but she, I guess, was a suspect in a few murders, and then she herself was murdered in the pet cemetery by the pet cemetery caretaker, and some people think it might have been a mob hit because her father was a gambler who owed the mafia money. I'm not making this up. Right now, the tombstone to Buttercat is currently in my Big Red Hearse.
It will be going out for the 2025 Halloween season. I have not found it to be particularly haunted, and I want to try and give it a good home. I mean, it's a solid piece of granite.
This is a hardcore piece, but I felt like I could at least try to give it a good home. It directly connected to paranormal pets, so I was super excited that I found something that was kind of supernatural tied to animals, so I thought, well, I can get it for the podcast. It does sometimes resonate with these ideas that we talk about.
Do graves contain the spirits of the dead? There's kind of this, I talk about this every semester when I teach humanities, because the Greeks went through something similar where initially the dead were thought to actually reside within the tomb, but they had to be fed and honored, etc. One thing that Homer does, which is always significant, is that he canonizes this idea of an afterlife, and then he also canonizes the idea of ghostly visitations, how they manifest in the afterlife, what happens to them when they are dead, and then how they might appear in dreams. And in fact, there's the whole chapter in the Odyssey where Odysseus goes to the underworld, and he talks with his dead friends, and it's pretty interesting.
He even talks to Hercules, which is interesting because Hercules was the last living guy who came into the underworld with his 12 labors to catch the three-headed dog of Hades. So the idea of the grave containing the spirit, it's a very old one. I suspect that it ties to something called manna, or the idea that your bones and your body are the closest thing that once held the soul.
So I suppose that would work just as well for animals, right? So anyway, what we're going to do is I'm going to pause here so that I can hopefully have the link to the story from the vendor told. He is also one who is involved with abandoned Florida, so he goes to investigate all sorts of abandoned places, which is kind of cool. So a little bit of overlap there, but I will let you listen to the story and see what you think.
And listen carefully, because there's a lot of background noise. There wasn't too much I could do about that. So there you have it.
At this point, we will probably pause so that I can pull together some more bits and pieces for our potpourri episode, including some ghostly visitations to one of the Spirits of St. Petersburg members who lost a couple of elder cats over the past few years, and she's had some odd incidents that she thinks might be the cats returning to do nightly visitation. I'll leave it up in the kitchen, but what better place for a cat? So we'll continue that shortly. Thank you so much for listening.
I wish you a good night and happy hauntings.