THE LANTERN GIRL OF MATTHEW STREET

You all who know me, know that a part of my heart lives in the Florida Keys, mainly, in Key West. But what do you know of her ghosts? Oh we all know about Hemingway,  Truman's Little White House, that one haunted thing in that one museum. ( I will NOT say the name). But did you know about the Lantern Girl? 

A Key West ghost forgotten on purpose.

Matthew Street wasn’t always the harmless little cut-through tourists wander at night. Back in the late 1800s, when cigar rollers and wreckers filled the island, it was a narrow stretch of dirt where the streetlamps never quite stayed lit. Sailors said the shadows there moved wrong. Locals said wind shouldn’t sound like that. Everyone agreed it wasn’t a place you lingered.

But the ghost?
She came later.

They called her Lantern Girl, though nobody remembers her real name. She was a young Cuban woman who worked rolling cigars by day and nursing sick neighbors by night. Fever season hit hard that year—yellow fever, brutal and fast—and she carried a little iron lantern house to house, checking on the dying, bringing broth to children whose parents were too far gone to move.

She caught it.
Of course she did.

But she refused to stop tending people. She walked Matthew Street long after she should’ve been bedridden, lantern swinging in her hand, her shadow wobbling like melted wax. When she finally collapsed, right there in the middle of the street, the lantern kept burning—even though the oil had run out the night before.

That’s where the story should end. It didn’t.

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THE FIRST SIGHTING

Weeks after her burial, people started seeing her again.
Not fully—never fully.

Just the lantern.

A small iron light drifting down Matthew Street on windless nights. No footsteps. No figure. Just that glow, soft and flickering, stopping at doors where someone inside was very sick.

Locals said if you opened the door while the Lantern Girl hovered near, the fever would break by morning.
But if you ignored it?
If you heard that faint metal tapping on your window and chose not to look?

Some said the sickness worsened.
Some said they heard coughing outside their house—a rasp that didn’t belong to any living throat.

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THE REASON SHE WAS FORGOTTEN

In the mid-1900s, a tourist couple claimed they followed the lantern. They were drunk. Key West drunk. They laughed, thinking someone was pulling a prank.

They followed it through tight alleys, down toward the old marina, past the crumbling wreckers’ homes. The glow drifted faster than they could walk, bobbing like it was held by someone running. The couple chased it anyway.

Only the woman returned.

She stumbled back hours later, barefoot, babbling about how the lantern turned red before her husband vanished. Police blamed the rum. Locals, quietly, blamed her disrespect.

After that, folks stopped telling the Lantern Girl’s story out loud.
Not because they didn’t believe it—
but because they absolutely did.

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THE MODERN WHISPER

Ask the oldest residents—really ask them, not the tour guides—and a few will admit it:

Some nights, especially during hurricane season, when the pressure drops and the island gets that eerie stillness… they still see a sway of warm light cutting down Matthew Street.

No figure.
No footsteps.
Just the lantern.

And if you ever find yourself there at 3 AM, hearing a faint tapping on the window?
Do yourself a favor, Ma’am:

Open it.

You don’t want to know what happens if you don’t.