A New Sweet Tea Murders Walking Tour
You can walk down Palafox Street a hundred times and never realize what happened just a few steps away.
Behind the storefronts, restaurants, sidewalks, and familiar buildings of downtown Pensacola are stories that have nearly disappeared: murder investigations, mysterious deaths, violent confrontations, notorious characters, and moments when justice was carried out very differently than it is today.
The Pensacola Museum of History sits on the corner of Jefferson and Zarragossa Streets in downtown Pensacola. Formally Pensacola City Hall, several fascinating events occurred around this building. Some will be explained on the tour.
On Tuesday, August 18, at 5:00 PM, Sweet Tea Murders will present a new walking tour:
Mystery and Justice in Old Pensacola
We will begin at Bodacious Bookstore and spend the next hour walking through old Pensacola while I tell five true stories drawn from the city’s criminal past.
Some involve murder. Some involve mystery. Some involve men and women whose names once filled Pensacola newspapers but are almost forgotten today. And some happened in places thousands of people still pass every week without knowing what occurred there.
This will not simply be another version of an earlier Sweet Tea Murders walk. I have been digging deeper into my collection of old Pensacola crime stories and selecting a new combination of cases specifically for this tour.
The stories for this walk are varied, and they range from the nearly forgotten to the nationally infamous: an old downtown killing, a strange discovery inside a historic Pensacola building, a deadly fugitive pursued by police, the story of a man who faced Pensacola’s gallows, and one of the most notorious gunmen of the American West.
And there is something different about hearing these stories while standing where they happened. A newspaper clipping can tell you that a man was killed. Standing on the same street, looking at the same corner, and hearing what happened there turns that clipping back into a story.
That is what Mystery and Justice in Old Pensacola is about. We will begin and end at Bodacious Bookstore, Tuesday, August 18, at 5:00 PM.
If you enjoy old Pensacola, forgotten history, true crime, or simply discovering the stories hiding behind familiar places, come walk with us.
The streets haven’t changed nearly as much as the stories have been forgotten.
Go to sweetteamurders.com/events/ for more information.
Michael Earl Simmons
