The ghost hunters slid into the white, wooden chapel in Dunedin about an hour before dusk.
They filed into its heart of pine pews, inspecting the 138-year-old Gothic-style chapel and the scar down its middle. The gash marks where the chapel was sawed in half and pieced back together about half a century ago — one of three times the chapel has been hoisted from its base and moved.
Some had journeyed more than 100 miles to visit the Historic Andrews Memorial Chapel, and the spirits some claim wander its creaky floors and arched doorways still.
The church has become a destination for those seeking spots around Tampa Bay to peer into the supernatural.
The paranormal thrill-seekers — some looking for a fun way to immerse themselves in the city’s history and others looking for proof of the unexplainable — armed themselves with spirit-hunting tools like dowsing rods, hoping to communicate with the spirits and answer an age-old question.
“I just want to know what happens after you die,” said Makayla Gustave, 19, a University of South Florida nursing student who tagged along with her mother and grandmother for her first-ever ghost hunt last month.
Maybe Gustave would hear from a spirit known as Ken, the carpenter who fell to his death from the wooden trusses that form a web in the ceiling, or William Andrews, the chapel’s namesake, who was killed by a limb falling from a tree struck by lightning as he was riding a horse.
A fascination with the paranormal
Cynthia Dominick, the founder and lead investigator of Silent Slayer Ghost Tours, guided the 15 ghost hunters in their sleuthing (another 15 sat on a waitlist after it hit capacity).
“Was anyone brought here against their will?” she asked the group, a tradition to mark the beginning of every session.
Dominick was always fascinated by the paranormal. She remembers her aunt telling stories of her own haunted home in Northlake, Illinois: Beds would shake when no one else was in the room, cabinets would fling open by themselves, stoves would light suddenly.
“Whenever I saw my aunt, no matter how old I was, I was like, ‘Tell me the ghost stories again,’” Dominick recalls.
So, when the pandemic put a halt to her job working as the director of sales at a hotel, Dominick pivoted. The Safety Harbor resident founded Silent Slayer in 2021, hosting ghost tours and investigations across the state and country.
“They always say do what you love, and it won’t feel like work,” said Dominick, who has now conducted more than 100 inquiries.
This was her eighth time investigating the Andrews chapel, which she first visited for a wedding years before she started her company.
She recalls sitting in the back pew when she asked one of the spirits she’d heard about to flicker the lights. About 30 seconds later, the grandfather clock let off a thunderous chime in the middle of the ceremony, she said.
“I was just like, ‘Oops, I did that,’” Dominick said. It made a lasting enough impression that, years later, she decided to come back.
A church sawed in half
The chapel has a colorful history. It rose as the church for Dunedin’s Presbyterian community in 1888 on the corner of Scotland Street and Highland Avenue, where it would sit for almost four decades, said Eric Houghton, a local historian and Dunedin native.
One hundred years ago, on July 6, the church was relegated to the back of the property, and a grander home — the First Presbyterian Church — took its place. Andrews Memorial was renamed a chapel, occasionally serving as a Sunday school, said Houghton, who attended classes there as a kid.
Another move came soon after, when the church pushed the chapel back another couple of hundred feet south, Houghton said.
In the 1970s, the chapel had a brush with death. The First Presbyterian Church sought to bulldoze the building to make way for more parking. The Dunedin Historical Society lobbied for its salvation and secured the chapel a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
But in order to be saved, the chapel would need to be lugged 2 miles north. It was a “monumental task,” Houghton said.
The chapel was sawed in half and dropped off at its current resting place in Hammock Park. Its innards sat for all to look at, wrapped in clear plastic sheeting for years before the historical society could begin renovations.
“Poor thing, cut in two, and looking pretty miserable by itself up there,” Houghton said.
The chapel is now the site of weddings, Celtic concerts, plays and the occasional ghost hunting investigation. As for whether spirits call the chapel home, Houghton said he’s on the fence.
Looking for the inexplicable
Dominick welcomes skeptics on the tour and said even she needs to scrutinize whatever evidence they may find.
“Not everything’s paranormal,” she said.
But she hopes people come in with an open mind.
“It’s not meant to scare you. It’s to pique your curiosity,” she added.
Gustave, the nursing student from Wesley Chapel, takes a ghost tour every time she visits a new city as a way to learn about its history. But she was still in search of some “cool evidence.”
Walking around with a spirit box, or a modified radio scanner, Gustave tried to make contact with the beyond. “Why are you still in the chapel?” she asked. “Trapped,” Gustave said she heard from the spirit box.
“There’s something here,” Gustave said.
Nick and Tiffanie Naive have been married for 12 years. They fit in a ghost tour or investigation on every vacation. This time, they drove two hours from their home in The Villages.
“You don’t just go to a town, and you’re going to a bar,” said Nick, 37, a project manager for a construction company. “You’re learning about where you’re at.”
Tiffanie held a dowsing rod, an L-shaped metal wand, in each hand. The rods are used to ask spirits questions. If the rods move away from each other, practitioners say, the spirit is answering “no,” but if the rods cross to create an X, the answer is “yes.”
She asked in her head, not knowing what to expect, if her grandmother was watching over her. The rods slowly moved toward each other.
“I asked if she’d been checking in on my grandpa. They argued all the time — and she said no,” said Tiffanie, 37, a home designer. “That’s hilarious.”
Barbara Lynch described herself as a believer. She came to the chapel looking for proof of what she said she knows exists.
“I want them to come and talk to me,” said Lynch, 53, a former marketing professional. “I know they’re there, and I feel it.”
She said she received confirmation on a prior ghost hunt. Last October, Lynch went on a tour at the Tampa Theatre and captured a video of what she said was a spirit moving through the grand curtains.
The guide said it was just a lens flare. But Lynch knows better.
