Northeast Florida’s 25 Best-Kept Secrets

Experience little-known corners of the First Coast with this guide to quirky, unusual and intriguing places and spaces across the region.
Fabrizio Gowdy and Timothy Gilmore contributed to this story

Think you know Jax? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Regardless, living in a city of this size—840 square miles or so—means there is always somewhere new to explore, something new to discover. From the rickety docks of Mayport at the mouth of the St. Johns River to the dusty hiking trails of Cary State Forest on the far Westside, we went in search of Jacksonville’s weird and wonderful, often overlooked historic sites and places that are real head-scratchers. A hotel for squirrels, an abandoned nuclear weapons storage facility, an old landfill turned into a mountain bike trail… sure, we’ve got all of that and more. Read on and see for yourself.

Aterro Park Trails
Aterro Park simultaneously proves two things—not all of Jax is flat as a pancake, and trash can become treasure. The former landfill turned mountain bike park offers 60-foot climbs, sudden changes in grade and eight miles of bike trails. An additional three miles of running paths are also set to open soon, and a dog park is in the permitting process. The privately run park along Sunbeam Road is free to enter and open every day from 8 AM to sunset. SORBA (Southern Off-road Bicycle Association) Jax maintains the trails and organizes races and other events. Check the group’s Facebook page for information on Wednesday night group rides, which will return in the fall. SORBA relies 100 percent on volunteers and is always looking for new members who are passionate about maintaining the semi-natural wonder.

Ghost Seats
If you’ve sat in the upper balcony for a show at the Florida Theatre—specifically Section 500 Row E, seats 1 and 2—you might have been unknowingly sharing your spot. That’s because those are the infamous “ghost seats” believed to be haunted by a friendly apparition named “Jay.” Some say Jay was a former building engineer, others think he is a long-ago theater manager protecting the current staff, while others claim he is a 1920s organist named Joseph Hilton. Whoever he is, there have been whispers about him going back decades. In 2010, local paranormal investigators filming in the theater reportedly captured footage of a ghostly figure appearing to sit and wave from seat 2. Built on the corner that formerly housed the city jail, the Florida Theatre has a long history of alleged paranormal activity: a presence in the projection booth, doors and lights operating on their own, disembodied voices, humming noises lingering after equipment is unplugged. When the theater underwent a massive seating renovation in 2020, seats 1 and 2 were the only two spared from replacement. Instead, they were shipped to a factory in Michigan for restoration before being reinstalled in their original location so their resident ghost would not be disturbed.

Grisham’s Beach House
Northeast Florida may not have the celebrity scenes of Hollywood or Miami, but renowned author John Grisham enjoys spending time at his oceanfront abode in Fernandina Beach. An attorney and (remember this for next trivia night) former member of the Mississippi legislature, Grisham has authored more than 50 best sellers and amassed an estimated net worth of $400 million. Grisham did not see the ocean until he was 18 years old, and instantly fell in love with Amelia Island’s easygoing coastal charm when he first visited 30 years ago. He bought a home on South Fletcher Avenue in 2010, and says his favorite time of the year is the two weeks he spends on the island every summer with his family. In his “Ode to Amelia Island,” penned in 2019 for Garden & Gun, The Firm author tells of lunches and late dinners on the porch, bocce games, reading on his swing chair and plenty of “serious loafing.” We don’t recommend ringing the doorbell to say, “hi,” but if you park at beach access lot 39 and take a walk down by the water, you might just cross paths with one of America’s most accomplished authors.

Main Library Balcony
Looking for an unusual place to work, study or just read a book, there’s a little-used outdoor balcony on the fourth floor of the Main Library with an expansive Downtown skyline view. There are even tables, chairs and electrical outlets. Monthly rent? $0. Despite being in the heart of the city, it’s usually pretty quiet aside from the tranquil sounds of the fountains in the library courtyard below. Admittedly, there is no AC or shade, but when the temperatures are cooler and it isn’t raining, it’s one of the most scenic places in town to enjoy a peaceful respite. The balcony can be accessed from 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Saturday. Enter through the Memory Lab.

Castle Otttis
Every year, more than 750,000 people tour the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine. Another castle just five miles away receives far fewer visitors. Perched west of Hwy. A1A north of Vilano Beach, Castle Otttis was built in the 1980s by Ottis Sadler and Rusty Ickes. Drawing inspiration from 11th century Celtic abbeys, the two men spent four years building the 3,500-ton structure, collecting enormous amounts of cinder blocks from salvage yards and completing all the masonry work themselves. The interior features elaborate woodworking of cypress and southern heart pine, including eight staircases, pews, an altar, a pulpit, choir loft and even a bishop’s chair. The castle is not affiliated with any church, but it is a monument to Jesus Christ—the three “T’s” in “Castle Otttis” represent the three crosses at Calvary, where Jesus was crucified. Ottis and Ickes have both passed, but Ickes’ son Mathias is continuing to welcome visitors to the one-of-a-kind monument. Tours take about an hour and can be scheduled using the contact section at castleotttis.org. Photography is fine, but the tour is not ADA accessible and children under the age of nine are not permitted.

Hotel for Squirrels
After storms, concerned do-gooders bring in orphaned squirrels in swarms. Desiree Pinder operates the Hotel for Squirrels in a small cabin left over from the old motor court behind the Bayard Inn, originally called the Wing Hotel when it was built in 1885, on Philips Highway. Bayard was a depot village attached to its stop for the Florida East Coast Railroad and W.W. Wing was a former Union soldier, killed and dismembered when he was sucked into a sawmill shortly after building his hotel. Karma is much better at the Hotel for Squirrels, whose purpose is to nurture orphaned squirrels until they can get back on their feet and into the trees. You can bring squirrels in, or sign up to take a course in orphan squirrel rehabilitation, or volunteer. “We are a team,” says the mantra of the hotel, recently the subject of a UNF student documentary called Squirrel Hotel, “and we all play a role in saving each life.”

Timucuan Burial Mound
In 2026, you could walk from the top of the burial mound in the back yard of the larger house to the roof of the house built into Grant Mound at the end of the cul-de-sac. In the summers of 1894 and ’95, archaeologist Clarence B. Moore dug into Grant Mound and found “numerous human burials,” as University of North Florida archaeologist Keith Ashley writes in “Introducing Shields Mound (8DU12) and The Mill Cove Complex,” though the “exact number is difficult to decipher from Moore’s writings.” Moore excavated 147 polished stone blades called celts, “chipped stone tools” and “shell drinking cups” and pearls and shell beads and “pottery vessels” and “stone beads.” Indicating long indigenous trade routes, he also unearthed “two long-nosed god maskettes” of a mythical figure known as He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-as-Earrings, a warrior deity in Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) and Ioway tribal cosmology. Ashley writes, “The Shields and Grant Mounds were erected upon the two highest points along the west side of Mill Cove, each perched with a magnificent view of the river.” Real estate development occurred here just before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act would have forbidden it.

Blue Cypress Boardwalk
It’s one of Jacksonville’s longest wooden boardwalks, and yet there are days you can walk the length of it and pass only a handful of people. The one-third-mile riverfront boardwalk at Blue Cypress Park faces west, making it a great place to catch sunsets as they melt over EverBank Stadium, the downtown skyline and the industrial hodgepodge of Talleyrand Avenue. Low tide exposes a few feet of sandy beach, while high tide pushes water under the boardwalk and into the marsh. It’s a quiet, low-key spot to cast a line or take a stroll. The best place to park is the small lot near the fishing pier.

Old South Jacksonville Marker
Even longtime San Marco residents can be forgiven for never having noticed the unimposing three-foot-tall concrete post on Gadsden Road in Miramar. Faded black letters painted on white read “City Limits 1937.” The letters are a bit hard to read, locked in a battle with grey lichen. This humble sign, now part of someone’s front lawn, is one of the most visible remaining vestiges of pre-consolidation Jacksonville. The marker dates back to when Jacksonville city limits extended only as far as Ortega, the Trout River, and parts of San Marco, and most everything between there and the Intracoastal Waterway belonged to feral hogs. There’s not a grand monument by any measure, but the little marker of yesteryear is worth appreciating next time you walk, bike or drive by.

Ossachite Iron Marker
In 1931, the Jacksonville Historical Society left a grossly inaccurate historical marker at one corner of the limestone, granite and marble former post office and federal courthouse downtown designed by the architectural firm of Marsh and Saxelbye. The marker claims it stands on the site of Ossachite, “from earliest times until about 1700.” But there was no Timucuan Indian town called “Ossachite.” Nor was there, in the marker’s spelling, such a “Timuquan” town. Since no such town throve, nor even barely existed, this corner of this magnificent municipal building marks not the site on which it stood. Jerald T. Milanich, the leading living authority on the Timucua, says, “There was never a Timucua town called Ossachite; that is a piece of bad historical research by T. Frederick Davis.” The Timucua, Milanich says, weren’t city-builders. Their largest settlements contained “a small number of huts and burial mounds.”

King Solomon Rathel Houses
“Sometimes Mr. Rathel would live in the house as he was building it,” says Ray Holliman, 96 years old. “He just had his old truck and he’d mix the concrete by hand there in the yard. He didn’t have no equipment. Just a shovel and an axe and some things like that.” He’d lay the foundation and work his way up, eventually building scaffolding and wheelbarrowing cement up ramps. Eventually King Solomon Rathel built at least 15 of his strange curvilinear flat-roofed houses, between 1935 and the late ’50s, around the Trout River and Lem Turner Road on the Northside. He’d moved down from Donalsonville, Georgia in the 1920s with his wife, Marvel Funderburk Rathel. Where he learned his trade remains a mystery, as does how he developed his own Art Deco-like style and why he finally took his own life in the 1970s.

Ribault Column
Many people visit Fort Caroline National Monument to see the fort and walk the network of hiking trails, but fewer people travel a bit further up to the Ribault Column. Situated atop a 70-foot bluff, it’s one of Jacksonville’s tallest natural points, and offers sweeping views of the St. Johns River and the marshes beyond. The stone monument is a replica of one French explorer Jean Ribault placed at the mouth of the St. Johns River in 1562 to claim Florida for France and King Charles IX, whose coat of arms is on the column. The modern replica was originally installed in 1924 near Mayport and was moved to its current lofty location in 1958 after NAS Mayport made the monument inaccessible to the public.

Goat and Exchange Islands
Jacksonville is a city defined by its waterways, with 17 percent of Duval County covered by water. Simply put, without a boat or a kayak, you’re missing out on some of the more picturesque spots the city has to offer. Luckily, two such places are relatively easy to access from public boat ramps via kayak—tiny Goat Island and Exchange Island. The western tip of Goat Island is only a .35-mile paddle from the dock at Reddie Point Preserve in Arlington. The narrow island is nearly three-quarters of a mile long and is completely undeveloped. The sandy eastern tip offers a great view of the Dames Point Bridge that’s hard to replicate from land. Exchange Island, which supports the Matthews Bridge, is a bit farther out in the water, about three-quarters of a mile from the Arlington Road Boat Ramp to the island’s small dock. Both islands are rugged and sans buildings, which juxtaposes with the skyline, bridges and industrial sites within spitting distance. One word of caution: if you’re planning to splash ashore during the warmer months, bring generous amounts of bug spray and apply it liberally.

Blue Protest Brick
On October 22, 1979, The Jacksonville Journal’s Lloyd Brown reported, “When the new Kent Campus of Florida Junior College officially opens, December 2, a handful of people will be there quietly enjoying an inside joke.” When the Board of Trustees discussed the design of the new campus, Jewell Haddock Blackburn opined the bricks should be blue, her favorite color. Board members may have gaslighted Blackburn, having delayed her reappointment to the board, though someone proposed placing one blue brick, inscribed with her name, somewhere in the new construction, “as a tribute of sorts.” Another unnamed “board member seemed displeased,” Brown reported, and the blue brick “was buried quickly.” But not entirely. In fact, Brown prognosticated, “The architectural oddity may puzzle FJC students of the class of 2000 passing through the south entrance to the administration building.” Somehow someone on the board managed to sneak in One Blue Jewell Haddock Blackburn Brick, printed with her name, though the name faces inward, the only blue brick on campus amidst more than 600,000 red ones.

Anna Kingsley’s Grave
Strange really that Anna Kingsley, Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, or Anna Madgigine Jai, should be famous here in Jacksonville. When she was 13 years old, she was kidnapped from what’s now Senegal and shipped to Cuba, where the slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley purchased her, impregnated her and married her. Anta became Anna and bore four children to the man who bought her. When she turned 18, Zephaniah emancipated Anta and she would soon supervise his Laurel Grove Plantation at an inlet on what’s now Doctors Lake in Clay County. Subject now of books and rock operas, she lies buried in an unmarked grave in the old neighborhood of Clifton tucked just south of the Mathews Bridge.

Atlantic Boulevard Mermaid
St. Augustine sculptor Thomas Glover W. said Beaufort [South Carolina] City Council was just “ignorant in art.” Over 14 other entries, the Beaufort Public Art Commission chose Glover’s in 1993, which the Hilton Head, South Carolina Island Packet newspaper called “a four ton stone mermaid and her exotic fishy friends riding a large wave.” The commission, however, objected to the mermaid’s breasts and demanded they be covered. Beaufort City Council declared those measures didn’t go far enough and soon the sculpture’s piscine mammaries instigated a mano-a-mano. Glover’s promotional material said, “Eroticism is a tension between contrary forces; it is a spark and I am a floodplain of gasoline.” In 2006, developer Ramzy Bakkar salvaged the design, not knowing the back story, hired Glover to sculpt the mermaid, and brought her to his new Harbour Village Shopping Center on Atlantic Boulevard, near the Intracoastal Waterway.

Cosmic Church of Truth
The spirits first spoke through Ethel Tunks in the little blue house at 712 Ralph Street in North Riverside where the Tunkses had lived since Ethel became a U.S. citizen in 1955. They were raising their first four children there when the spirits told the Tunkses to open their home as the Cosmic Church of Truth and WHVH Bookstore. In August 1971, Jo Anna Moore, writing for The Florida Times-Union and Journal, compared the Tunkses’ home to Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel. “Like the cold spot of Hill House,” Moore wrote, the house on Ralph Street was “the psychic center for area students of the occult.” That same year, the Tunkses had moved to a tall clapboard on Park Street and the wood-frame 1945 house in the subdistrict platted as “Rose of Riverside” became home solely to WHVH and the Cosmic Church of Truth. Today the church continues at 1637 Hamilton Street and though its membership hovers between 60 and 90 adherents, it contains several Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans and, goes an inside joke, “lapsed Catholics.”

Betz Sphere Site
An Associated Press headline read, “UFO Panel to Examine Odd Ball,” and United Press International headlines announced, “Five Scientists Meet Over Steel Ball Today” and “Further Probe of Weird Metal Ball.” In late March 1974, the Betz family investigated the damage a brush fire had wrought along the marshes beside their 1920s’ Tudor-style Fort George Island house, when their 21 year old son found the hollow 22-pound steel sphere. Strange things began to happen after they brought the steel ball inside, though the house had always carried bad luck. To this day, the Betzes are the only residents to have lived in the 89-year-old house year-round. They called it “The Castle” and called The Castle home for 18 years. Even Chicago realtor Nettleton Neff, who commissioned Mellen Greeley, once called “the dean of Jacksonville architecture,” to design his Florida mansion in 1927, never lived in the house. Eventually the Betzes left the house behind too, chased away not by ghosts and aliens, but by the relentless onslaught of conspiracy theorists and Ufologists.

Nuclear Weapons Storage Bunkers
Each bunker held from 10 to 30 nuclear weapons and was surrounded by three rows of barbed wire fences, sensors, searchlights and surveillance cameras, while about 200 Marines watched from towers. Each nuclear weapon held a grapefruit-sized core of plutonium, an element terrifyingly radioactive, with a half-life of 25,000 years, a couple grains of which can cause cancer. Miles of barbed wire fence surrounded 11,000 acres of pine woods with a labyrinth of roadways, a helipad, an inner compound. For decades, Jacksonville went about its business, all without knowing the U.S. Department of Defense was storing scores of nuclear warheads in secret bunkers here at Yellow Water. In 1992, Bob Blodgett, who served 18 years as Duval County chief of emergency management, told Florida newspapers he’d known the Navy stored nuclear weapons at Yellow Water, that it angered him that the Navy transferred these weapons by armed truck convoy straight through the city. “They were transporting those things right across our highways and through Downtown.” Now the bunkers stand empty and wide open beneath the trees just a hop, skip and a jump from the Jacksonville Equestrian Center.

Blackrock Beach
Even if you haven’t been yourself, there’s a decent chance you’ve received a wedding invitation or Christmas card photo taken at Boneyard Beach, Big Talbot Island’s fallen forest of sun-bleached oak and cedar driftwood trees. Blackrock Beach, a less-frequented spot, lies just up the shore. Formed during the last Ice Age, this section of beach features striking formations that look like black lava rocks, but are made of hardened sand. The beach shares its name with a volcanic rock beach on Maui. The rocks are best accessed by parking at Bluffs Scenic Shoreline Picnic Area and walking south, or parking at the Blackrocks trail and walking north.  It’s about a mile each way. The beach is open during daylight hours, but parking is limited.

Mary Fox Markillie Statue
Students from nearby Bishop Kenny High School have made legend trips here to see her in the St. Nicholas Cemetery for years. Stories say the statue once had eyes of rubies and that sometimes they return. The stories say that Mary Markillie’s ruby eyes weep. The truth is that in 1895, she left her son George $1,000, more than $40,000 in today’s money. Oddly, a city directory lists her living downtown at 624 West Church Street the year after her death. Near the end of his own life, her only son, who’d made his living in real estate, memorialized his mother here in stone. So here she is, planted sometime between 1912 and 1916. George Fox Markillie died four years later, but his stone shows no death date.

Florida’s First Execution Site
Celia Bryan, the first woman executed in Florida, showed no remorse when she went to her death by hanging at the site of the old courthouse, northeast corner of Market and Forsyth streets downtown. “She cut open his skull so as to produce instant death,” having mounted a knife to a hoe in the fields of his plantation, said The Jacksonville News on December 7, 1847. Jacob Bryan, residing five miles from the center of town, “had,” said the News, “been murdered by a female negro slave.” Jacob had married an enslaved woman named Susan, with whom he had several daughters, including Celia; meanwhile, a May 9, 1848 probate document has Jacob Bryan admitting to being the father of his daughter Celia’s four children. In the summer of 1848, upon Celia’s testimony in court, Governor William Mosely, first governor of Florida as a state, temporarily commuted Celia’s sentence while considering her “great hardship.” Jacksonville residents wrote their governor some demanding Celia’s death, some begging for her life. Ultimately the governor denied both pardon and mercy.

Beluthahatchee
Jacksonville-born literary great Stetson Kennedy came from an aristocratic Southern family, with ancestors including signers of the Declaration of Independence and the founder of the Stetson hat empire. An author, folklorist and activist, he gained notoriety in the 1940s when he successfully infiltrated the Klan in Georgia. For six decades, Kennedy lived in an eclectic home overlooking Lake Beluthahatchee until he died in 2011 at the age of 94. The home has twice been designated a National Literary Landmark, and is open to tours by appointment. It is located at 1523 State Road 13, and those wishing to visit can call the Stetson Kennedy Foundation at (904) 549-9444 to arrange a tour. In addition to tours, the property hosts concerts every second Sunday of the month. Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie used to stay at the home for months at a time and composed over 80 songs here. The name Beluthahatchee, was reportedly coined by Kennedy’s close friend Zora Neale Hurston, which describes a mythical “Florida Shangri-La” where all unpleasantness is forgiven. Perhaps as you tour the grounds, you’ll feel the unpleasantness of St. Johns County traffic melt away.

Mary Todd Lincoln House
Most recently the River House Apartments, the old house once operated as a hotel called both River House and Rochester House. The Second Empire-style dwelling stood back then in Brooklyn, but was moved by barge down the river to its current location on River Boulevard near Memorial Park. Historians have often dated the onset of Mary Todd Lincoln’s insanity to March of 1875, when the president’s widow left her hotel in Jacksonville to travel back home to Illinois. Just more than a year earlier, as Jason Emerson writes in his 2012 book The Madness of Mary Lincoln, she’d written that so many of her “ties to this world” had been “severed,” she sometimes felt she had “no right to remain upon earth.” Mary’s son Robert began proceedings to have her institutionalized, which started with a trial to determine her state of mind. At the trial, the Mary Lincoln said she’d been haunted by an Indian spirit who took bones from her face and removed wires from her eyes. Spirits visited her, rapping on the table to communicate the time of her death. She would always believe, though records said otherwise, that Robert had her committed “on false charges” so he could steal her money.

Seminole Hotel Terracotta Heads
Supposedly the Seminole Indian was Jacksonville Prairie-style architect Henry John Klutho’s self-portrait. The story had been told for decades as had urban legends concerning the whereabouts of the terracotta heads. Originally there were 10 heads and they weren’t Seminoles, but Mohawks. Then in the spring of 1909, the Utica [New York] Investment Company, which commissioned of Klutho a grand Jacksonville building, was bought out by a Tennessee hotel conglomerate and Klutho converted his banking building to a hotel. When the Seminole Hotel, at the southeast corner of Hogan and Forsyth streets, was demolished in 1974 to build a parking lot, activist and future architectural historian Wayne Wood drove by in his Volkswagen bus and talked the demolition crew into letting him haul away several heads for free. Wayne has three Seminole Hotel heads in the yard of his Riverside Avenue home. There’s another downtown in the Ed Ball Building and two more in the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee.

Editor’s Note: As a side nugget to this story, our annual Taste local drinking and dining supplement features a story about ten little known but worth visiting eateries, markets, roadside stands and more.