‘I Told You I Was Sick’: Inside Key West Cemetery

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Key West Cemetery occupies nineteen acres at the foot of Solares Hill, the highest ground on an island in Florida that barely rises above the sea at all. Estimates put as many as 100,000 burials inside its walls, against roughly 30,000 people living on the island today. That imbalance is the first thing most visitors register, and it colours everything else: a small city of the dead sitting in the middle of Old Town, four blocks from streets full of bars and rental scooters.

Nineteen Acres in the Middle of Old Town

• Official name: Historic Key West City Cemetery
• Size: 19 acres, at the foot of Solares Hill
• Location: the northwest section of the Old Town area of Key West
• Estimated burials: up to 100,000
• Established at this site: 1847
• Oldest dates on stone: one headstone carries a birthdate of 1792, another records a death in 1843

The cemetery is also home to a memorial to the U.S. battleship Maine, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey, and it was one of the burial grounds profiled in the 2005 PBS documentary A Cemetery Special.

The 1846 Hurricane That Forced a New Burial Ground

Key West’s earlier cemetery sat in the coastal sand dunes on Whitehead Point, near what are now the West Martello Towers. In 1846 a hurricane tore through and washed the dead out of the sand. The city moved its burials inland the following year, establishing the cemetery on its present site in 1847.

That story sits comfortably with the island’s older reputation. Key West was originally called Cayo Hueso, or Bone Key, a name tied to early accounts of Native American bones found on the island. Yellow fever, hurricanes and the ordinary hazards of a nineteenth century port town kept the burial rolls filling. Because the water table sits so close to the surface, many of the dead here rest in above-ground crypts stacked in tiers, which gives the grounds their distinctive skyline of white boxes rather than the sunken rows of a mainland graveyard.

Not every part of Key West’s burial history is inside these walls. In 2009 an African Memorial Cemetery was dedicated beside the West Martello Tower, on the site where enslaved people who had fallen ill during the sea voyage were buried before the Civil War.

Sloppy Joe, a Stuffed Rabbit, and the Grave With No Name

The epitaphs are the reason a lot of people come. B.P. “Pearl” Roberts, who died in 1979, has the island’s most photographed line carved above her: “I Told You I Was Sick.” Gloria M. Russell, buried in 2000, settled for “I’m just resting my eyes.” The humour is genuinely local, and it reads less like a gag than like a town refusing to be solemn about something it has had a great deal of practice at.

Other graves are quieter and stranger. Miriam Albury, who died in 1933, had a stuffed bunny left on her grave that stayed there for more than fourteen years. “Sloppy” Joe Russell, the bar owner whose name still hangs over Duval Street, died in 1941 and is buried here.

The plot most bound up with the island’s ghost stories has nothing on it at all. Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, a local beauty of the 1920s who died in 1931, lies in an unmarked grave. The reason is documented rather than legendary: her body was robbed from the cemetery by Carl Tanzler, a German radiology technician obsessed with her. Her final resting place was left unidentified so it could not happen again.

The Bahamian Woman Said to Watch the Graves

None of what follows is verified, and the cemetery makes no such claim. It is what visitors and local guides report.

The best known figure here is the spirit of an unnamed Bahamian woman, described in island lore as appearing to people who treat the graves carelessly: sitting on headstones, walking across plots, taking liberties with the crypts. Accounts of her are consistent enough that the story functions as an etiquette lesson as much as a ghost story.

Other reports from visitors include:

• Apparitions glimpsed among the crypt rows
• Disembodied voices with no visible source
• Orbs and shadow shapes turning up in photographs
• Sudden cold spots on otherwise hot days
• Unexplained scents, most often described as perfume

Cold spots and photographic orbs have mundane explanations in a place of stone, shade and sea air, and a nineteen acre cemetery in a busy town produces plenty of stray sound. What is worth saying is that the reports cluster around the same theme: the sense of being observed, and the sense that behaviour matters here.

Walking Key West Cemetery Respectfully

The cemetery is open to the public and free to walk, and it sits within easy walking distance of Old Town. Come early. There is little shade among the crypts and the Keys sun is punishing by midday. A map of the grounds is available if you want to find the noted graves rather than wander into them by accident.

The rules are the ones you would expect and the ones the ghost story reinforces: stay on the paths where they exist, do not walk over graves, do not sit or lean on headstones and crypts, and do not move anything left as a tribute. This is an active burial ground for a small island community, not an attraction. Treat it that way and the visit gives you the closest thing Key West has to a written record of itself, in stone, with jokes.

See Key West Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• GPS coordinates address of Key West Cemetery, Florida (FL) United States, Travel to Key West Cemetery – Alltopsights.com
• Key West City Cemetery
• Loc (official)
• Memorial to the U. S. Battleship Maine, Key West Cemetery, Key West, Monroe County, FL (Library of Congress)
• Google Maps
• Wikipedia: Key West Cemetery

Address: 701 Passover Lane

Ghost Tours Nearby

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