Antebellum Churchyard in the Heart of Key West
401 Duval Street, Key West, FL 33040
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access to the Memorial Garden during daylight hours; respect active church grounds.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved and crushed-shell paths within the small churchyard
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1831 · Antebellum Florida · Key West Heritage · Episcopal Church History
St. Paul's Episcopal Church was formed in 1831 by an official act of the Key West City Council, only nine years after the city's founding. In 1832, the widow of John Fleming donated the parcel on Duval Street for both the church and its cemetery, on the condition that her husband's grave on the property remain in place as a permanent resting site.
The history of the building itself is a sequence of rebuilds. The first church, completed in 1839 of coral rock, was destroyed by the 1846 Havana Hurricane. A second church was lost in the Great Fire of Key West in 1886. After the third building was demolished, plans for a storm-proof structure were approved in 1911, and the current building was completed in 1919. It remains an active congregation.
The churchyard now functions as a Memorial Garden rather than a working cemetery. Many of the original antebellum burials were moved to Key West City Cemetery during the early-twentieth-century reconstruction, and at least six people are documented as still interred beneath the present building. A modern columbarium for cremated remains has been added to the historic churchyard. John Fleming's marker remains on site as a primary point of historical reference.
Sources
Key West's dense ghost-tour ecosystem keeps the small churchyard at St. Paul's in regular circulation. Tour operators describe a turbulent presence linked to the marker for John Fleming, the property's donor, with accounts of sudden gusts of wind in still conditions and a sense of unwelcome that has led some local tour operators to avoid bringing groups onto the property itself.
A second strand of folklore involves children's voices reported in the rear of the churchyard, attributed in popular retellings to a fire-related Sunday-school tragedy nearby. We could not find newspaper or church-archive corroboration for the specific story circulating around this site — the Sunday-school-arson detail in the Shadowlands listing names no parties and matches no documented Key West fire we could locate. We list children's-voice reports as a folkloric phenomenon without endorsing the specific tragedy story behind them, and we recommend treating the John Fleming personality details as community lore rather than archival fact.
The site appears on multiple operating Key West ghost-tour routes and is mentioned in tour-operator literature; we did not find published independent paranormal-investigation reports.
Walk the small Memorial Garden behind St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Duval Street. The churchyard contains a few remaining headstones and memorial plaques from the antebellum period; most original graves were relocated to Key West City Cemetery during the church's early-1900s rebuild.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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