Dr. Horace Drew Mansion

According to JaxPsychoGeo's documented account, on a damp November night just after Halloween 1969, Michael Tiliakos — an 18-year-old orderly at the Duval Medical Center — took a head from the medical center's 'amputation unit.' The head belonged to a man in his fifties whose body had been donated for medical-education use. The cadaver was kept in an airtight germicidal bag and Tiliakos, who reportedly knew the donor personally, did not want the body cremated entirely. He slept with the head the first night and the following day buried it about 18 inches deep behind the then-vacant Drew Mansion, where prickly thistles and tall goldenrod concealed the spot.

Two children playing in the overgrown yard discovered the head before its decomposition was advanced. On July 12, 1970, Tiliakos was arrested at the medical center as he arrived for his shift and was charged with 'dealing in dead bodies.' The Orlando Sentinel ran the now-famous headline 'Medical Center Claims Haunted House Head' and United Press International picked up the nickname 'the Haunted House of Jacksonville.' The mansion's vacancy from 1967 to 1973 reinforced the lore.

Since then, the Drew Mansion has appeared in regional reporting and abandoned-building photography (David Bulit's work, Abandoned Florida) repeatedly under the 'haunted' label. The original ghost story rests on the very real 1969-70 incident rather than on apparition reports. Some later anecdotal accounts describe shadows in upper-floor windows and uneasy feelings inside the building, but the primary source of the legend is the documented buried-head case.