An 11-acre ghost-town island accessible only by boat — six people killed in an 1840 Seminole raid, never resettled
Off Overseas Hwy near MM 78, Islamorada, FL 33036
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Florida State Park entrance fee applies. Access by private boat or kayak only — no vehicle access. Boat rentals and kayak tours available from nearby outfitters.
Access
Limited Access
Boat access only to a small island with sandy paths among ruins and subtropical vegetation. Uneven ground around building foundations.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1830 · Southernmost Land Battle of the Second Seminole War · Death of Dr. Henry Perrine (botanist, former U.S. Consul) · National Register of Historic Places (1972) · Only Accessible Ghost-Town Island in the Florida Keys
Indian Key was a thriving commercial settlement of roughly 50 residents by 1840, located on an 11-acre island southeast of the Matecumbe Keys in what is now Monroe County. The island functioned as a wrecking and salvage base, taking advantage of the reef-strewn waters of the upper Keys where ships ran aground regularly. It was incorporated as a town and for a brief period served as the county seat of Dade County.
On August 7, 1840, at approximately 2 a.m., resident James Glass spotted a row of dugout canoes along the island's edge. A war party led by Chakaika — a Seminole leader who had become notorious for the 1839 Caloosahatchee massacre — attacked the settlement before an alarm could be raised. The assault lasted several hours; the attackers burned every structure on the island.
Six people were killed in the raid. Dr. Henry Perrine, a physician, botanist, and former U.S. Consul to Campeche, Mexico, had taken refuge at Indian Key while awaiting federal clearance to begin cultivating a 36-square-mile botanical grant on the mainland. He died when the attackers found him. His wife and children survived by hiding in the turtle crawl — a submerged holding pen for sea turtles beneath the family's wharf — and listening to the attack from beneath the water. Other residents escaped by swimming to vessels anchored in the harbor.
Among the other dead: John Motte, killed by a rifle shot; Motte's wife, killed as the family was dragged outside; the Motte infant, thrown into the water; the Motte's older daughter, clubbed to death; and Joseph Sturdy, a boy who died of smoke inhalation while hiding in a cistern beneath a warehouse.
The island was never resettled after the attack. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and is now administered as Indian Key Historic State Park. Ongoing archaeological work has mapped the building foundations beneath the vegetation. Access is by private boat or kayak only.
Sources
Indian Key has no organized paranormal tradition — no ghost tours run to the island, and Florida State Parks does not frame it in those terms. What the island carries instead is an extreme version of what preservation historians sometimes call material haunting: a landscape where the event is physically legible.
The building foundations are still present in the ground. Vegetation has grown through and around them but not erased them. Interpretive markers identify structures by function — the hotel, the warehouse, the dock approaches — and visitors walking between them can reconstruct the settlement's footprint against the overgrowth. The cisterns where survivors hid are still in the ground.
Some visitors who kayak out to the island describe the experience as qualitatively different from other Keys state parks: quieter, more concentrated, the sense of a boundary between the active water around the island and the stillness of the interior ruins. Whether that maps to anything paranormal is a matter of individual interpretation. The historical record is sufficiently detailed — the Motte family's deaths, Dr. Perrine dying while his family listened from the water below — that no embellishment is needed to make the island feel like a site of arrested time.
Notable Entities
Kayak or boat to this uninhabited 11-acre island to walk among the archaeological ruins of the settlement destroyed in the 1840 Seminole raid. Interpretive markers identify building foundations, the former dock area, and the site where botanist Dr. Henry Perrine was killed. The island has been uninhabited since the attack.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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