Old Jail — Amelia Island Museum of History

The most widely repeated legend attached to the old Nassau County Jail concerns a figure called 'Luc Simone Aury,' said to be the illegitimate son of the privateer Louis Aury and a notorious criminal. According to the story — repeated on the official Amelia Island tourism site and various ghost-lore pages — he attempted to cheat the gallows by slitting his own throat the night before his execution, was stitched up by a surgeon to keep him alive, and was hanged the next day, the stitches tearing open and drenching the crowd in blood. His ghost is said to be heard moaning where the gallows once stood, occasionally appearing with a gaping wound across his neck.

This legend should be read with strong caution. The historical Louis-Michel Aury (1788-1821) controlled Amelia Island only briefly in 1817, surrendered to American forces that December, and died in 1821 on Old Providence Island after a fall from his horse; the documented record names a sister, Victoire, as his heir but no son. There is no credible historical evidence for a 'Luc Simone Aury,' for such a son being hanged at Fernandina, or for the gruesome execution scene — and the jail building itself postdates Aury's 1817 occupation by decades, making the on-site gallows tale anachronistic. Even sources that retell the story present it explicitly as legend ('according to locals'). HauntBound treats the hanged-son narrative as unverified folklore rather than fact.

What is genuinely established is that the old jail and the surrounding district anchor an active, museum-run ghost tour and a long-standing dark-tourism tradition built on Amelia Island's pirate, Civil War, and Gilded Age history. Visitors interested in the lore are best served by the museum's guided tour, where the documented history and the legends are presented side by side.