Pinewood Historic Cemetery

Pinewood Historic Cemetery has long carried a haunted reputation in Daytona Beach folklore, recounted by local ghost tours, regional news outlets, and paranormal sites. Its signature legend concerns Adler Rawlings, remembered as one of the town's prominent early citizens. According to the story, his tomb was disturbed and his remains scattered — local retellings claim children once used the tomb as a clubhouse — and his head was never recovered. His headless spirit is said to roam the cemetery as a result. The legend is best treated as oral tradition; no documentary record verifies the desecration as described.

Beyond the Rawlings legend, visitors and ghost-tour guides describe the apparition of a woman among the graves, full-bodied figures seen hovering over headstones, and disembodied, playful laughter near the children's section. Some accounts mention well-dressed men appearing near the gates and a colony of cats around Rawlings' tomb said to vanish mysteriously.

Older anonymous reports tied to the surrounding beachside streets — unexplained figures photographed near a fence on Auditorium Boulevard and at a house on Hollywood, linked to a murder tale from the neighborhood's pre-1970s houses — circulate on user-submitted folklore indexes. These street-level accounts are uncorroborated and are noted here only as local color; the documented haunted tradition centers on the cemetery itself.