Lauderdale, Florida Firefighters Tell Tales Of Ghostly Presence At Historic Sailboat Bend Station
"Roll'n all night since 1927," declares a sign in the dining area of the old Westside Station, now called Station 8. By the end of next month, Fort Lauderdale firefighters will move into a new station on Northwest Second Street, Fire Chief Otis Latin said.
If historic and civic groups have their way, the city-owned station will become a firefighters' museum, but that City Commission decision has yet to be made.
Meanwhile, the buzz about the ghost they'll leave behind has grown louder.
The old station is not an unlikely place for a ghost.
One of Fort Lauderdale's earliest, the Sailboat Bend station at 1022 W. Las Olas Blvd., was built when city pioneer Frank Stranahan was on the City Commission, and notable architect Francis Abreu was designing most of the city buildings in town.
He drew the cozy Westside Station to look like the houses around it, a customary practice in those days, historian Merrilyn Rathbun recounts. Inside and out, it's almost indistinguishable from a single-family home, with a dining room, kitchen, living room and bedrooms branching off the hallway. Only the giant engine bay makes the building's purpose clear.
And at some point, firefighters say, a ghost settled in.
Firefighters think it might have been in the 1940s, after a young firefighter, Robert Leland Knight, died in his second week on the job.
The headline in the Fort Lauderdale Daily News on Dec. 27, 1940 read: "Local Fireman Electrocuted During Storm."
"Death of a Ft. Lauderdale fireman, Robert L. Knight, 28, climaxed a night of winds and sweeping rain, when he stepped from the rear of a fire truck into a pool of water charged by a fallen electric wire early this morning
