Emily (LOW) Gibson of Orlando's Lake Highland

“HER form could be seen floating among the orange trees,” wrote historian Kena Fries in 1938, in telling of an event that had occurred many years earlier on Orlando’s Lake Highland. “A jolly Christmas party” Miss Fries said, “the guests leaving long after midnight, in the darkened house the hosts slept peacefully. In the early morning the wife awoke, a choking sensation in her throat. The room was filled with smoke, and lurid flames leaped about the building. Frantic efforts failing to arouse her husband, she ran to the nearby water plant, clad only in her night robes.”

The tragedy on Lake Highland, which is not found in other local histories, tells of a young Central Florida bride who, after her husband was rescued, collapsed and died of exhaustion. “After that, for many years, just before sunrise on the morning of December 27^th, her form could be seen floating among the orange trees, from the charred remains of the old house to the water plant, where it dissolved into thin air and vanished.”

The Orlando Water Plant was built at Lake Highland in 1887, so was there really a ghost visible among the orange trees surrounding the water plant? Below are the facts, you decide!

The most popular guy in town during the summer months of the 1880s had to be John W. Anderson. Why? He managed the Orlando Ice House! Born in Indiana, Anderson grew to adulthood in Iowa, and after the Civil War, married Miss Adeth Bell GIBSON.

But five days after the birth of the second Anderson child in 1877, Adeth died. John married his deceased wife’s sister, Emily, and in 1881, the couple relocated to Orlando, Florida. By 1886, John W. Anderson had moved his family to Lake Highland, but he did not buy the land they lived on.

The deed to Anderson’s land had been issued to, “Emily Gibson Anderson, sole heir at law of Peter Gibson, deceased.” A resident of Ryegate, VT, Peter had purchased five acres upon which Lake Highland Preparatory School is now located.

Peter had died at his Vermont hometown. He was buried at a Ryegate hillside cemetery, and a handsome grave marker memorializes not only the life of Peter, but that of his wife as well. And there, on the side of Peter’s tombstone, is a bone chilling inscription, a tragic story replicated in the annals of Ryegate, Vermont history.

Peter married Emily LOW in 1846. They were parents of two girls, Adeth and Emily, both of whom, according to the Vermont town’s history, had been married to John W. Anderson. Now then, about that bone chilling tombstone inscription, it reads: “Emily LOW Gibson died at Orlando, FL, December 23, 1883.”

“A jolly Christmas party” said Miss Fries of her haunting Orlando story, “the guests leaving long after midnight, in the darkened house the hosts slept peacefully. In the early morning the wife awoke.” Vermont recalls Emily LOW Gibson, a central Florida frontierswoman who died in 1883.

You now know the facts, so what do you think? Was Emily LOW Gibson the ghost of Lake Highland’s Water Plant?

Tomorrow: The Sheriff's Widow during #WomensHistoryMonth