Gator City Haunting

Unpublished: May 2007

The bar should have been empty. After all, the doors to XS are locked after hours. And the only people allowed in the building – bouncers and bartenders - were next door in Gator City. They were busy cleaning, dragging mops against broken glass, stale beer, sweat and other strange fluids that cake barroom floors.

But when Brent opened the door separating XS from Gator City, he saw a woman across the room, standing in front of the restroom door. There’s no reason why anyone should have been there, unless maybe she passed out, only to wake up abandoned by her friends next to a toilet.

“You can’t stay here,” Brent said as he approached her from across the room. “You have to leave.” And she did.

Instantly.

Brent only looked away for a second and she was gone. People aren’t supposed to vanish like that. The woman didn’t duck into the bathroom. She didn’t hide herself in an unlit corner behind the bar. And he would have heard a door swing open if she left. But the bar was empty.

He was sure he saw someone. She was a brunette, short, maybe 5’2”.

Confused, Brent returned to his coworkers at Gator City. He tried to explain, but…

“You saw Nancy!” they told him.

His coworkers razzed and teased him. Haven’t you heard the stories? Stop lying. You know!

But Brent was being honest. He said he saw someone. And he hadn’t heard anything about a woman named Nancy.

Although her name isn’t Nancy, that’s just what everyone calls her. Her real name is Kathryn Oliveros, and she’s been dead for more than 40 years.

Living with the past

The building that Gator City now occupies, once called The College Inn, was where Kathryn Oliveros was stabbed to death in an upstairs bathroom.. But little remains of the restaurant at 1728 West University Avenue. A bronzed sign that once marked the date of establishment near the entrance has since been covered. It seems that only the algae-colored tiles, where the restrooms were and still are sans plumbing, are the last remaining vestiges of the popular student hangout. But the entirety of the upstairs hallway is now employees only. One of the rooms was converted into an office. Another into a cooler.

Even within the current staff of XS and Gator City, many are unaware of the building’s history, said Erin Adamson, a bartender who has been working there since the late 90s when it was the Purple Porpoise.

Bartenders during the Purple Porpoise era would scare new hires by telling them about Oliveros’ murder and then would ask them to fetch something from upstairs. A handful of the staff refused to ever go up.

But even then, Oliveros’ murder was a tall tale, and the staff mistakenly referred to her as Nancy.

“But I know…” Adamson said with a smile.

In the 60s, The College Inn was the one of the last holdouts of segregation and drew the constant ire of student protestors.

A fire gutted the building in 1962. The Alligator reported that students cheered as the roof caved in and goods from the store spilled into University Avenue.

“One fireman, without breaking rhythm, turned the fire hose away from the blaze, sprayed the chanting crowd, and then pointed it back towards the fire. The chanting increased,” The Alligator wrote in March 30, 1962.

The laundromat next door was slightly damaged from water and smoke, but the Catholic church was unharmed. No one was hurt.

The records catalogue for both the Gainesville Sun and the Alligator lack complete information on the College Inn, so it’s not clear when it reopened after the blaze, but it was definitely operating again by 1965, the year Oliveros was murdered.

Whether or not a patron or employee chooses to believe in the supernatural, there are just some things that are wildly beyond the scope of rational explanation.

Adamson was working the night that Brent said he saw a woman vanish inside XS. She also recalled one night where she was alone with another bartender, counting money after closing, when the two of them heard the walk-in cooler opening. The suction-like sound startled the pair. After closing the cooler and returning to the main area of the bar, the TVs came on by themselves. The other bartender ran out. Adamson turned off the TVs and finished counting the money.

“And I’m all like, ‘aaargh!’ and then ran off with a bucket of money,” she said as she threw up her arms, mimicking running out the bar.

It was commonplace for cups and bottles to randomly fall off counters in the kitchen and for pictures to fly off hooks, said Rich Hagard, a former bartender of the Purple Porpoise.

One night when he walked upstairs to smoke a cigarette, Hagard felt a “cool breeze go right down the back of my neck.” But the A/C only ran downstairs. Upstairs, it’s usually sticky hot.

“I thought, ‘maybe the ghost is trying to cool me off,’ ” he said.

Brian Walker, account executive and director of concert events for Rock 104, would book local bands at the Purple Porpoise on Thursdays and Saturdays.

“I’ve seen every inch of that building… and it actually got the point where I was disappointed that she didn’t show herself to me,” he said jokingly.

He was aware of other employees being afraid of the ghost. An employee who ran sound for live music, who Walker knew as “Hound Dog,” would always yell to the spirit that he was about to head upstairs, as if he was intruding on someone’s home.

“He would holler, ‘Catherine, I’m coming up.’ ”

But Walker remains reserved as to whether or not a spirit actually haunts the building. He recalls one employee mopping upstairs, and then finding footsteps that led nowhere on a damp floor. The employee ran scared downstairs, only to realize later that the footprints he saw matched his own.

“Does the power of suggestion help you experience things that aren’t really there?”

Celebration gone awry

The 1965 Gator football season was already under way. The day before the game with Louisiana State, Kathryn Oliveros planned to meet up with her boyfriend at the College Inn.

Oliveros’ brother, Charles, a junior at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida, was celebrating his 21st birthday.

It was supposed to be a weekend of fun and football. Steve Spurrier lead the Gators to a 14-7 victory over LSU, but Oliveros never made it to the game.

Oliveros originally met her boyfriend, Patrick Lynch, when she attended Sacred Heart College, which shared a campus with Lynch’s school, St. Bernard, a small Catholic school in St. Bernard, Ala.

“She was in love with this boy. He’d just gotten his class ring that weekend. He was going to give it to her,” said Oliveros’ mother, never identified by first name, in a Gainesville Sun story from October 13, 1965.

When Kathryn’s Air Force scholarship ran out, her family could no longer afford to send her to Sacred Heart. She took up working at a bank in St. Augustine.

Oliveros’ coworkers said that she was excited about the trip to Gainesville; she had been talking about it all week.

When she arrived in town, she parked her car a few blocks away from the College Inn and met Lynch outside. They had only spent a few moments together before she asked him to order cokes, and then excused herself to the ladies room upstairs.

But also wandering the hallway upstairs was Milton Lawson Luke, a former employee of the College Inn. A man psychiatrists described as easily confused and having little control over his emotions, was lost in thought when he meandered into the woman’s restroom.

Words were never exchanged between Luke and Oliveros. They met for only a moment, startling one another. An employee using another stall heard Oliveros scream. The employee rushed to Oliveros’ aid and found her bleeding from a knife wound to the chest. No one saw Luke stab Oliveros. No one even noticed him leave.

The employee who found Oliveros helped her downstairs, and the store manager called for help.

The officer who responded rushed her to Alachua General Hospital. En route, Oliveros described her assailant to the officer. She died almost two hours later on the operating table.

11 days later, Luke was arrested and then arraigned the next morning. After months of court delays, Luke’s lawyers made a surprise change in their defense strategy by begging the court for mercy. Luke plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder, avoiding a death penalty, and was paroled after serving 20 years of a lifetime sentence.