LAKESIDE INN
Inn — Mount Dora, Florida
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/lakeside-inn-mount-dora-florida/

VISIT FLORIDA describes the hotel as reputedly haunted.

An inn in Mount Dora, Florida, Lakeside Inn is filed here for what the record attaches to it. VISIT FLORIDA describes the hotel as reputedly haunted. It sits in the archive under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

Lakeside Inn is Florida's oldest hotel still taking guests — the Alexander House opened 1883 on Lake Dora's shore, the ten-room pine hotel the town's founders built before the railroad came, when the journey from New York took a week by lake steamer through the Harris Chain. Emma Boone bought it in 1893, married George Thayer in 1903, and the Thayers doubled it and built the cottages that made it Lakeside Inn.
The rocking chairs on the two-hundred-foot veranda have been filled since the South was rebuilding — eighteen years after Appomattox when it opened, older than Walt Disney. Every other Victorian hotel in Central Florida burned or fell or was redeveloped; the Edgertons kept it through the Depression and the Flagler-era collapse of the lakes region; it's the last of them, still the anchor of Mount Dora's historic district.
The file keeps Lakeside Inn: the 1883 opening, the steamer guests, the Thayer expansion, and the veranda that's held a hundred forty years of rocking chairs.
Lakeside Inn is the archive's Mount Dora file — the oldest continuously-operated hotel in Florida and the last Victorian survivor.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Lakeside Inn is the archive's Mount Dora file — the 1883 Alexander House and the continuous operation.
A hotel that predates the railroad keeps its veranda — the file's suggestion being that Lakeside's hold is the endurance: the steamer-era inn that outlasted every competitor, still rocking on Lake Dora after a hundred forty years.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] unspecified haunting: VISIT FLORIDA describes the hotel as reputedly haunted. Lakeside Inn, a hotel in Mount Dora, Florida, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. 'A Guide to Florida Ghost Tours' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. It's the kind of claim that outlives debunkings — too many witnesses, too few explanations.
  source: A Guide to Florida Ghost Tours (https://www.visitflorida.com/travel-ideas/articles/florida-ghost-tours/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· A Guide to Florida Ghost Tours — VISIT FLORIDA
  https://www.visitflorida.com/travel-ideas/articles/florida-ghost-tours/

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