St Augustine, Florida is also where Castle Warden was built in 1887 as a winter home for William Warden.

Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings later purchased it and turned into a popular, fashionable hotel. A frequent visitor, Robert Ripley, tried to purchase the building, unsuccessfully. He felt the building would be perfect to house his unusual collection of oddities from his travels around the world.

After his death in 1949, Ripley's heirs made a successful bid for Castle Warden and opened the first Ripley's Believe it or NOT! museum in December, 1950.

I intentionally altered this image to resemble the 40's style tinted images we're familiar with from Ripley's newspaper drawings. Enjoy