STRANGER THAN FICTION

St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuously occupied city in the USA. A sixteenth century-founded beach town with old brick roads, coquina stone walls and Spanish colonial architecture, it’s long been claimed to be haunted. Paranormal enthusiasts visit for its ghost tours. Some say the first ever Thanksgiving took place here, 50-odd years before the pilgrims broke bread with the Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts, when Spanish colonists feasted on shellfish, alligator, tortoise and wild turkey with members of Florida’s Timucua tribe.

It was here that Chris Tapp – singer/guitarist with The Cold Stares, and a man with a gift for conveying ghosts of the past through music – found inspiration for one of his band’s standout singles to date, the smoke-wreathed desert blues cocktail In The Night Time.

“When you’re walking on the streets you’re basically walking on a graveyard,” Tapp says in a deep, southern purr, talking via Zoom from his Indiana home, “because there’s so many people buried under the streets. And I had that mentality in my head, so I wrote in a minute or two.”