The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables

At the height of the Florida land boom, Coral Gables founder George Merrick and hotelier John McEntee Bowman announced a $10 million luxury hotel, and in January 1926 the Biltmore opened, its 315-foot tower modelled on the Giralda of Seville Cathedral. For two years it was the tallest building in Florida. Its pool – once billed as the largest in the world – hosted aquatic galas with bathing beauties and alligator wrestling, and future Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller set a world record there. Guests included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby and Al Capone.

Gangland violence gave the hotel its ghost. In 1929 Thomas “Fatty” Walsh, a gangster, was shot dead by another gangster during a party on the thirteenth floor. That killing, local historians say, is the origin of the Biltmore’s ghost stories: Walsh, the story goes, never left the tower suites where he died.

The Depression and war changed everything. In November 1942 the War Department turned the hotel into a 1,200-bed hospital; it later became Pratt General Hospital and then a Veterans Administration hospital and early home of the University of Miami’s medical school, with windows sealed and marble floors covered in linoleum. When the VA moved out in 1968 the building stood empty for almost two decades. Neighbourhood children sneaked in with flashlights, dodging a security guard they nicknamed “the Greenie”, and swapped tales of ghosts in the dark corridors.

The City of Coral Gables took ownership in 1973, began restoring the building in 1983 and reopened it as a hotel on 31 December 1987. The hotel later leaned into its legend: for about ten years from 1994, storyteller Linda Spitzer told ghost stories in the lobby every Thursday night, saying her best material came from the guests themselves. The Biltmore is now a National Historic Landmark.

Guests and staff tell of an unseen presence and unexplained noises on the thirteenth floor attributed to Fatty Walsh, and of figures linked to the building’s years as a military and veterans’ hospital. Many of the stories were collected and retold by the hotel’s own storyteller, and few have been documented independently.

The tower’s upper floors, especially the thirteenth floor where Walsh was killed, the long corridors that once served as hospital wards, and the grand lobby where ghost stories were told on Thursday nights.

The Biltmore is a fixture of Miami ghost-tour lore and of “haunted hotel” lists, and has appeared in films and television shot in South Florida. Its story ties together the Florida land boom, Prohibition-era gangsters and the Second World War home front.