The Biltmore Hotel

The tower elevator at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables has a habit of going somewhere no one asked it to. Staff say it rises to the 13th floor on its own, doors open on an empty hall, and the smell of cigar smoke turns up in rooms with nobody in them. One couple said they pressed the button for 4 and were carried to the 13th instead. That floor is locked behind a card key now. The people who work there have a name for whoever keeps riding up to it.

They say he's Thomas "Fatty" Walsh.

Walsh was a New York mobster who'd worked as a bodyguard for Arnold Rothstein, run with Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, and been questioned after Rothstein's 1928 killing and let go. By early 1929 he was running a speakeasy and casino out of a two-story tower suite high in the brand-new Biltmore, counted as the 13th floor in the hotel's telling.

It ended over money. In the small hours of March 7, 1929, Walsh owed his partner Edward Wilson $8,000 from a card game and mocked Wilson's lisp across the table. Wilson pulled a .38 and shot him three times near the suite's fireplace. A friend trying to help Walsh caught two bullets and refused to talk to police. Wilson slipped off to Cuba before anyone could question him. The case was never solved.

The suite where he died is rented out today as the Everglades Suite, and the staff still point to a bullet hole in the fireplace, more than ninety years on. Cigar smoke is Walsh's signature. But it isn't all him. Guests have reported figures in army uniforms from the years the building was a 1,200-bed military hospital, a woman waving from the tower, a dancing couple in an empty ballroom. At a 1986 séance in the hotel, a medium said she heard the tapping of a cane, "a cane like maybe a blind man."

Linda Spitzer, the hotel's official storyteller through the 1990s, spent a decade collecting what guests and staff brought her. She never saw Walsh herself.

"I never saw one," she said, "but such strange things were told to me by such regular people."