Casa Monica Resort & Spa

At Casa Monica in St. Augustine, Florida, a medium investigating the hotel was taken up to the top-floor Kessler Suite, and what she described there had a face. A man with "big burly sideburns," pacing back and forth in despair, fixed on a vision of broken tiles crashing past the window. The tour guide standing beside her said she went completely frozen, a feeling she hadn't had in ten years of leading tours.

Only afterward, digging into the building's history, did the group connect the description to a real person. Franklin W. Smith — a Boston hardware merchant and Civil War-era abolitionist — built this hotel out of poured concrete and opened it on January 1, 1888 to exactly three guests. Within about four months, money trouble forced him to sell to Henry Flagler for $325,000, fixtures and silver and linen included. Flagler renamed it the Cordova. Smith never got it back.

The broken tiles fit, too. The hotel's original terracotta roof was replaced somewhere in its long second life, and the medium's vision was tied to that loss — the builder watching the last of his work come down.

After Smith, the place lived several lives. It was the Cordova, then the Alcazar Annex once a bridge was thrown over Cordova Street in 1902. It closed in the Depression, sat as the county courthouse for three decades, and only got its original name back in 1999. The name came full circle. The man who started it, some guests and staff say, never did leave.

The rest of the lore is the usual hotel chorus, sorted by floor. Guests and staff report children running the fourth-floor halls when the floor is empty. Room 511 carries a story of a man who hanged himself there; the guest below in 411 woke to figures in old-fashioned clothing that vanished in seconds. Housekeepers, the staff say, work in pairs.

Management won't confirm any of it. But it's Smith they keep coming back to — the one who built the place and only ever got to keep it for a season.