The Don CeSar Hotel

A man in a white summer suit and a Panama hat keeps turning up where he isn't supposed to be at the Don CeSar Hotel on St. Pete Beach, Florida. Staff and guests say he greets new arrivals with a smile, then disappears when anyone walks toward him. Doors swing open for housekeepers carrying trays. He keeps to the fifth floor, the lobby, the gardens, and the beach, where the story goes that he walks out toward the water and is gone.

They say he's Thomas Rowe, the man who built the hotel.

Rowe opened the Don CeSar in 1928 — a wedding-cake of a building painted shrimp pink, the rosy color from lime worked into the mortar. Locals still call it the Pink Palace. He named it for Don César de Bazan, the hero of an opera called "Maritana," and the love story goes with the name. As a young man, the legend says, Rowe loved a Spanish opera singer named Lucinda whom he met in London. Her family forbade it. He married someone else, wrote Lucinda for years, and got back only one reply: a clipping announcing her death, with a note that read, "My beloved Don Cesar."

On May 2, 1940, Rowe had a heart attack in his own lobby. He died three days later, at 67. He'd drawn up a new will leaving the hotel to his staff but never signed it, so the place passed to the wife he was estranged from.

The hauntings started in 1973, when the hotel reopened after years as a wartime hospital and then a ruin slated for the wrecking ball. By the fountain, guests say, the white-suited man is sometimes seen holding the hand of a raven-haired woman — Rowe and Lucinda, reunited.

Then the Gabber, a local newspaper, went looking for Lucinda. "Maritana" wasn't staged in the 1890s when Rowe is said to have seen it. No playbill lists a singer by that name. And Rowe was buried beside his actual wife. The great romance everyone repeats lives in the tours and the books, not the record — which means the woman by the fountain belongs to a love that may never have happened.