Flagler College

Originally the luxurious Hotel Ponce de Leon, built by Henry Flagler in 1888 and designed by Thomas Hastings and John Carrere. The Spanish Renaissance-style building is now a private college named after its founder.

Flagler College occupies the magnificent Ponce de Leon Hotel, built by Standard Oil co-founder Henry Flagler in 1888 as the most luxurious resort of its era. The Spanish Renaissance Revival masterpiece features Tiffany stained glass, electricity wired by Thomas Edison himself, and architecture so innovative it became America's first major poured-in-place concrete building.

Flagler's friend Edison installed the hotel's electrical system using direct current generators, but the technology was so unreliable that light bulbs occasionally exploded. Terrified guests refused to touch the switches, forcing Flagler to hire staff specifically to operate them.

The hotel closed during the Great Depression and served as a Coast Guard training center in World War II before philanthropist Lawrence Lewis Jr. transformed it into Flagler College in 1968. But the spirits of the Gilded Age never departed.

Henry Flagler himself is the most frequently encountered ghost. When he died in 1913 from a fall at his Palm Beach home, his body was brought to the Ponce de Leon Hotel to lie in state in the rotunda. Legend holds that when pallbearers removed his casket, every door in the building began opening and closing violently on its own. Shortly after, a janitor discovered a tile in the floor bearing what appeared to be Flagler's face.

Today, visitors report a man resembling Flagler—tall, wearing a white suit, walking with a cane—wandering the rotunda, lobby, and fourth-floor balcony. The Gray Lady, believed to be Flagler's mentally ill first wife Ida Alice (who was committed to an asylum and never freed), wanders the towers at night in a flowing gray cloak, searching for her lost husband. Students have also reported a mistress who supposedly hanged herself from a chandelier on the fourth floor, a mischievous little boy, and strange noises emanating from the dormitory towers.