In Brief
The La Concha Hotel rises seven floors over Key West, taller than anything else on the island. Guests keep reporting a disheveled man pacing the rooftop balcony who vanishes when security comes up. The story goes he's Fred — a lawyer who went off that roof in 1992.
The Full Story
Security at the La Concha Hotel in Key West, Florida gets the same call and never finds the man. A guest spots him on the rooftop balcony — disheveled, agitated, pacing the edge of the seventh-floor bar. By the time anyone climbs up, the balcony is empty. Tour guides have a name for him. They call him Fred.
Fred Butner was a Key West lawyer, and on October 7, 1992, his body was found on the roof of a two-story garage next to the hotel. Police pieced together what he'd done. Butner was under five active investigations for embezzlement and fraud, and a suicide would have voided the insurance money his family stood to collect. So, the police concluded, he staged a murder. He jumped from a tabletop at the rooftop bar, leaving his glasses and one shoe on the table. In his pockets: a large amount of cash, a photocopied note framing his secretary, Susan Hanna, and a tape recorder.
The recorder survived the fall. It caught the whoosh of the descent and the thud at the bottom.
Hanna had nothing to do with it. The note was signed in her name, but she had a gas-receipt alibi and her voice wasn't on the tape. Months before he died, she'd resigned from his firm in a letter to the Florida Bar: "He has falsified records, falsified documents, coerced clients and fraudulently taken trust funds."
The Southern Strange account of the death makes no mention of a ghost. That connection — the documented jumper and the pacing man on the balcony — is the story the tour guides tell, not anything in the record.
The hotel opened in 1926 and is still the tallest building in Key West, six floors of rooms under a seventh-floor tower bar. That height is its own kind of draw. Tour operators say more than a dozen people have gone off it over the years, though no archive backs the count.
Whoever paces the balcony, he keeps stopping at the edge.
