Safety Harbor Resort and Spa

At the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa, on the west shore of Old Tampa Bay in Florida, the salt shakers won't stay put. They disappear from the dining room and turn up later behind televisions, tucked into towel closets, their tops loosened. Set one on your table and look away, the story goes, and it has slid to the next table over. Staff blame a dead man for it.

His name was Dr. Salem H. Baranoff, and he hated salt.

Baranoff bought the spa in 1945 and rebuilt it around a code he called his "Precepts for Healthy Living." No salt. No liquor. The man ran the place by his own rules, and the staff say he never gave them up. The resort's own executive administrator, Jean Barraclough, has gone on record naming him: Baranoff "was against salt and liquor," she said, which is why salt shakers get knocked over in the Baranoff Ballroom and wine bottles are said to pop on their own.

The spa was old ground before he ever got there. It sits on the Espiritu Santo Springs — the "Springs of the Holy Spirit" — mineral waters the Tocobaga people used for thousands of years, and a place a Spanish expedition was later said to have mistaken for the Fountain of Youth. A sanatorium opened here in the mid-1920s so guests could "take the waters" in porcelain tubs. The resort marks its centennial in 2026. Harry Houdini was a guest.

Baranoff is just one of the spa's reported tenants. Housekeepers won't go alone into the women's bath area, where after-hours staff describe sudden cold and an unseen voice whispering their name. A lady in white is rumored on the grounds. During 1990s renovations, staff say, the front desk got late-night calls placed from rooms that were supposed to be empty.

But the one with a name is the doctor. He bought the place to run it by his own rules, and decades after they buried him, the staff keep finding the salt where he'd want it: tucked out of reach, knocked over, gone.