Fatty Walsh and the Biltmore Hotel Ghosts of Coral Gables

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Coral Gables built itself a landmark in ten months, and the Biltmore Hotel ghosts that guests talk about today are a byproduct of everything that happened to the building afterwards: a hurricane, a bankruptcy, a mobster’s death in a card room, twelve years as a military and veterans’ hospital, and nearly two decades of standing empty in the Florida heat. The hotel still operates as a luxury resort. Nothing reported inside it has ever been verified, but the stories are old, consistent, and tied to specific floors.

The Biltmore at a Glance

• Opened January 1926 in Coral Gables, designed by Schultze and Weaver
• Built by developer George E. Merrick and Bowman-Biltmore Hotels president John McEntee Bowman for about $10 million
• Tallest building in Florida when completed, at 315 feet, until the Dade County Courthouse surpassed it in 1928
• The tower is modelled on the Giralda, the medieval tower of the cathedral of Seville
• Served as a 1,200-bed military hospital from 1942, later a Veterans Administration hospital until May 1968
• Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986; reopened as a hotel on December 31, 1987

Ten Months, Ten Million Dollars: Merrick and Bowman’s Great Hotel

In 1925, at the height of the Florida land boom, Merrick joined forces with Bowman to build what they described as a great hotel that would serve both the crowds thronging to Coral Gables and act as a center of sports and fashion. Construction took ten months. In January 1926 the hotel opened with an inaugural that brought guests down from northern cities on trains marked “Miami Biltmore Specials.”

The guest list in the years that followed reads like a period newsreel: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, assorted Roosevelts and Vanderbilts, and Al Capone. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a temporary White House office set up at the hotel while vacationing in Miami. The pool was at one time the largest in the world, and the swimming instructor was Johnny Weissmuller, who broke a world record there before he became the screen’s Tarzan. Through the 1930s a large share of the hotel’s revenue came from aquatic galas that drew as many as 3,000 spectators for synchronized swimmers, bathing beauties and alligator wrestling.

The good years were thinner than the guest list suggests. On September 18, 1926, only months after opening, the Miami Hurricane struck. The hotel itself came through undamaged and sheltered more than 2,000 survivors, but the storm marked the end of the land boom. Merrick’s Coral Gables company declared bankruptcy on April 13, 1929, and Bowman bought out his partner’s stake that November for $2.1 million. Bowman resold the hotel in September 1931 to the millionaire Henry Latham Doherty.

Pratt General Hospital: The Twelve Years the Biltmore Was Not a Hotel

This is the chapter that most of the ghost lore leans on, and it is fully documented. With the onset of World War II the War Department took over the building and converted it into a 1,200-bed hospital in November 1942. Many of the windows were sealed with concrete and the marble floors were covered with government-issue linoleum. The building was transferred to the Army in 1946 and renamed Pratt General Hospital, then passed to the Veterans Administration in July 1947. It was also an early home of the University of Miami’s School of Medicine. Pratt General operated as a 450-bed VA hospital until a newer facility opened nearby in May 1968, at which point the building was vacated.

It then sat empty. The City of Coral Gables was granted ownership control in 1973 through the Historic Monuments Act and the Legacy of Parks program, and the building remained unoccupied for almost ten more years. Restoration began under the city in 1983. The Biltmore was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and reopened as a luxury hotel and resort on December 31, 1987. A multinational consortium led by Seaway Hotels Corporation took over operations in June 1992 under a long-term management lease with the city, refurbishing guestrooms, lighting, telephones, the pool and adding a spa.

Fatty Walsh and the Thirteenth Floor

The best known story attached to the building concerns Thomas “Fatty” Walsh, a mobster said to have been shot dead here in 1929, when local tradition holds the thirteenth floor operated as a Prohibition-era speakeasy and gambling room. Guests and staff have long reported hearing the residue of that party: murmured conversation, laughter, and the smell of cigar smoke drifting from a floor that is not in general guest use. Walsh is credited in the telling with a prankster’s temperament, moving lampshades and leaving marks or messages on mirrors.

None of the paranormal element of this is documented, and the identification of any reported presence as Walsh is folklore rather than evidence. It is worth saying plainly: the historical record of the building, including its National Historic Landmark documentation, is architectural and institutional. The ghost is a local tradition layered on top of it.

What Guests and Staff Say Happens Here

Reported phenomena cluster in a few places rather than spreading evenly through the property.

• The elevators. The most commonly repeated complaint is of cars that travel to floors nobody selected, or that open on the thirteenth. Guests report this has continued through successive modernisations of the equipment.
• The thirteenth floor. Party noise, voices, laughter and cigar smoke from unoccupied space, plus small objects reported moved.
• A woman in white. A figure said to be seen on the property, connected in the retelling to a fall from the Giralda-inspired tower. The story is undated and unattributed.
• A woman’s voice calling for a child. Reported in corridors, usually described as distressed rather than threatening.

A seance held at the hotel in 1978, during the years the building stood empty, is often cited as having made contact with these presences. Treat it as what it was: an event, not a finding. There is no measurement, investigation or record that substantiates any of the accounts above, and the hotel’s own history of itself is a history of architecture, guests and restoration.

Staying at the Biltmore in Coral Gables

Unlike most sites in this guide, this one wants your booking. The Biltmore operates as a full luxury resort: an 18-hole, par 71 championship golf course originally designed by Donald Ross, restored and updated by Brian Silva and reopened in November 2007 on its original 1925 routing, with further improvements in 2018; a 12,000-square-foot full-service spa; and, since February 2009, the Biltmore Culinary Academy, a hands-on recreational cooking school taught by the hotel’s chefs. The golf course annually hosts the Junior Orange Bowl International Golf Championship.

The lobby, pool and tower are the reasons to come even if the ghost stories leave you cold, and the building’s screen career means parts of it will look familiar: it has appeared in Bad Boys, The Specialist, Shock Waves, Popi, CSI: Miami and Miami Vice. The thirteenth floor is not open for casual wandering, so anyone hoping for Fatty Walsh should expect to hear about him rather than visit him.

See The Biltmore Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables | 123896
• homepage
• Biltmore Hotel pool (Miami (official site))
• A history of the Biltmore, Miami's best-known creepy hotel
• Get Your Dough On: Biltmore Miami Cooking Classes – TravelMuse
• Wikipedia: Miami Biltmore Hotel

Address: 1200 Anastasia Avenue

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