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Heavily Investigated

They say Thomas Rowe never really left his Pink Palace — and neither did she. Guests strolling the Gulf shoreline at dusk have sworn they glimpsed a couple walking ahead of them: a gentleman in a white Panama suit, a woman in a flowing pink caftan, drifting just above the sand. Get close and they simply vanish. Sightings have been logged since 1973. The legend holds that Rowe and his lost love, Lucinda, were separated by her family in life but found each other again here, in the warm salt air of the hotel he built as a monument to missing her.

Thomas Rowe opened the Don CeSar in 1928 after purchasing 80 acres of St. Pete Beach in 1924 for $100,000 — a Jazz Age fever dream of pink stucco and Mediterranean Revival excess. Architect Henry H. Dupont gave it the silhouette of a wedding cake; F. Scott Fitzgerald and FDR filled its rooms. During WWII it was commandeered as an Army Air Forces convalescent hospital, then fell to disrepair before a 1970s restoration returned it to glory. A National Historic Landmark now — though Rowe, reportedly, never needed a plaque to know where home was.