The Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa

Real estate developer Thomas Rowe opened the Don CeSar, known as the Pink Palace, on January 16, 1928, modeling its lobby fountain on one in London where he'd fallen in love with Lucinda de Guzman, a Spanish opera singer performing in Maritana, in the 1890s before her family forced them apart; she wrote him a final letter from her deathbed decades later, addressing him as her "beloved Don CeSar," and he named the hotel for the opera's hero. Rowe died of a heart attack in the hotel in 1940. The hotel later served as a VA hospital from the 1940s until 1973, when it reopened as a resort. Guests and staff describe a man in a Panama hat and white suit strolling the grounds before vanishing, knocking and swinging doors on the fifth floor where Rowe once lived, a young couple in period dress sometimes seen walking toward the fountain, and a nurse still seen wandering near the kitchens, which once held the hospital's morgue.