A GANGSTER WAS MURDERED ON THE 13TH FLOOR — And the Elevator Still Stops There

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables is one of the most beautiful buildings in Florida. It is also, staff will quietly tell you, one of the most haunted.

The Biltmore opened in January 1926, the crown jewel of George Merrick’s Coral Gables. Its tower suite — the Everglades Suite, spanning the 13th and 14th floors — doubled during Prohibition as a speakeasy and casino. And on March 7, 1929, while a trio played “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” casino partner Edward Wilson argued with Thomas “Fatty” Walsh over money, then shot him dead in front of the suite’s fireplace. A bullet hole is said to still mark that fireplace today.

The hotel’s history kept layering: during World War II it became a 1,200-bed military hospital; it served veterans afterward; then it sat abandoned from 1968 to 1983, when urban explorers made its ghost stories famous. It reopened in 1987 and is now a National Historic Landmark.

And Fatty? Guests and staff have reported his cigar smoke in empty rooms, lights flicking, doors opening for waitresses, workers’ tools moved around during the 1980s renovation — and, most famously, the elevator rising to the 13th floor and opening on no one, with no button pressed. The Biltmore took the stories seriously enough to employ an official storyteller in the lobby for a decade.

Join the conversation: Ever had an elevator take you somewhere you didn’t ask to go? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.

Sources: The Dead History; Coral Gables Magazine; Mob Museum; contemporary 1929 newspaper reporting.

Photo: Ebyabe, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).