After building his Pink Palace on St. Pete Beach in Florida, Thomas Rowe still couldn’t get over his true love, the opera singer he met as a student. Staff at the Don CeSar Hotel claim that the two lovers were reunited in the afterlife and are still lingering at the hotel.
Florida’s Gulf Coast isn’t all sugar-white beaches and turquoise tides. Beneath the sunshine and salt air, its shores cradle legends older than their glitzy resorts and postcard-perfect sunsets. And if there’s one place in St. Pete Beach where the past refuses to stay buried, it’s at the Don CeSar Hotel — better known to locals as The Pink Palace.
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This towering, rosy-hued monument to 1920s decadence holds more than history within its walls. It holds a love story cut short, a founder lost too soon, and the lingering spirits of those who never truly checked out.
A Glamorous Beginning Shrouded in Heartbreak
When estate mogul, Thomas Rowe opened the Don CeSar in 1928 on the beach close to St. Petersburg near Tampa, Florida, it was the epitome of Jazz Age luxury. Nicknamed The Pink Lady because of the color, it quickly became a playground for the rich and famous — from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Al Capone.
But behind the glittering parties and ocean views lurked a tragic love story that would forever haunt the halls of this seaside palace.
As the legend goes, Rowe fell deeply in love with Lucinda de Guzman, a Spanish opera singer he met while studying architecture in London in the 1890s. She starred in Maritana, an opera where the hero was named Don César de Bazan — a name Rowe would later bestow upon his dream hotel.
In other versions they met at the opera, or Rowe took her to see it on their first date, it varies. They would meet outside the opera by a fountain, planning their life together.
But fate was unkind. Lucinda’s family, who was of Spanish nobility, forbade the match, and the lovers were cruelly separated and their plans to marry fell apart. Rowe moved back to the U.S and married someone else, but continued to send her letters, but only one ever returned: a newspaper clipping announcing Lucinda’s death, with a simple, heart-wrenching note attached: “My beloved Don Cesar.”
Death in the Pink Palace
In 1940, just over a decade after realizing his dream, Thomas Rowe suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack in his lobby. He never left a will and the hotel was left in disrepair by his wife until the army bought it to turn it into a hospital during the war.
Some say it was heartbreak that finally claimed him. The Don CeSar passed from his hands — but Rowe, it seems, never truly left.
By 1969, the hotel was completely abandoned and the pink paint covered with graffiti and the only guests staying were ghosts. At first they wanted to tear down the whole building, but fate would have it otherwise. In 1973 it opened up again as a hotel after the franchise owner of Holiday Inn bought it.
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Today, staff and guests alike whisper of ghostly figures seen wandering the hotel’s sun-soaked corridors. A man in an old-fashioned linen suit and a Panama hat is often spotted strolling through the courtyard or pausing on the grand staircase or by the fountain that he built as close he could to their fountain outside the opera house. Some claim he’s seen standing beside a beautiful woman dressed in a flowing, traditional Spanish gown, her hair dark and eyes eternally searching.
Eerie Encounters in the Halls
In addition to Thomas Rowe lingering in the hotel he built, it is also believed that some of the haunting comes from the former patients as its time as a war hospital and convalescent center.
Countless stories have emerged over the years from guests and employees who’ve had unexplained encounters at the Don CeSar. Lights flicker without reason. Footsteps echo in empty hallways. Doors open and close of their own accord.
More than one housekeeper has reported seeing the dapper man in the hat, only to watch him disappear around a corner. Others say the ghostly couple appears in the garden courtyard under the moonlight, standing hand in hand before dissolving into mist.
The Don’s Eternal Vigil
While some spirits cling to anger or unfinished business, Thomas Rowe’s ghost seems bound by love. It’s said he roams the Pink Palace not in torment, but in eternal search of the woman he lost.
How true was the love story in the afterlife though? No playbill with Maritana mentions a woman named Lucinda. Did it even play in London in the 1890s? As it was a British opera, it does make sense he did see it when he was a student in England though.
Although Lucinda was not on the playbill as an opera singer, the House of Guzmán is a real Castilian royal family.
According to some articles, the story wasn’t even told until its reopening and the tragic love story was a marketing strategy instead of something true. The story was apparently told in “Ghostly Encounters: True Stories of America’s Inns and Hotels,” by Frances Kermeen, and when asked where she had gotten the story from, she answered from her PR contact of the hotel.
Today, St. Pete Beach thrives as a laid-back, sun-drenched getaway. But as dusk falls and the Gulf sun sinks beneath the horizon, the Pink Palace casts long shadows across the sand. It’s in those moments that guests swear the past comes alive — a timeless echo of love, loss, and unending devotion.
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References:
Florida’s Fairy-Tale “Pink Palace” Hides A Chilling Secret
Seeks Ghosts: Haunted Don CeSar Hotel
The Lost Love of Thomas Rowe – The Gabber Newspaper
In The News | Historic Hotels of America
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