Haunted Pub Crawl Near Me: The Biltmore Bar and Fatty Walsh's Ghost

If you search haunted pub crawl near me from Coral Gables, the guided tours will send you to South Beach, but the most famous ghost in Miami-Dade drinks closer to home. The Biltmore Hotel at 1200 Anastasia Avenue has a wood-paneled cocktail lounge called The Biltmore Bar, and the building above it carries the story of gangster Thomas Fatty Walsh, shot in a gambling suite upstairs in 1929 and, legend says, never quite checked out.

The hotel itself is the reason to come. George Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables, partnered with hotel magnate John McEntee Bowman, broke ground on March 13, 1925, and opened The Biltmore in January 1926. The New York firm of Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver designed it, and its tower was deliberately modeled on the Giralda of Seville. The hotel is marking its centennial this year, and the National Park Service named it a National Historic Landmark in 1996.

Now the shooting, which is documented. According to the Mob Museum, Walsh, a former bodyguard of New York gambler Arnold Rothstein, was in a gambling suite on the 14th floor in the early hours of March 7, 1929, when an argument ended in multiple gunshots. Another man, Arthur Chick Clark, was wounded. Police issued a warrant for Eddie Wilson, who ran the suite, but nothing came of it, and the killing was never solved.

The ghost belongs to legend, and the best teller was the hotel's own former storyteller. In a 2011 Miami New Times piece, Linda Spitzer, who told the hotel's stories for a decade, described the lone original elevator rising to the 13th floor with nobody calling it, and joked that it was Fatty Walsh wanting company. She also admitted she never saw a ghost herself, only that very ordinary people told her very strange things.

Spitzer collected other sightings too. High school kids who snuck in reported people walking with their feet floating above the ground, guests felt taps on the shoulder and turned to see men in army uniforms, and one piano player looked up to find a man waving at her who vanished a moment later. Those uniforms point to real history: the hotel served as an Army Air Forces hospital during World War II.

That wartime chapter ran longer than most visitors expect. The hotel's history page says the building was an Army Air Forces hospital, an early home of the University of Miami's School of Medicine and then a Veterans Administration hospital until 1968. Restoration began in 1983, the hotel reopened in 1987, closed again in 1990, and has been operated by the Prescott family's Seaway Hotels Group since 1992.

Inside The Biltmore Bar, the room is all dark wood and lamplight, a deliberate contrast to the pastel lobby. The hotel names two house cocktails in its photos, the AZ-85 Old Fashioned and the Biltmore Blossom, alongside Key West pink shrimp and a charcuterie and cheese board. The bar does not publish a priced menu online, so order at the counter and ask the bartender which bottles they are pouring tonight.

Happy hour is the cheapest way into the room. The Biltmore Bar runs its Signature Hour from 4 to 6 pm Wednesday through Friday, which lines up well with a crawl that starts in daylight and ends near midnight. Brandi's has a Nightcap Collection happy hour from 9 to 11 pm Sunday through Thursday, and Fairways, the golf-course bar, has one daily from 4 to 6 pm.

For live music, come on Friday or Saturday between 7 and 11 pm, when the bar books a solo artist. That is also when the room is busiest. Earlier in the week the lounge is calmer, which is the better setting for telling the Walsh story to friends who have not heard it, and for wandering out to the elevator bank afterward to see where Spitzer's 13th-floor tales began.

If you want a sit-down dinner before drinks, Fontana is the hotel's Italian restaurant. Its Miami Spice menu runs Monday through Friday through October, at $40 per person for lunch and $65 per person for dinner, plus tax, with an automatic 20% service charge. On Wednesday, October 28, the hotel hosts an Italian Wine and Gastronomy Soiree from 6 to 9 pm, with tickets at $135 including tax and gratuity.

Getting here takes a car or some patience. The Miami tourism bureau points riders to Metrorail's Douglas Road station, where the free Coral Gables Trolley connects, but the trolley runs only Monday through Saturday from 6:30 am to 10 pm. Coral Gables' free Freebee electric rides run until midnight on Friday and Saturday. Drivers can use valet, which the hotel lists at $25 a day for visitors.

For a daytime prologue, the Venetian Pool at 2701 De Soto Boulevard was carved from a coral rock quarry in Merrick's same building boom. It opens Tuesday through Friday from 11 am to 5:30 pm and weekends from 10 am to 4:30 pm, closed Mondays, with non-resident adult admission at $23. Swim in the afternoon, change, and reach the bar for the 4 pm happy hour.

Practical notes: The Biltmore Hotel is at 1200 Anastasia Avenue, Coral Gables, FL 33134. Smoking is not allowed inside the building. The hotel no longer runs its old Thursday ghost-story sessions, and no Halloween 2026 party has been announced on its calendar, so the haunted part of this stop is yours to bring. The commercial Miami haunted pub crawl stays in South Beach.

The Biltmore Bar suits crawlers who want their ghost story with a documented crime behind it and a cocktail lounge that looks the part, in a hotel celebrating 100 years. It is less suited to a cheap, fast bar hop, since the drinks are hotel-priced and the next bar is a drive away. Make it the grand final stop, order an Old Fashioned, and watch the elevator.