Ringling School of Art and Design

Along North Tamiami Trail in Sarasota, a short distance from the Ringling Museum estate and the circus money that shaped this stretch of Florida coastline, Ringling College of Art and Design sits on a campus that blends contemporary studio buildings with a handful of older structures carrying far heavier histories. At its center stands the Keating Center — a Spanish Mission Revival building constructed in 1925, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1984. Before it was an art school, it was a hotel. And before it was merely a hotel, it was something darker than that.

The Bay Haven Hotel opened in the mid-1920s during the Florida land boom, a period when Sarasota was exploding with speculative wealth and circus-empire prestige. The Bay Haven was built to attract the traveling businessman and seasonal wealthy visitor. It was moderately successful for a few years. Then the boom crashed. By 1928, the man who developed the Bay Haven subdivision was killed in a car wreck near Arcadia, and his wife struggled to keep the hotel afloat. By 1930 the banks were closing, insurance payments lapsed, and the hotel fell into receivership. What replaced the original clientele, according to accounts passed through generations of students and staff, was a considerably different population: gamblers, Prohibition-era bootleggers, and women working in prostitution on the second floor.

Into this compromised building, Dr. Ludd M. Spivey — president of Southern College in Lakeland — brought his plan for a Florida art school. He courted John Ringling, who was nearly bankrupt but agreed to lend his name and fund the $45,000 renovation. On October 2, 1931, the School of Fine and Applied Art of the John and Mable Ringling Art Museum opened with 75 students and 13 faculty. Students attended chapel daily and needed written permission to leave town. The school became independent in 1933 and eventually grew into Ringling College of Art and Design. The Keating Center has served as the campus heart ever since, housing administration below and student dormitory rooms above.

The ghost came with the building. She is called Mary, and her legend is among the most consistently reported haunting accounts in Sarasota. The story holds that Mary was one of the women living and working on the second floor of the Bay Haven during its decline — a live-in prostitute who fell in love with a client who didn't return her feelings and took her life by hanging in the stairwell at the end of the second-floor corridor. Hotel management concealed the death. Alumni accounts from as far back as the 1960s reference a locked room off that hallway near the stairwell that was left unused.

The manifestations are specific and consistent across decades. Students have described a young woman in her late teens or early twenties gazing down from a second-floor window at students below — sometimes smiling, sometimes not — wearing a cream-colored dress with ruffled armlets or a lavender flapper-style dress, a tight skull cap from the 1920s, with one foot bare and the other in a small blue shoe. Others report anguished sobbing from the stairwell at night with no visible source. Those who investigated described an overpowering smell of stale perfume and a crushing wave of sadness — shortness of breath, racing heart, an uncontrollable urge to weep. Former students from the 1970s and early 1980s described certain rooms on the haunted side as persistently thick and dark, prompting room transfers. A local priest reportedly performed an exorcism at the Keating Center in the 1990s — an event that those who claim ongoing encounters with Mary generally describe as unsuccessful.

The Travel Channel featured the legend in 2004. Ringling College today is a thriving institution and the Keating Center is fully restored, its upper floors still active as student housing. Students still report seeing her at the window. The perfume still turns up where no one is wearing any.