Free previewStop 6 of Haunted St. Augustine Walking Tour
The Hotel That Kept Changing Its Name
You're on King Street, and the big building with the towers and the Moorish arches is the Casa Monica. Look up at the roof and find the huge flagpole on top. It's actually a lightning rod. Keep that in mind, because this building has spent its whole life quietly hiding one thing under another.
The man who built it was Franklin W. Smith, a Victorian architecture enthusiast and social reformer. His own winter home, Villa Zorayda, sits just a block west of here, and it was the first Moorish Revival building in St. Augustine. He also experimented with poured concrete, and he built this hotel with it. When the Casa Monica opened in 1888 you could see the horizontal marks where each layer of concrete had been poured.
Soon after finishing, Smith ran into money trouble.
That's the opening. The rest plays at stop 6 of Haunted St. Augustine Walking Tour (3 min in all). Unlock the tour to hear it all, or try stop 1 free first.
