Welcome To Tampa Terrors
Don’t let the palm trees and whimsical theme parks distract you; Tampa has a haunted history buried beneath the bikini-strewn beaches. As the bright sun sets over the coast, you can hear the restless souls of unfinished pasts begin to stir.
What Will I See?
Visit Tampa’s Most Haunted Locations, Including:
Old Tampa Theatre – In 1926, the fabulously gaudy Tampa Theatre opened its shiny doors, and locals stepped inside for a night of escapist fantasy for only 25 cents per head. It is a space artfully designed for delightful frights, with plush blood-red seats, carved busts whose eyes seem to follow you as you walk, and gargoyles perched in corners. But be careful where you wander: A chain-smoking poltergeist named Foster “Fink” Finley died in the lighting booth years ago and is said to have never left.
Floridian Palace – Built in 1926, The Floridian Place Hotel is one of the only hotels in Tampa to make the Historical National Registry. Once the peak of luxury for lavish tourists to gather over cocktails, the hotel’s business took a sharp decline in the 1980s, and the clientele shifted to migrant workers and forlorn travelers. Today, the horrors of this conflicting past haunt its halls.
- Old Federal Courthouse (Le Meridien Hotel) – Le Meridien Hotel tries its best to cover up its dark past, yet ghosts still haunt its halls. Only in recent years was the old federal courthouse renovated into a luxury hotel, but its history wrought with false accusations, gangers on trial, and suspicious murders lives on. Locals say that the ghost of Charlie Wall, a gangster brutally murdered after revealing too much on trial, haunts the steps of Le Meridien still.
Terror in Tampa
Tampa Terrors will take you to the city’s most fascinating, spirit-infested corners. With a proud history of piracy, blockade running, bootlegging, and organized crime, Tampa has a rich seam of hauntings to mine.
In just over one hundred fifty years, the city has built up a rich otherworldly history of confirmed hauntings and ghostly appearances by historical characters. On this tour, you will stand in the very spots where horrid crimes were committed and hear the gruesome tales of unfinished business that consigned these souls to live in limbo forever.
Join Tampa Terrors standard tour any night of the week to see eight mysterious locations across the shady Downtown streets, or join the extended tour to visit an additional four fascinating places in Tampa.
Tampa is a Ghostly Family Town
If you spend any time in Tampa, you can’t help but bump into the name McKay. The powerful dynasty has left physical and spiritual footprints all over the city. Their multi-generational story has touched several of the most haunted places.
James McKay Sr. was a broad-shouldered, six-foot-four Scotsman who emigrated to St Louis, Missouri, in 1846. He married a local girl and, based on a tip from a preacher, set off in a boat with all his worldly possessions (including a handful of slaves) to make his fortune in the new U.S. state of Florida. His boat promptly sank about 70 miles North of Tampa, right by the Chassahowitzka River’s swampy outlet. He had to repeatedly swim to shore, dragging his passengers and possessions to dry land.
Over the next 150 years, the McKay family played a pivotal role in making Tampa the town it is today. Their family legacy involves three Mayors, a bronze bust, running cattle to Cuba during the Civil War, and having a bay. Several streets bear the family name. They also have left behind a few ghosts along the way. Discover them all with Tampa Terrors.
Why is Tampa so Haunted?
A Deal With the Devil
Other mayors of Tampa have ghost stories to share, too. Tampa Terrors will tell you all about the City Mayor, who married into the McKay family, and their son Charlie, who was the black sheep of the family. He rebelled against his privileged upbringing and chose a life of crime. Charlie ended up running illegal gambling in the city and butting heads with rival gangs.
Legend has it he made a deal with the Devil to avoid assassination, but he got his eventual comeuppance after trying to do the right thing. His well-dressed ghost now haunts the steps of the Le Méridien Tampa, a luxury hotel on North Florida Avenue that occupies a former court building. During the 1950s, he sang like a canary in front of a federal inquiry into organized crime in this building.
The inquiry was prime-time viewing in the 1950s, with a bigger audience than the Baseball World Series. Characters seemingly stepping out of the Hollywood casting room marked ‘gangsters and molls’ paraded into courtrooms across the country. However, the inquiry had little effect here in Tampa, except for Charlie, the black sheep gangster who testified in Miami. He was dead three days later. Tampa Terrors will take you to the steps his ghost haunts today. Sightings aren’t guaranteed, but they have happened before!
The Ghosts of Organized Crimes Past
One mobster in Tampa fled to Cuba before the organized crime inquiry. He ran Casinos in pre-revolutionary Cuba and had a solid connection to the underworld there. His contacts in Cuba made him a prime candidate for later coercion by the CIA to help assassinate Fidel Castro. An unsuccessful operation that may have caused the much more successful retaliation attempt on the life of John F. Kennedy by Castro.
Tampa has many ghosts of other mafia criminals, some with Junior or Senior at the ends of their names. Although Tampa was not a large city until recently, it has been big enough for more than one Organized Crime gang throughout its history. A fierce turf war in the 1940s had many casualties, some of which had not yet quit this earthly realm.
The conflict was over a game called Bolita, an import of the Cuban cigar workers. The Cubans who ran the game sent all the money back to Cuba, which displeased local gangsters who wanted a piece of the action. The scene was set for a bloody turf war between the gangs that have created several ghosts around town.
What’s so Special About the Tampa Terrors Ghost Tour?
The Smoky History of Ybor
The atmospheric Ybor City district northeast of Downtown was Cigar Central for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. A cigar factory owner in Cuba funded a rebellion that failed, forcing his migration to the Keys. A fruit trading friend later told him about Tampa and said the humidity would keep the tobacco soft. The city made him an offer he could not refuse, and Tampa got a new industry and neighborhood.
The workers brought their culture, gambling games, traditions, and ghosts. A few decades after the neighborhood started, the terrifying story of Jose Luis Avellanal Jr. unraveled. A fraudster and fake doctor of Cuban heritage, he allegedly lured women to his hotel residence in Ybor City, murdered them, froze their bodies, and tried various loopy methods of reviving them. All unsuccessful.
He haunts the basement of the Don Vicente Inn with several of the ghosts of his frozen-solid victims. If you feel a cold draft on your walking tour with Tampa Terrors on a hot night in Ybor City, it might be the ghost of Jose Luis Avellanal Jr.
Be Part of a Growing Ghostly Community
Tours set out every night around sundown. Family-friendly and accessible for all. You will hear all about Tampa’s history, hauntings, and horrors. Join Tampa Terrors and take a wild ride through this Gulf-side city’s swampy history with some of Florida’s finest hauntings.
* This is a walking tour and we do not enter privately-owned buildings or private property *
