HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Built by a convicted embezzler in 1925, Sanford's vacant Mediterranean Revival hotel reports a phantom piano and two silent apparitions
201 E 1st St, Sanford, FL 32771
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Exterior viewing only; the building is not open to the public
Access
Accessibility not stated
Exterior sidewalk; building interior not publicly accessible
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1925 · Mediterranean Revival Architecture · Florida Land Boom Era · Seminole County History · NRHP-Adjacent
Forrest Lake arrived in Sanford from South Carolina in 1886 and spent four decades shaping the city and county. He served in the Florida House, helped carve Seminole County out of Orange County in 1913, and founded the Seminole County Bank the same year. By the early 1920s he commissioned a showpiece hotel on the waterfront — 158 rooms, private baths in each, a ballroom, and two dining rooms. Designed by architect Elton J. Moughton in the Mediterranean Revival style, the Hotel Forrest Lake opened in 1925 at a cost approaching half a million dollars.
The timing was catastrophic. Florida's real estate boom was already cracking when the hotel opened, and tourism never materialized. The Seminole County Bank collapsed on August 6, 1927. A grand jury indicted Lake and bank vice president A.R. Key for embezzling roughly $553,000. After five separate jury trials, Lake received a 14-year hard labor sentence in May 1928. He served time at Raiford prison, was released on bond in 1933, and ultimately served six years before a gubernatorial pardon. He died January 24, 1939, impoverished, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Sanford.
The city purchased the vacant building in 1930 and renamed it the Mayfair Hotel. The New York Giants used it as spring training headquarters through 1963, a naval academy program occupied it from 1966 to 1975, and the missionary organization New Tribes Mission (now Ethnos360) held it as a training headquarters from 1977 until vacating in 2016. World Olivet Assembly purchased the property for $6 million in 2022 and received city rezoning approval in late 2025 for a rehabilitation into office space and 46 apartments.
Sources
The paranormal lore around the Mayfair centers on two silent presences. The more identifiable is described as a mustachioed man in period dress who appears in darkened hallways and reflective surfaces, always moving away, never speaking. Local accounts associate him with Mayor Forrest Lake — the figure whose ruin the building represents. He has been reported in the upper-floor corridors.
The second presence is a woman in white, encountered more frequently in the ground-floor public areas after dark. Reports place her appearance alongside soft piano music with no obvious source — the sound drifting through a building that has been structurally silent since 2016. Neither figure has been documented interacting with observers; both are described as residual rather than responsive.
The building's long vacancy (2016 to the present) and its loaded history — financial catastrophe, a mayor's imprisonment, the dreams of a boom-era city turned to Depression-era bankruptcy — give the lore a coherent emotional logic, even if the specific claims rest on local oral tradition rather than documented investigation.
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