The Vinoy Resort & Golf Club

The Vinoy occupies an unusual niche in paranormal reporting: the hotel where visiting professional ballplayers consistently file the strangest accounts. The pattern dates to at least the 1990s, when the hotel reopened and immediately began hosting Major League teams in town to play the Tampa Bay Rays. Players have described the property as oddly heavy, particularly on the fifth floor, and the most-quoted single account belongs to Cincinnati Reds relief pitcher Scott Williamson.

In 2003, Williamson told the Tampa Bay Times that he was awakened in the early morning by a sensation of pressure on his back. When he opened his eyes, he saw a man in a long coat and top hat standing beside the bed. He reached to turn on the overhead light, and when he turned back the figure was gone. Williamson's account is unusual because he was on the record by name and because subsequent visiting players reported similar experiences. Toronto Blue Jays third-baseman Scott Rolen and several teammates have repeated the broad outline in interviews; pitcher Dirk Hayhurst's account names the same room range and describes a similar figure.

A secondary cluster of legends concerns the hotel's older guests rather than its athletic ones. Staff and guests have reported a woman in white on the fifth floor, sometimes identified by Tampa Bay paranormal researchers as the wife of an early hotel-era guest. Music from the empty Palm Court ballroom is the second-most-cited phenomenon, attributed locally to bandleader Paul Whiteman, who performed at the hotel in the 1930s. The Vinoy was investigated by Jason Hawes and the Ghost Hunters team, who reported activity in room 521.

The hotel itself does not market the ghost stories. Acknowledgments are passive: the legends circulate in regional press, in road-trip-baseball oral histories, and in the steady current of visiting-team interviews each spring.