The Haunted Casa de Sueños, St. Augustine

Casa de Sueños means House of Dreams, and with its pale yellow stucco, red tile roof and tall arched windows it looks the part. It sits at the corner of Cordova and Saragossa Streets on the horse-carriage route through old St. Augustine, with the 1777 Tolomato Cemetery just to the north on the same block. In the middle of the last century the house was the Garcia Funeral Home, and that is where most of its ghost stories begin.

Local tour companies tell of a playful spirit named Randolph who wanders the halls at night and borrows guests’ belongings, only to return them later. One tour writer has added a cast of colonial-era ghosts, while admitting that no record links those people to this house. The inn’s own history page does not mention ghosts at all. Here is what is documented, what is told, and how to tell the two apart.

The ghosts of Casa de Sueños

Randolph, the borrower

The story most guests hear is about Randolph. Ghost City Tours describes him as a spirit who walks the halls late at night and moves guests’ things, then returns them later, more mischievous than menacing. Florida Trippers repeats the same account: footsteps, items that go missing and turn up again in the same spot, and objects moved around rooms.

Nobody claims to know who Randolph was in life. Tour guides tend to link him to the building’s years as a funeral home, which is the most natural explanation people reach for, but there is no record of a Randolph connected to the house.

The funeral home years

The inn is open about this part of its past. Its history page says that in the mid-1900s the building housed the Garcia Funeral Home, before it served a local disability services charity in the 1970s and then became offices. For a town that runs ghost walks every night of the year, a former funeral home on the carriage route was always going to collect a story or two.

The colonial legends

Ghost City Tours also publishes a longer and much more dramatic version. It names Esperanza Rosario, said to have died with her three children in a yellow fever epidemic in 1728, who is said to visit the bridal suite, braid sleeping guests’ hair and leave the scent of orange blossom. It adds her husband, Don Fernando, said to move chess pieces in the gentleman’s parlor, and a young woman named Maria Mendoza, said to sob in a tower room while waiting for a fiancé who never came home from war.

The same article is honest that it found no record tying any of these people to the site, and it points out that the present house was built long after the dates in the stories. The inn has seven rooms on two floors, so a third-floor tower room is hard to square with the building. Read these as campfire stories rather than history.

Featured in a local ghost book

Casa de Sueños is one of the inns covered in Greg Jenkins’ 2012 book Haunted Inns, Pubs and Eateries of St. Augustine, which collected stories and visitor accounts from the city’s B&Bs, pubs and restaurants. The St. Francis Inn, run by the same owners, is in the same book.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The upstairs halls: Where Randolph is said to walk late at night.
• Your own nightstand: Leave your keys or earrings in one place. If they move and come back, guests will tell you it was Randolph.
• The bridal suite: The room tour legends give to Esperanza, the colonial-era wife said to touch sleeping guests. Treat it as legend.
• The parlor: The setting of the chess-playing ghost story, and where guests gather to swap tales over breakfast.
• The Tolomato Cemetery wall: Not part of the inn, but the 1777 cemetery is just north on the same block and is on most of the city’s ghost walks.

History of Casa de Sueños Bed & Breakfast

An 1889 property map shows the corner as bare land held by Dr. Andrew Anderson, the St. Augustine physician who sold orange-grove land to Henry Flagler in 1885. According to the inn, the house was most likely built around 1904 as a one-story wooden frame residence on land owned by Flagler’s Model Land Company. One early resident was George A. Colee, from the family behind the city’s horse-carriage company founded in the 1880s.

In the early 1900s the house was bought by P.F. Carcaba, a Spanish-born cigar maker whose Solla-Carcaba Cigar Factory went up nearby around 1909. The Carcaba family enlarged and remodeled it, adding Palladian and bay windows, red tile roofs, balconies, arched doorways and stucco walls, and giving the house the Mediterranean Revival look it still has.

In the mid-1900s the house became the Garcia Funeral Home. In the 1970s it was run by the St. Augustine Association for Retarded Citizens, as the charity was then called, and it later became offices. The lot sits on the western edge of the old Rosario Line, an 18th-century earthen defense wall, with Tolomato Cemetery, dating to 1777, just north on the same block.

Ray and Sandy Toole opened the house as an inn in 1998, and Kathleen Hurley owned and ran it from 2001 to 2015. Since the fall of 2015 it has been owned by Joe and Margaret Finnegan, who have run the St. Francis Inn about five blocks away for more than 35 years. Both inns are members of Select Registry.

Today Casa de Sueños has seven guest rooms, each with a private bathroom; some have two-person whirlpool tubs, and the second-floor rooms have private balconies. AAA lists it as a two-story, smoke-free property, and Visit St. Augustine describes walls of windows over the palm-lined streets and passing carriages.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Pair it with the St. Francis Inn. The same family runs both. Stay here and walk five blocks to see the St. Francis Inn, home of Lily’s Room.
• Ask at breakfast. Breakfast is when guests compare notes, and the innkeepers will know which rooms people talk about most.
• Book a second-floor room for a balcony. You will look out over the carriage route, which is busy with ghost tours after dark.
• Know the rules. Guests must be 13 or over and pets are not accommodated; stays of two nights or more get a discount.
• Walk the old cemeteries. Tolomato Cemetery is on the same block, and our guide to haunted places in St. Augustine covers the rest of the city.

More haunted hotels nearby

• St. Francis Inn, St. Augustine: same owners, five blocks away, with Lily’s Room
• Casa Monica, St. Augustine: the 1888 Moorish Revival hotel a few blocks south on Cordova Street
• Casablanca Inn on the Bay, St. Augustine: the Lantern Lady on the bayfront
• Haunted hotels in Florida
• Haunted hotels in St. Augustine

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• Casa de Sueños: About and history of our bed and breakfast
• Casa de Sueños: Lodging policies
• Visit St. Augustine: Casa de Sueños Bed & Breakfast
• AAA: Casa de Suenos Bed & Breakfast
• Ghost City Tours: The Haunted Casa de Sueños
• Ghost City Tours: Haunted Hotels in St. Augustine
• Florida Trippers: Haunted hotels in St. Augustine
• Greg Jenkins, Haunted Inns, Pubs and Eateries of St. Augustine (2012), contents

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