Cabbage Key is a small island west of Fort Myers, reachable only by boat. The inn is the 1937 winter house, still taking guests, with a restaurant and a bar papered in signed dollar bills. It does not have the ghost file the other inns in this series do. The death people might expect a haunting from is real. The apparition is not in the record.
Charts in 1859 and 1899 called the island Guanal Key and Palmetto Island. Otto Stellrich owned it from 1899 to 1905, then lost it for a two-dollar tax. After that it was groves, hogs, and moonshine. Locals also called it Gill’s Island. In 1936 Alan Rinehart, a Paramount producer and a publisher, and his wife Gratia Houghton Rinehart bought Palmetto Key. Accounts put the price around $20,000. Fort Myers architect Nat Walker designed the estate. Contractor M. M. “Pint” Cornwell finished it in the spring of 1937: the main house, a boathouse and docks, two cottages, a water tower, and a power house.
Gratia was the force behind the house. She was a Corning Glass heiress, great-granddaughter of Emory Houghton, and a cousin of Katharine Hepburn, who is said to have visited. She designed the house and built the Doll House as a playhouse for her daughters. In 1938 she divorced Alan. He conveyed his interest for $18,000, and she became the only person to own the island outright. That spring a lab went up for Charles M. Breder of the American Museum of Natural History, who used the island for tarpon studies. Gratia was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1938. She spent most of her last months on the key and died in 1939 at her home in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. She was 34.
Her mother-in-law was Mary Roberts Rinehart, the best-selling mystery writer and a Saturday Evening Post war correspondent. Rinehart fished for tarpon and stayed on nearby Useppa after Herbert Hoover introduced her to the coast. Later tellings put her living and writing in the Cabbage Key house. The inn’s own researchers and a 1995 Sun Sentinel piece say that role is overstated. Gratia’s brother told family that Mary never set foot on the island. A Florida Museum note says she had a cottage near the main house. The two accounts do not match. What is agreed is that the house is Gratia’s, not Mary’s novel factory.
The house became an inn in the 1940s. The inn’s history splits the island into eras: before the Rineharts, Rinehart (about 1936–44), Stults (1944–69), Turner-Beck (1969–76), and Wells (1976 on). The Wells family still owns it. The main house is the inn and restaurant. The playhouse is the Doll House cottage. The water tower is still standing. The bar is covered in signed bills, a figure often put above $70,000. Jimmy Buffett is part of the island’s modern reputation. The cheeseburger claim is local lore, not a deed.
Haunt listings for this inn did not turn up a named witness, a room number, or a reported figure. Gratia’s illness and early death are the only event a ghost story would hang on, and she did not die in the house. If a guest report exists, it is not in the sources below.
The island from the air, inn buildings and the water tower among the palms, boat-only. The dining room with the dollar-bill ceiling and walls, the bar the island is known for.
Relevant links
- Cabbage Key Inn: history — the 1936 purchase, Nat Walker, the 1937 estate, the 1938 divorce
- Florida Rambler on the inn’s site — Gratia as the builder, and the note that Mary’s role is overstated
- Randell Research Center: Cabbage Key — Guanal Key, Stellrich, Breder’s tarpon lab
- Sun Sentinel, 1995 — Gratia’s illness and death, and the family denial that Mary lived there