{"id":2258,"slug":"versace-mansion-casa-casuarina-miami-beach-florida","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Casa Casuarina is the mansion that was famous before the murder. Alden Freeman — Standard Oil heir, Mayflower descendant, retired architect at twenty-seven — built it in 1930 as a replica of the Alcázar de Colón, Diego Columbus's Santo Domingo palace, and put a brick from the original beside the front door. When Freeman died it became the Amsterdam Palace apartments, declining through the decades until Gianni Versace saw the Kneeling Aphrodite from Ocean Drive in 1992 and bought it for $2.95 million.","Versace rebuilt it into the villa that defined South Beach — the 24-karat-gold Thousand Mosaic Pool on the razed hotel lot next door, the eight bedrooms and the library and the gardens Sir Roy Strong designed. The house became the third most photographed home in America, after the White House and Graceland — and on July 15, 1997, Andrew Cunanan shot Versace dead on its front steps as he came home from the News Café, the crescendo of a cross-country murder spree that ended nine days later on a Miami Beach houseboat.","The mansion keeps the double fame — Versace's masterpiece and Versace's murder scene, the luxury hotel it is now preserving the designer's vision while the crowds photograph the steps where he died. The file holds the house's own arc: the oil heir's homage to Columbus, the fashion king's palace, and the steps where the twentieth century's most famous fashion murder made the house a shrine and a crime scene in the same image.","Casa Casuarina is the archive's Versace file — the 1930 Columbus-palace replica that the designer rebuilt into South Beach's icon and on whose steps he was murdered in 1997, now a hotel where the fame and the infamy share the address."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Casa Casuarina is the archive's fame file — the mansion that was America's third most photographed home before the murder made it a crime scene, the Versace villa where the architecture and the assassination share the same Ocean Drive frontage.","A mansion that outlived its designer keeps its steps — the file's suggestion being that Casa Casuarina's hold is the front stair: the spot where Versace died in front of the house he'd built, the tourists photographing the murder site of the man whose taste made it worth photographing."]}],"name":"Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)","aliases":[],"type":"MANSION","type_label":"Mansion","cats":["DARK_HISTORY","MEDIA_REPORTED","HISTORIC_SITE"],"groups":["dark-history","historic-sites"],"desc":"The Ocean Drive mansion where Gianni Versace was shot on his steps.","full_desc":"Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina) is a mansion in Miami Beach, Florida. The Ocean Drive mansion where Gianni Versace was shot on his steps. HauntHunt files it with dark history and media-reported sites. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 documented fact — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors.","address":null,"city":"Miami Beach","county":null,"state":"Florida","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":25.782,"lon":-80.1308,"coord_kind":"EXACT","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Dark-history/ghost-town batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":70,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0.85,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1639,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Staff report a presence near the steps and in the designer’s former rooms. Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina) in Miami Beach, Florida is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. It's anecdotal evidence in the strictest sense — stories, repeated, unresolved. The report is preserved in sources like 'Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.","evidence":"ANECDOTAL","evidence_label":"Anecdotal","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villa_Casa_Casuarina","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"The July 15, 1997 murder on the mansion’s steps is documented; the site is a hotel. The documented date is 1997-07-15. A house in Miami Beach, Florida with this much documented history gives the dossier substance underneath the lore. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. Sources including 'Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)' carry the record. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1997-07-15","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villa_Casa_Casuarina","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Historic mansion; check the official site for tour times.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Versace Mansion (Casa Casuarina)","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villa_Casa_Casuarina","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Casa Casuarina","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Casuarina","desc":"Former home of Gianni Versace","extract":"Casa Casuarina, also known as the Versace Mansion, is an American property built in 1930, renowned for being owned by and the place of the murder of the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace; he lived there from 1992 until his death in 1997. It is located at 1116 Ocean Drive in the South Beach neighborhood of Miami Beach, Florida, in the Miami Beach Architectural District. Since 2015, it has been adapted into and operates as a luxury boutique hotel known as The Villa Casa Casuarina.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Casa_Casuarina_2019.jpg/960px-Casa_Casuarina_2019.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":86,"lat":25.782,"lon":-80.13061111},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}