Hotel del Coronado

The Hotel del Coronado rose on an empty sandspit across San Diego Bay in 1887–88, the project of Elisha Babcock Jr. and Hampton L. Story, who financed it by auctioning building lots on the new resort town of Coronado. Designed by the Reid Brothers and built largely of wood – much of the labour, according to historians, done by Chinese immigrant workers – it opened in early 1888 as the largest resort hotel in the world. Sugar magnate John D. Spreckels took full ownership around 1890, and over the next century the Del hosted presidents, royalty and film stars, lent its turrets to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

Its ghost is a real woman. On 24 November 1892 a young woman checked in alone under the name “Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, Detroit.” Staff remembered her as well-dressed, reserved and visibly unwell and unhappy. Five days later, on 29 November, she was found dead on an exterior staircase leading down to the beach. The coroner’s inquest ruled that she had died by suicide. She was identified as Kate Morgan, born Kate Farmer in Iowa around 1864, who had married Thomas Morgan in 1885 and lost an infant son two days after his birth in 1886; she is buried in San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

The story has never quite settled. In the 1980s a San Francisco lawyer, Alan May, argued in a book that she had been murdered, pointing to inconsistencies in the inquest testimony, and others have suggested she was waiting for an estranged husband or lover who never arrived. The hotel’s own heritage department published Beautiful Stranger: The Ghost of Kate Morgan and the Hotel del Coronado, which reviews the records and leans towards the inquest’s verdict.

Over the decades guests and staff began to describe Kate’s presence – a figure glimpsed in corridors and on the grounds, a room where things will not stay put – and the hotel came to embrace her. In 1992 the Del hired parapsychologist Christopher Chacon for a year-long investigation of reported phenomena, interviewing around 1,100 people; the hotel says a significant share of what was reported “could not be scientifically explained”, though no independent report of the findings has been published.

The hotel and its guests describe fleeting appearances of a young woman taken to be Kate, unexplained breezes, televisions and lights switching on and off, doors and windows opening by themselves, moving chairs, shadows, cold spots, voices and footsteps. The hotel’s own book says she “generally limits her activity to fleeting appearances and inexplicable antics.”

The hotel singles out its third and fifth floors as its “famously haunted” areas; Kate Morgan’s former guest room – usually identified as Room 3327, numbered 302 in 1892, though some accounts name Room 3312 – is said to be one of the most requested in the hotel. Sightings are also reported on the beach stairs where she was found.

Kate Morgan is one of California’s best-known ghosts, the subject of the hotel’s Beautiful Stranger, of Alan May’s book arguing she was murdered, and of countless magazine features. The Del itself is famous from Some Like It Hot, and L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, spent long stays there between 1904 and 1917.