La Fonda on the Plaza

La Fonda sits on the corner of Santa Fe’s plaza where the Santa Fe Trail ended, and a “fonda,” or inn, has stood on or near the spot since the early days of the town. A page on the hotel’s history says that Captain William Becknell stayed at a La Fonda in 1821, the year he opened the trail from Missouri, and after the American takeover in 1848 the inn became the U.S. Hotel and later the Exchange Hotel, which ran for almost six decades. The present building, in a Pueblo Revival style, opened in 1922. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway acquired it in 1925 and leased it to Fred Harvey, and it was a Harvey House until 1968, when it passed to local owners who still run it.

Two violent episodes in the site’s past are the usual starting point for ghost stories. According to local lore, in 1857 a gambler was dragged from the hotel’s gambling hall and hanged by a mob in the backyard; the victim is not named in the sources. The better-documented event took place on 15 December 1867. William Logan Rynerson, a member of the Territorial Legislative Council, confronted John P. Slough, the Chief Justice of the New Mexico Territory, over insults Slough had made in public. When Slough refused to retract them, Rynerson shot him; Slough, who had led Union forces at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in 1862, died two days later. Rynerson was tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defence, a verdict that critics saw as political.

Judge Slough has become the hotel’s best-known ghost. Guests and staff describe a tall figure in a long black coat in the lobby and upper hallways. In one account, from the 1970s, a guest complained of heavy footsteps pacing the corridor outside his room; an employee who went to check saw a man in a long black coat walk into a stairwell, followed him and found no one. Other legends describe a murdered bride said to appear in the wedding suite, Room 510, the lobby, an elevator and the basement, a gray figure by a tree on the patio, a cowboy in the bar and the outline of a person under the covers of an empty room that a housekeeper reported. The hotel leans into the lore, offering ghost-tour packages, and a Saving Places feature from the National Trust for Historic Preservation noted that the building is on the site of the city’s first inn.

As elsewhere, the stories mix documented history with embroidery. The Slough shooting is well documented, but no records link his ghost to the building, and the bride, the cowboy and the other characters are unnamed, with no dates or named witnesses in the sources. The mix is part of the hotel’s appeal. The ghosts act as a way into a town where Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican and American histories overlap, and where violence and justice in the territorial era were often entangled with politics.

A man in a long black coat in the lobby and hallways, pacing footsteps in a corridor, an apparition said to be a murdered bride in Room 510, the lobby, an elevator and the basement, a gray figure on the patio and an outline under bedcovers in an empty room.

The lobby and upper hallways, the wedding suite (Room 510), the La Plazuela dining room area, the bar and the patio.

La Fonda is a stop on Santa Fe ghost walks and in lists of the most haunted hotels in the country; the National Trust’s Saving Places blog devoted a feature to its ghosts, and Albuquerque Journal and Legends of America have published accounts.