Lincoln County Courthouse

Lincoln, New Mexico, a small town in the Bonito Valley, was the center of the Lincoln County War of the late 1870s, a violent struggle between rival merchants and their allies. The building that became the county courthouse began life as a store and has also served as a residence and a Masonic lodge; it was later pressed into service as courthouse and jail. The whole town is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1960, and the state of New Mexico operates 17 of its buildings as Lincoln Historic Site, including the old courthouse, which is open year-round as a museum.

The building is best known for what happened on 28 April 1881. Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid, had been convicted of murdering Sheriff William Brady during the Lincoln County War and was awaiting execution, shackled in a second-floor room. Sheriff Pat Garrett was away in White Oaks collecting taxes, leaving deputies Bob Olinger and James Bell on guard. Accounts of what followed differ. In the usual telling, Olinger took the other prisoners across the street to the Wortley Hotel for a meal, and the Kid, escorted by Bell, got hold of a gun – whether from the armory, a hiding place in the privy or by overpowering Bell remains disputed. He shot Bell on the stairs, took Olinger’s shotgun and shot Olinger from an upstairs window as he returned. He then worked his leg chain loose and rode out of town. Garrett shot him dead at Fort Sumner on 13 July 1881.

Ghost reports are recent compared with the events. A 2008 feature in The New Mexican called the museum possibly the only haunted state monument in New Mexico. Staff told the reporter about visitors who felt uneasy after coming down from the second floor, white mist on the stairs, a feeling of being pushed upstairs and a couple whose daughter’s hiccups stopped during a visit; one staff member said that after speaking to a presence on the stairs, the light bulb burst. A reception worker noted that the reports tend to cluster late in the year. The monument manager, who had not experienced anything herself, said others had.

The best-known object in the lore is a photograph taken in August 2004, during an experiment by forensic scientist Henry Lee, who applied luminol to the staircase and found stains consistent with Billy the Kid’s account; the image is said to show a luminescent orb over the stairs and is displayed in the courthouse. No one at the museum claims the orb is Bell’s ghost. A tour guide quoted in the same feature also described footsteps at the Tunstall store and a young woman named Lilia said to haunt a room at the Wortley Hotel. The courthouse remains a place where history and legend sit side by side: Bell and Olinger were real men who died here, and the museum’s exhibits are built around that history.

Visitors and staff report white mist on the staircase, a feeling of being pushed on the second floor, a touch and moving hair, a flushed sensation near a first-floor window, a light bulb that burst after someone spoke to a presence and an orb in a 2004 photograph.

The main staircase where Deputy Bell was shot, the second-floor rooms and a rear window on the ground floor; reports are said to cluster late in the year.

Lincoln hosts an August pageant, The Last Escape of Billy the Kid, and the courthouse features in countless films and books about the outlaw. Ghost tours of Lincoln run alongside historic programs.