State file · NM
Haunted places in New Mexico
What are the most haunted places in New Mexico? The best-known are La Llorona, St. James Hotel, La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House) and KiMo Theatre.
New Mexico’s ghost lore is layered like its history. Pueblo communities have lived here for more than a thousand years, Spanish colonists arrived in 1598, and Santa Fe – founded around 1610 – is the oldest capital city in the United States. Then came the Santa Fe Trail, the railroads and the cattle and land-grant wars of the 1870s and ’80s, which left frontier hotels with bullet holes in their ceilings. Each era added its own stories, told in Spanish and English and handed down through families.
- 4 hauntings
- 12 recorded sightings
Haunted places in New Mexico
La Llorona
The weeping woman who searches rivers and canals at night for the children she lost – the best-known ghost legend of Mexico and the Hispanic world. Folklore
St. James Hotel
A Santa Fe Trail hotel of gunfights and bullet-riddled ceilings, where the locked Room 18 is said to hold the ghost of a man shot over a card game. Widely reported
La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House)
Santa Fe’s first brick mansion, built in 1882 for Julia Staab, is now part of a resort hotel whose staff say its first lady never moved out. Widely reported
KiMo Theatre
Albuquerque’s 1927 Pueblo Deco movie palace, where a boy killed in a 1951 lobby explosion is said to linger – and where casts still hang doughnuts for him. Regional legendThe ghost lore of New Mexico
The best known of them belongs to no single building. La Llorona, the weeping woman who searches rivers and acequias for her lost children, is part of Hispanic New Mexican childhood, and parents along the Rio Grande still use her to keep children away from the water. The state’s haunted hotels – the St. James in Cimarron, La Posada and others in Santa Fe – and Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre, with its backstage doughnuts, show the same mix of real tragedy and well-polished legend.
Ghost hunters base themselves in Santa Fe, whose walking ghost tours wind past adobe churches and old hospitals, and drive the Santa Fe Trail country to Cimarron and Las Vegas. Pueblos and their sacred sites are living communities, not attractions: visit only when they are open to the public, and follow their rules.
Ghost-hunting hotspots
- Downtown Santa Fe
The Plaza district’s historic hotels, including the former St. Vincent Sanitorium now the Drury Plaza Hotel, are stops on nightly ghost walks.
- Los Lunas
The Luna-Otero Mansion, now a restaurant, has been said to be visited by a woman remembered as Josefita since renovations in the 1970s.
- Old Town Albuquerque
The adobe plaza around San Felipe de Neri church hosts ghost tours that mix colonial history and local legend.
- Cimarron and the Santa Fe Trail
Old Town Cimarron, with the St. James Hotel and its 19th-century mill and jail, preserves the trail’s rough frontier past.
- The Rio Grande and its acequias
The riverbanks and irrigation ditches of the valley are the classic setting for La Llorona sightings.
Timeline
- 1876Killings in the bar St. James Hotel
Outlaw Davy Crockett shot and killed three Buffalo Soldiers in the saloon, one of the best-documented acts of violence in the hotel’s history.
- 1882The Staab mansion is built La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House)
Abraham Staab completed Santa Fe’s first brick mansion for his wife Julia and their growing family.
- 1896Death of Julia Staab La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House)
Julia died in Santa Fe. Later legend says she had become a recluse after the death of her youngest child.
- 1901Bullet holes in the roof St. James Hotel
Workers replacing the roof found the ceiling riddled with bullets; a double layer of hardwood had protected guests sleeping upstairs.
- September 19, 1927The KiMo opens KiMo Theatre
Oreste Bachechi’s Pueblo Deco theater opened on Central Avenue, among the most striking cinemas in the Southwest.
- 1935La Posada opens La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House)
Robert and Eulalia Nason opened an inn of adobe apartments around the old mansion; ghost stories about Julia date from this era.
- August 2, 1951The lobby explosion KiMo Theatre
A water heater explosion killed six-year-old Bobby Darnall and injured others. The Albuquerque Journal reported the blast on August 3, 1951.
- 1977Saved by the city KiMo Theatre
After years of decline and fire damage, Albuquerque voters approved buying the theater, and it was listed on the National Register.
- 1985Restoration and the first ghost stories St. James Hotel
New owners restored the hotel, and accounts of Room 18, Mary Lambert and the Imp began to circulate widely.
- 1986The real Christmas Carol KiMo Theatre
Benjamin Radford found that the production at the heart of the doughnut legend took place this December, not in 1974, and that its lead actor and director recalled no ghostly disruptions.
- 1998–1999Rebirth as a resort La Posada de Santa Fe (Staab House)
A major renovation and expansion turned La Posada into a 159-room resort, with Julia’s story part of its identity.
- December 20, 2024Reopened under new owners St. James Hotel
Three months after announcing its closure, the 152-year-old hotel reopened with new management.
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