Hotel del Coronado and Kate Morgan

She checked in on Thanksgiving Day.

It was November 24, 1892, and the Hotel del Coronado was only four years old: a vast, red-roofed Victorian resort on a strip of sand across the bay from San Diego, all turrets and verandas and white wooden gables, one of the largest hotels in the world. Its guests were wealthy families from the East and Midwest who came to escape the winter, and it was wired with electric light — then a marvel — under the supervision, it was said, of Thomas Edison’s company.

The young woman who walked up to the front desk that afternoon was alone. She had no luggage. She was in her twenties, attractive, with dark hair, and she seemed unwell. She signed the register as “Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, Detroit,” and was given Room 302, on the third floor overlooking the ocean.

Five days later, she was dead.

The Five Days

Over the following days, the hotel staff got to know the young woman a little. She told them she was waiting for her brother, a doctor, who was supposed to join her. She seemed ill and in pain. A bellboy who brought her things later said she complained that she was suffering from neuralgia and stomach cancer, and that her brother, the doctor, would cure her. She asked for her bill to be held until he arrived. She sent at least one telegram.

On November 28, she took the ferry across the bay to San Diego. There she bought a revolver at a hardware store, and cartridges to go with it.

The next morning, November 29, an electrician walking along the hotel’s beach found a woman’s body on the stairs leading from the hotel down to the ocean. She had been shot in the head. A revolver lay beside her. It had been a cold, rainy, stormy night.

It was the young woman from Room 302.

The Beautiful Stranger

The death became a national sensation. Newspapers called the woman “the beautiful stranger.” No one knew who she really was. The name she’d signed in the register was false. Her photograph and description were sent out across the country in hopes someone would identify her.

Within days, they did. She was identified as Kate Morgan, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Iowa. She was married to a man named Thomas Morgan, a gambler who worked the trains, and according to some accounts the couple had traveled together working cons on passengers. Kate had been working for a time as a domestic servant in Los Angeles under another name. Why she had come alone to the Hotel del Coronado, and who she had been waiting for, was never clear.

The coroner ruled that she had taken her own life.

The Questions

Over the years, researchers have raised doubts.

Some have suggested that Kate was pregnant, and that she had come to the hotel to meet a man — her husband, perhaps, or a lover — who never arrived. Some believe she had tried to end the pregnancy with drugs, which might explain the pain and illness the hotel staff described. In despair, the theory goes, she took her own life.

Others have argued that she didn’t take her own life at all. A lawyer and researcher named Alan May, who spent years studying the case, came to believe that Kate had been murdered — possibly by her husband, who May believed had followed her to the hotel. May pointed to inconsistencies in the evidence: questions about the bullet, the wound, and whether the gun found beside her was the one that killed her. Others have disputed his conclusions.

The case was never reopened. Kate Morgan was buried in San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

Room 302

The Hotel del Coronado has been renovated and renumbered many times since 1892. The room where Kate Morgan stayed is now Room 3327.

And for decades, guests and staff have reported strange things happening there.

Lights flicker or turn on and off by themselves. The television switches channels or turns on in the middle of the night. Guests say they feel sudden cold breezes, even with the windows closed. Some say the curtains move when there’s no wind, or that they hear murmuring voices. Some report seeing a young woman in an old-fashioned black dress standing at the window, or walking the halls on the third floor, or wandering along the beach and the stairs where she died.

Staff in the hotel’s gift shop have reported that items fly off the shelves. Others describe the scent of a woman’s perfume in places where no one is. The hotel, rather than denying the stories, has embraced them. It sells a book about Kate’s story in the gift shop. Room 3327 is one of the most requested rooms in the hotel.

There are other ghosts said to haunt the hotel, too — including a young woman, believed by some to be a maid who worked for the family of a hotel executive, said to haunt another room on the upper floors. But Kate is the most famous.

A Lonely Death

The Hotel del Coronado is now one of the most famous resorts in America. Presidents have stayed there. So have movie stars; Marilyn Monroe filmed Some Like It Hot there in 1958. It is still beautiful: white and red against the blue Pacific, with palm trees and wide beaches and the sound of the surf.

But I think about Kate Morgan whenever I see a picture of it. A young woman, alone, ill and in pain, waiting for someone in a grand hotel full of laughing, wealthy families celebrating Thanksgiving. Waiting for a brother who didn’t exist, or a husband who never came. Taking the ferry to town to buy a gun. Walking down to the sea on a stormy night.

Whatever ended her life, she died alone, under a false name, far from home. If something of her is still in that room, still standing at the window, still waiting — I understand why.