Hotel del Coronado

History

In 1885, two Midwestern businessmen who had never run a hotel, Elisha Babcock and Hampton L. Story, bought the Coronado peninsula across the bay from San Diego. They paid $110,000 for 4,100 acres and sold off lots to pay for a hotel they promised would be “the largest hotel in the world” and “too gorgeous to be true.” The hotel’s own history says they wanted a place where “people will continue to come long after we are gone.” The National Park Service, writing up the Del’s case for landmark status in 1977, wasn’t so sure. Babcock “seemed more intent on using the hotel as a quick promotional gimmick than he was in creating a place to which people would long come,” it said.

Speed came first. Work began in 1887, with green lumber brought in from Northern California and a labor force brought down from San Francisco through the Chinese Seven Companies. Building started on the plain north side, so the workers could learn on the job before they reached the more complicated south end. Built almost entirely of wood, the Del opened in February 1888, before it was finished, with its ballroom under a red-roofed tower on the ocean side. The land boom that paid for it was already collapsing. Gina Petrone, the hotel’s heritage manager, told the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s magazine in 2026 that San Diego had 40,000 people in 1885 and 14,000 by 1889. The sugar heir John D. Spreckels lent money to the founders to keep the Del going, and in the end, they handed it over to him. He owned it until he died in 1926.

The Del has hosted presidents since Benjamin Harrison stopped for breakfast in 1891, the first sitting president to visit San Diego. Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe, was filmed there in 1958, and in 1977, the Del became a National Historic Landmark. Blackstone, which owns the Del, finished a seven-year restoration of the original Victorian building in 2025. The building and its courtyard alone cost $174 million, according to its lead architect, David Marshall. Hilton runs the hotel as part of its Curio Collection.

Hauntings & Lore

Most of the Del’s ghost stories are about one guest, a young woman who stayed five days in November 1892 under a name that wasn’t hers. The hotel tells her story on its own ghost tour every night, “the official account of Kate Morgan’s 1892 visit to The Del and why her spirit never left.”

Kate Morgan, the Beautiful Stranger

Five Days in November

On Thanksgiving Day, 1892, a young woman arrived at the Del with no luggage but a small handbag and signed the register “Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, Detroit.” She kept to her room. She told the housekeeper she had cancer of the stomach, The San Diego Union reported, and said she was waiting for her brother. The hotel says she asked at the front desk every day about the arrival she was expecting. There was never any news. On Monday morning, when a bellboy told her again that her brother hadn’t come, she said, “Oh, no one comes to me any more!” She burned her letters and papers in the grate.

That afternoon, she crossed the bay to San Diego. She bought a 44-caliber revolver and cartridges from a gun dealer, M. Chick, telling him it was a Christmas present for a friend. That night, a storm was sweeping the coast. Between 9 and 10 o’clock, she stepped out onto the veranda facing the ocean, dressed in black, with a lace shawl over her head. The next morning, the hotel’s assistant electrician found her on the steps leading down to the beach. She had been shot in the right temple. A revolver lay by her right hand, and the rain had washed the blood away.

Who Was She?

Nobody knew who she was. The newspapers called her the “beautiful stranger,” the hotel says. On December 4, the Los Angeles Herald announced that she was Lizzie Wyllie, a young woman missing from Detroit. Then a trunk marked “Mrs. Kate Morgan” turned up at a house on South Hill Street in Los Angeles, where she had worked as a domestic. She had left on November 23, her employer said, promising to be back the next day. Inside the trunk was a certificate of her marriage to Thomas E. Morgan, at Hamburg, Iowa, in 1885.

On December 9, The Morning Call of San Francisco reported that she had been positively identified as Mrs. Kate Morgan, whose husband was a gambler. The Herald wasn’t convinced. Her photograph from the trunk didn’t look like the woman described at the Del, it said that same day, under the headline “Not the Coronado Woman.” Two weeks after her death, she was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego as Kate Morgan. Her grandfather in Iowa paid for the funeral, and no one followed the hearse, the Sacramento Record-Union reported.

Suicide or Murder?

A coroner’s jury had met the day after she was found and returned a verdict of suicide, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The hotel accepts the coroner’s finding, though its own history adds that “some skepticism still surrounds” it.

Alan May, a San Francisco criminal defense lawyer, doubted it. In August 1989, he spent a night at the Del hoping to see Kate’s ghost. He went on to argue that her death may have involved foul play, and in 1990, he published The Legend of Kate Morgan. A year later, the CBS series Haunted Lives dramatized his search for “the ghost of murdered Kate Morgan,” as Wikipedia’s episode list puts it. Terry Girardot, a Texas author whose own book on Kate came out in 2001, says May’s book “seems to have become the cornerstone for all contemporary versions” of the Del’s famous ghost story. “Much of it is wrong,” Girardot adds.

May’s case rested on a passing remark at the inquest, Wikipedia says. Dr. B. F. Mertzman, who examined her, was asked the size of the bullet. “From the looks of it, I should say about 38 or 40,” he said. The revolver found by her hand was a 44-caliber American bulldog, like the one the gun dealer said he had sold her. But the transcript Girardot publishes shows what came next. Handed the pistol and asked whether the bullet was about that size, the doctor said, “Yes, sir, about the size of that.”

May also declared that Kate was his great-great-grandmother, and he paid for a monument on her grave. The Del rejects his story.

Her Room

Kate is the Del’s most famous ghost. The hotel says she turns up all over the grounds, in the hallways and along the beach, but mostly in her old third-floor room. Guests there have reported flickering lights, a television that turns itself on and off, breezes from nowhere, doors that open and close, and unexplained footsteps and voices. Her room was 302 in 1892. It’s 3327 now, and Historic Hotels of America’s 2023 list of haunted hotels calls it “the most requested guestroom at the resort.”

Christine Donovan, the Del’s historian at the time, wrote the hotel’s book on Kate, Beautiful Stranger, published in 2002, and kept files on what guests told her. “She generally limits her activity to fleeting appearances and inexplicable antics,” Donovan said. One business executive wrote to her that he woke at 2 a.m. to an exceedingly cold room and the ceiling fan running at high speed. Later, he woke again to find all the bed pillows stacked “pyramid style on top of my computer.”

Petrone, who was the hotel’s historian by 2021, told San Diego Magazine that year that the flickering lights and the television are not unexpected in a 133-year-old hotel. What she has a harder time explaining are guests who feel fingertips brushing their cheek while they sleep, and Kate’s initials, KM or LB, appearing on the room’s ceiling. Staff have had to paint over them numerous times, she said. When one of the magazine’s editors, Erica Nichols, stayed in the room that year, she slept peacefully through the night. As she packed to leave, the ceiling fan started to spin. It was off, she wrote, and so was the air conditioning.

To stay in Kate Morgan’s room, ask for Room 3327 when you book the Del’s Victorian building.

The Gift Shop

“Another very ‘active’ area,” the hotel says, is its gift shop, Established 1888, where visitors and employees see giftware “mysteriously flying off shelves, oftentimes falling upright and always unbroken.” When the shop moved to a space beside the lobby, the hotel’s account goes, the pranks moved with it. Marilyn Monroe memorabilia from Some Like It Hot falls most often, and some longtime shop employees think the Del’s resident ghost doesn’t like sharing the spotlight.

Room 3519

In 1992, the hotel hired a parapsychologist, Christopher Chacon, to look into what its guests and staff kept reporting. By the hotel’s account, his team monitored the resort around the clock for 12 months and interviewed 1,100 people in confidence. It documented phenomena that “could not be scientifically explained,” among them moving chairs, doors and windows opening and closing, faucets turning on and off, concentrations of extremely cold air, and disembodied voices and footsteps. The haunted rooms on the third and fifth floors were among the places they turned up. Historic Hotels of America says more than 400 were logged in Room 3519 alone, and in 2023, the hotel let visitors into that room to see some of the footage.