Aside from a few youthful Ouija board sessions in which teen-age hearthrobs figured far more prominently than the dearly departed, I’ve never done much dabbling in the occult. But when I got the chance to spend a night alone in a haunted room at Southern California’s iconic Hotel del Coronado, I jumped.
A Victorian ghost couldn’t be any more disconcerting than the stuffy heaters, sagging mattresses and outrageous surcharges that have bedeviled other lodgings in my past and I was eager to show that when it comes to paranormal check-ins, marketing hype trumps genuine fear.
Built by railroad tycoons Elisha Babcock and H.L. Story in 1888, the turreted, gingerbread-style Hotel Del was supposedly the inspiration for Wizard of Oz author Frank L. Baum’s Emerald City. It’s housed such famous visitors as Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Prince of Wales (who later married Coronado resident Wallis Simpson), and Marilyn Monroe, who cavorted on the hotel’s beach in Some Like It Hot.
But its most infamous guest is Kate Morgan, an attractive young woman who arrived alone in late November, 1892 and died of a gunshot wound to the head a few days afterward. Since then, she has refused to check out switching lights on and off, opening and closing bureau drawers and even, one legend has it, ordering a bottle of champagne from a waiter whose bosses insisted the room was unoccupied at the time.
Read the entire (spooky) USA Today article here.
