Hotel del Coronado

The hotel

Elisha Babcock Jr. and Hampton L. Story built the hotel on Coronado's beach in Oregon pine, and it opened in February 1888. Its National Historic Landmark nomination, written in 1977, calls it the first hotel in the world to use electric lighting, installed under Thomas Edison's supervision, but cites nothing for the claim, and it never mentions Kate Morgan.

Thanksgiving, 1892

On Thursday, November 24, 1892, a young woman arrived alone with a small handbag and signed the register as "Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, Detroit." She told the housekeeper she was 24, that she had cancer of the stomach, and that she was expecting her brother, and she telegraphed a man in Hamburg, Iowa, for money. On the night of Monday, November 28, she was seen stepping onto the ocean-side veranda in a storm. David Cone, the hotel's assistant electrician, found her the next morning on the stone steps from the terrace to the beach, with a revolver near her right hand and a wound to her right temple. She had burned her letters in the grate in her room.

At the inquest on November 30, a San Diego gun dealer testified that on the Monday afternoon he had sold a woman dressed like her "a 44 American bulldog." Every 1892 report called the death a suicide. The surviving inquest transcript does not include the verdict's wording.

Who she was

On December 9, a trunk marked "Mrs. Kate Morgan" turned up at a Los Angeles house where she had worked as a domestic. It held a marriage certificate for Thomas E. Morgan and Kate F. Farmer, from Hamburg, Iowa, in 1885. That day, the San Francisco Call reported her "positively identified," and the Los Angeles Herald ran the headline "Not the Coronado Woman." She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego on December 13 as Mrs. Kate Morgan, born Farmer, with her grandfather paying, and no one followed the hearse. A 2024 paper by John Streiff argues the identification may still be wrong.

The murder theory and the room

San Francisco lawyer Alan May later argued that she was murdered, pointing to the doctor's estimate at the inquest that the ball looked like "about 38 or 40" caliber, against a .44 revolver. In the same answer, the doctor agreed it was "about the size of" the pistol he was handed, and no ballistic examination is recorded.

Her room was 302 in 1892. San Diego Magazine reports it is now 3327, and other accounts give 3312 or 3502. The hotel calls it "the most requested guestroom at the hotel." It sells a book about her, commissioned a 12-month paranormal assessment in 1992 whose results it has kept confidential, and lists reports of flickering lights, a television switching itself on, and gift-shop items that fall "always unbroken." None of the 1892 coverage mentions a ghost.

Kate Morgan's room can be noted on a reservation, but the hotel does not guarantee a specific room number. The Victorian building reopened after a 6-year renovation.

The Haunted Happenings tour, which the hotel bills as the official account of her stay, runs nightly at 7pm for 60 minutes. Tours start at the Ice House Museum on Wagers Row, which is free and open daily from 10am to 5pm. The Legendary Tour of the Victorian building runs daily at 10am, with extra 2pm tours Friday through Sunday. In October 2026, a Paranormal Tour on the 17th and 23rd goes inside her room; the separate Room 502 Tour visits a different room.