Kate Morgan and the Haunting of Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego

In May of 1983, a Secret Service agent that was meant to be protecting then Vice President Bush was in need of protection himself when the ghost of Kate Morgan appeared suddenly in his room at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego one night.

The Secret Service agent eventually decided to leave his room after complaining about cold breezes and drapes blowing about mysteriously, even though he had checked to make sure that all of the windows were closed. He also complained that he had heard loud gurgling noises throughout the night and that his room was bathed in a strange, eerie glow. He called reception and said that he was tired of hearing loud noises above him all night and wished to be transferred to another room. The problem was that there was nothing above his room as he was already on the top floor.

Was this the ghost of Kate Morgan that the Secret Service agent had witnessed? Many other guests at the Hotel Del Coronado have had similar experiences when staying in Kate Morgan's old hotel room, and other guests have noticed Kate's presence throughout the hotel.

Who was Kate Morgan, and why is she now haunting the Hotel Del Coronado? First though, a briefing on the Hotel Del Coronado at the time of Kate's death.

The San Diego of 1885 was a very different place from the San Diego of today. Things were a lot rougher in those days, and murders and suicides were rampant in the city. The water supply in the city wasn't terribly great and trains didn't yet connect to Los Angeles.

But despite all this, a man named E.B. Babcock decided that he wanted to build a luxury hotel somewhere in the West. He liked what he saw in San Diego, and purchased the island of Coronado and North Island for the paltry sum of $110,000. To help subsidize his future hotel, he sold off small portions of the land to private citizens. It cost over $1 million to build E.B. Babcock's 399 room hotel.

By 1891, the Hotel Del Coronado had already opened and United States president Benjamin Harrison had come out to visit the hotel and stay as a guest. Enter Kate Morgan and her husband Thomas, both a pair of professional swindlers.

Kate was a native Iowan who had been born in 1865. At the age of 20, she married a man named Tom Morgan who worked on trains but was also a notorious gambler.

Kate Morgan traveled under the alias Lottie Bernard and Tom Morgan went under Dr. M.C. Anderson. This husband and wife team would pretend to be brother and sister, and Kate's husband would try to get other men interested in her. Kate would tell these poor, hapless men that if they wanted to court her or have her hand in marriage, they would have to win the approval of her brother. This was done by her brother challenging them to a game of poker. Once the couple had taken the victim's money, they moved on to their next victim.

One day Kate Morgan decided that she had had enough of these antics and wanted to settle down. She and her husband had both come from respectable families and they had made enough money by swindling people through their aliases that they could both settle down. Tom Morgan wasn't happy with this idea, but bought a house in Los Angeles anyway, while still traveling from town to town gambling.

Tom Morgan soon frittered away their money on his gambling addiction, and Kate had to resort to cleaning houses in order to make ends meet. One day she discovered that she was pregnant. She was purported to have broken the news to her husband on a train ride from Los Angeles to San Diego. The couple fought over the news, and Tom Morgan jumped ship early and let Kate Morgan travel the rest of the way to San Diego on her own.

Kate checked into room number 302, which is now 3312, of the Hotel Del Coronado on November 24th. She had shown up with no luggage, but was expecting to meet her husband there for Thanksgiving and told employees at the hotel that she was waiting for her brother. As she looked ill and the staff were concerned about her well being, she assured them that her brother would arrive with her suitcase to look after her soon.

Kate grew depressed when her husband didn't show, and took large amounts of quinine to try and abort her baby. She then bought a .44 caliber pistol along with some shells. She was found dead the next morning on the steps that led to the beach. She had suffered a bullet wound to her right temple and a gun was found two steps above her hand. The coroner's report cites Kate Morgan as being a natural beauty and her death was ruled a suicide. But was it really a suicide?

A book called The Legend of Kate Morgan: The Search for the Ghost of the Hotel Del Coronado was published in 1990 and gives evidence that Kate was actually murdered by her husband. The lawyer who wrote the book spent a lot of time looking over records from the time of Kate's death, and found that the bullet that had entered her head was a different caliber than the ones that she had bought herself.

After Kate Morgan's death, paranormal activity began taking place at the hotel. Even though Mr. Babcock didn't believe in ghosts himself, he didn't rent out Kate's room unless every other room in the hotel was already occupied.

Kate Morgan's old room is almost always rented out now and a very difficult room to reserve. Visitors are keen to see for themselves if the ghost of Kate still lingers. There are some who say that voices can be heard even when no one else is inside the room, or that objects move by themselves and lights flicker. An electrician has said that the light over the steps where Kate died won't stay lit, despite light bulbs being replaced constantly.

Whatever may have happened to Kate's soul, her physical body now dwells at Mount Hope Cemetery near downtown San Diego.

Sources: www.eeeek.com/coronadoghost.html, hotels.about.com/od/hauntedhotelsatoz/p/hau_delcoronado.htm, www.ghosts.org/haunted/coronado/hoteldel.html, wikipedia