Hotel del Coronado: Kate Morgan, Room 3327 and the 1892 Mystery

The hotel is one of America's best-documented historic buildings, listed on the National Register in 1971. The 1892 death is on record: the hotel's own history describes the alias, the inquest and the coroner's suicide verdict, and the case was covered in the press at the time. Who she really was, and whether it was suicide, are still argued over; the attorney Alan May wrote a book arguing she was murdered.

The haunting itself rests mostly on the hotel. Its heritage team describes lights, breezes, voices and objects falling in the gift shop, but we found no named, dated first-hand witness. The story of a maid haunting Room 3519 appears only in ghost collections, in versions that contradict each other.

Kate Morgan

On Thanksgiving Day 1892, a young woman checked in alone as "Lottie A. Bernard" of Detroit. Five days later, on November 29, she was found dead on an outside staircase leading to the beach, with a gunshot wound to the head. A coroner's inquest ruled it suicide. She was identified as Kate Morgan, born Kate Farmer in Iowa, and buried in San Diego's Mount Hope Cemetery. The hotel itself says "some skepticism still surrounds this finding."

Her room

Kate stayed in a third-floor room, numbered 302 then and 3327 now. The hotel calls it its most requested guestroom and describes a woman in black, flickering lights, sudden cold, breezes, a TV switching itself on and off, and footsteps and voices. Its heritage manager, Gina Petrone, has said: "Most of our stories are things we can't explain." We didn't find a named guest's own account.

The gift shop

The hotel says souvenirs fly off the shelves of its gift shop, often landing upright and unbroken. The story comes from the hotel's own press pages.

Room 3519

Ghost collections tell of a maid who hanged herself, or vanished, in Room 3519. Some say she was linked to Kate Morgan, others that she was a founder's mistress. The versions contradict each other, the hotel doesn't tell the story, and we found no record of her.

Room 502

The hotel runs a "Room 502" tour of a fifth-floor room, once on a staff-only floor, which it says has even more reports than Kate's. Some sources mistake it for Kate's room.

Building the Del

Elisha Babcock and H. L. Story bought the Coronado peninsula in 1885 and began building the hotel in March 1887, to designs by the Reid brothers of Evansville, Indiana. It opened on February 19, 1888.

Guests

John D. Spreckels owned it from about 1890 until 1948. Presidents from Benjamin Harrison onward have stayed, along with Thomas Edison, L. Frank Baum and Charlie Chaplin. In 1958 Billy Wilder filmed Some Like It Hot here, with the hotel standing in for a Florida resort, and Marilyn Monroe stayed during filming.

Landmark

The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and named a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Blackstone bought it in 2015 and it joined Hilton's Curio Collection in 2017; a $550 million restoration finished in 2025.