The Miraculous Loretto Chapel Staircase

Dylan Thuras: If you’re a nun and you’re facing a problem you don’t know how to solve, you might pray on it. If you’re a nun and facing a really big problem that you really don’t know how to solve and you’ve exhausted all the other options, maybe you really, really pray on it. I don’t mean just regular prayers here. I mean you go nuclear. Something called the novena. Nine full days of prayer and meditation.

This is exactly what was going on with the Sisters of Loretto, a community of nuns in Santa Fe, New Mexico, all the way back in 1873. They had a real problem on their hands. So they settled into their pews and got ready to focus all of their attention for the next nine days, hoping that on the other side there would be some kind of answer.

This was their conundrum: The sisters had been trying to build a chapel. They had an architect who had been brought over from France and he had all these beautiful grand plans. The architect, named Projectus Mouly, really went all out. Just a side note, I feel like the name Projectus should come back. What a name. Anyway, Projectus Mouly had these giant stones cut from a nearby quarry. He had stained glass brought over from France, which meant it had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and survive a covered wagon journey to New Mexico. And then construction got underway.

For five years, it was going really well. But just as they were about to cross the finish line, Projectus dropped dead. The sisters went into the chapel to take stock of the situation. It was, in fact, very beautiful. It was almost done. Everything seemed to be in place. The stone, the stained glass, the choir loft in the back of the chapel floating 20 feet above the ground.

And that was the big problem. This choir loft, it was just floating there. Projectus had not yet put in any stairs.

So, the sisters brought in a variety of local carpenters to survey their various options. And they all just shook their heads. Putting stairs in at this point was going to be really difficult, impossible even. Everything else had been built and there was almost no space to put in a staircase, really none at all. It was actually kind of a crazy mess. The sisters didn’t know what to do. They had no idea what Projectus’s plans had actually been to solve this.

So they decided to do what they could do and pray a novena. They decided to dedicate this novena to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, since this was a carpentry emergency. The sisters settled in for their first big day of prayer. They prayed and meditated and prayed and meditated. And, you know, nothing happened. Second day went by, same thing. Third day, fourth. And then, on the last day, the Loretto Chapel ended up getting its staircase. Exactly how it got there, or who put it there, is still something of a mystery.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Visit Santa Fe. Today, we are going to the Loretto Chapel to visit the truly best spiral staircase in all of the lands. Some say it is an engineering marvel, and others say it is downright miraculous. And, in fact, there is a debate still raging about who exactly built it 150 years later.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Richard Lindsley: When a guest would walk in for the first time, I think they’d be struck by its beauty. The chapel is neo-Gothic or revised Gothic chapel. The artwork is more than 100 years old.

Dylan: This is Richard Lindsley. He’s been the curator of the Loretto Chapel for 30 years.

Richard: And the second thing is when they turn to look at the staircase, that would be stunning in and of itself. It’s because it’s unlike almost any other staircase on earth.

Dylan: Spiral staircases are always kind of lovely in their way. But this particular staircase is strikingly beautiful. It’s a spiral staircase wrapped really tight, making two full turns in between the floor and the choir, like a little DNA strand. And usually with a spiral staircase, there is a central beam that the stairs twist around, right? A kind of central post that they wind themselves around.

But with the Loretto staircase, there is no central beam at all. The stairs just kind of wind around themselves like a big spring. They look kind of like they’re just floating there. It also means they are very, very steep. And not only do they not have a central beam, but when they were first built, they didn’t have a railing either.

Richard: One sister, a woman who became a Sister of Loretto, said that when she was a girl, she went up the staircase and she became so frightened, she sat on each step coming down. And I couldn’t blame her for doing that because it is 20 feet tall and the steps are only like two feet, four inches wide, that—it would have been very scary going up and down.

Dylan: So they’re this kind of beautiful, tightly wound, slightly terrifying set of stairs. But how did they get there? So, let’s go back to the story I was telling earlier about the nuns and their nine-day prayer. This is where the whole thing takes a bit of a mystical turn.

Richard: On the last day of their novena, this old man rode in off the desert on a donkey and offered to build it. And they hired him on a handshake, which was common for the time. The only description they had of him was that he was an older man with a gray beard. This carpenter worked inside the chapel for three months. And during that time, he never allowed anyone into the chapel while he was working.

Yes, the sisters would go in every morning for prayers and the students and the carpenter would leave. And when they were done, he would go back and insist upon being left alone. And after three months, he vanished without being paid. And the sisters went looking for him. I think they thought he hadn’t finished the staircase because it had no banisters on it.

But they couldn’t find him. And when they did, they went to the only lumberyard in town to at least pay for the materials. And the lumberyard told the sisters that their carpenter never got materials from them. So the sisters were faced with two great mysteries: Where did he come from, and where did the wood come from?

And in their piety, they and the villagers of Santa Fe came to the conclusion he had come from heaven. They were convinced it was St. Joseph who came from heaven and built the staircase for them.

Dylan: So, the story feels very much like a myth or a legend. But the funny thing about the staircase is that there really is a mystery about who built it. And that question remains fundamentally unresolved.

People have come forward over the years claiming to either have been the carpenter of the stairs or their descendant or their great-great descendant. So maybe let’s consider some of these suspects. The most famous one is a guy named Oscar Hadwiger. And his story was actually featured on an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the one with Robert Stack. It’s so good.

Richard: In the 1970s, Mr. Hadwiger was going around the country saying that he believed his grandfather built the staircase because he said he found a sketch of the staircase in his deceased grandfather’s toolbox. And he leapt to the conclusion his grandfather built it.

Dylan: The big problem with this story is that when anyone asked him to show them the sketch, he said it had been lost. So it gets a little thin there. But then there is another theory that to me feels a little more plausible. It’s from a woman named Mary Jean Straw Cook. She’s an amateur historian who wrote a book about the Loretto Chapel back in the 1980s.

Cook dug into some old New Mexico newspapers and found this 1895 obituary of a carpenter named Frank Rochas, sometimes referred to as François-Jean, sometimes just called “Frenchy.” And Frank or Frenchy, he was quite a character. When you read his obituary, you find out that he was found dead at his ranch and that his friends believed it was, and this is a quote, “an assassination as previous attempts have been made.”

I’m not sure what kind of carpentry Frank was doing that would get him assassinated. Maybe he was doing other things, too. It does raise some questions about credibility, but I don’t know. You don’t really know what was happening in 1895, do you?

Anyway, the obituary goes on to claim that it was Frank who built the handsome staircase in the Loretto Chapel. Richard is not so convinced, though.

Richard: Some people say, well, we have a newspaper account and a story as if they were assuming that it was an investigative piece. But it wasn’t. It was an obituary, and they could put whatever they want in a newspaper, whatever the people applying for the obituary wants to put in there. So the fact that it was in the newspaper doesn’t prove anything.

Dylan: There is one more piece of fairly solid evidence for the theory. Mary Jean Cook, the historian, found that in the sisters’ logbook, there was an entry saying they had paid a Mr. Rochas $150, a sizable sum of money at the time. It did say that it was work on a school being built at the same time, not on the chapel. They didn’t mention stairs—but still.

So was the staircase built by Frenchy, the murdered itinerant carpenter? Hard to say. And for his part, Richard feels pretty clear about exactly where the stairs came from.

Richard: My personal opinion is that it was definitely the answer to the prayers of St. Joseph. And I believe he was deeply involved in it. And I’ll find out the details on the other side.

Dylan: And there are other questions about the staircase besides just the mystery of who built it. There is a fairly persistent claim that the engineering involved is physically impossible. That these stairs are, in fact, a genuine miracle.

But there are some similar double helix staircases found elsewhere in the world from the same period or even a little older. So, you know. And there’s one other mystery that goes around about the staircases, which is that we don’t know what they are made of. There have been some analyses made of the wood, and they were only able to narrow it down to a variety of spruce, but not specify where it came from.

But these stairs have a funny way of gathering mysteries about them. And whether you think it’s a miracle about who built them or their design or what they’re made of, there’s another point that occurs to me. Since the 1800s, these stairs have been bringing attention, visitors, money, support to this chapel. It’s hard to argue that that’s not a little bit miraculous.

The Loretto Chapel is open 364 days a year. They are closed on Christmas and occasionally now and again for a special event. Admission for adults is only five bucks. Go and pay your five bucks and appreciate a small miracle.

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