The moment I touched the door handle, the lights in the hallway dimmed a good 30%.
After checking in, we rode the birdcage elevator up to the third floor and wound our way through the labyrinthine hallways of the Victorian building to our room: Ghost Kate's room at the Hotel del Coronado. I placed my bags on the floor and pulled out my key. I jumped back and instinctively ducked. I spun to look at Momo, my intrepid ghost-hunting partner, my eyes wide.
"Tell me you saw that too?!" I said.
Momo looked at me with a stony, unmoved expression.
"Come on. The lights are probably on a timer. The sun is going down." she mocked.
This was the first of several incidents of note over the course of my stay in Ghost Kate's room at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California.
I am a believer in the supernatural. Momo, my partner for this adventure, is a staunch skeptic. The daughter of a German academic, Momo has a skepticism and savoir-faire I appreciate, but I have also really been wanting to find somewhere that would even get her to question her beliefs. The series of incidents over the course of our stay with Ghost Kate would certainly stretch her rational explanations to irrational limits—and do it in luxury and style.
Dimming timers in an interior hallway of a Four Diamond resort?
The Del, as many locals refer to it, is one of the most visually striking and famous hotels in America. Since its opening in 1888, the Hotel del Coronado has served as a playground for the rich and famous, a backdrop to iconic films, and a meeting place for heads of state. L. Frank Baum wrote at least three books in the Oz series here. Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon filmed the classic Some Like It Hot on location at the Del.
Yet some of the hotel guests who never checked out have become as famous as any celebrity.
The Del is regularly cited as one of the most haunted hotels in America. Unquestionably, the most famous of these "permanent residents" is Kate Morgan.
In life, Kate was a beautiful 24-year-old woman who checked into the hotel alone under an alias on Thanksgiving Day in 1892. She spent her days walking the grounds in a black traveling suit, with veil and hat, as was customary at the time, waiting on a man who was supposed to arrive any day.
Five days later, Kate was found with dead by gunshot with a revolver she had purchased the day before lying nearby, and wearing her now-iconic black traveling suit, soaked to the bone, on the hotel's steps to the beach at daybreak.
Kate is widely believed to continue to haunt the hotel's grounds, and in particular her room on the third floor of the Del, which the Del was graciously allowing Momo and me to spend the night in and photograph with my Graflex 4x5 film camera.
Upon entering the beautifully appointed room, we unpacked and started to get ready to make our 7:30 p.m. Ghost Tour meeting at the Ice House Museum.
I stopped to pee before we left.
As I was standing in front of the toilet midstream (with the seat up, I am not an animal), the glass door to the shower next to me rattled and briefly opened.
"MOMO! Did you do that?!" I yelped, as I attempted to spin without peeing on myself or the floor.
Her reply of "Do what?" came from outside of the bathroom.
"We said no pranks!" I said.
"Do what?" she replied.
"You didn't open the shower door?" I meekly asked.
It was clear from her expression that Momo seemed to believe I was trying to pull one over on her, and I was not sure how to process and file this latest incident. So I zipped up, and we left for the Haunted Happenings Tour.
The Haunted Happenings Tour was a fun and informative nighttime ghost tour of the hotel's grounds, stopping at particular points of reported paranormal concentrations and sharing photographs taken by hotel personnel and guests, as well as security camera footage.
As we walked the stately grounds, our minds were on Kate and the mystery of her death so many years ago.
We finished up the tour around 9 and went to dinner at Serẽa, a lovely beachfront sustainable seafood restaurant on the hotel's grounds. We sat on the patio, and as this was a Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. in San Diego, we increasingly found ourselves enjoying a private, secluded dinner as the patio cleared out.
Momo and I discussed our theories on the mysteries surrounding Kate's final days over calamari, patatas bravas, and a wood-grilled whole red snapper, deboned and plated tableside.
Sometime after dinner, as we sat enjoying the quiet patio and salt air, Momo looked behind her and then her head snapped back toward me with a wide-eyed look typically reserved for me that evening.
"Someone just brushed by me and said 'excuse me' in my ear!" she said.
"There is no one there, Momo."
We sat there just looking at each other.
After dinner, Momo retired to the room. Despite my trepidation about leaving her, she assured me she was quite fine and quite tired and wished me happy ghost hunting. I wandered the hotel grounds, shooting long-exposure shots on my film camera in the quiet halls and courtyards until midnight.
I returned to the room to find Momo asleep in bed. As I walked over to the far side of the room, I faintly but distinctly smelled tobacco smoke, which, in a Four Diamond resort in San Diego in 2026, felt almost as unexpected as if I had found a pygmy hippopotamus reading Dungeon Crawler Carl in the chair by the window.
I quietly set up my camera to take some long-exposure images of the room and the bed while we slept. I pulled the dark slide, opened the shutter, and went to bed. I had set a timer to wake me in two hours to close the shutter and load a new sheet of film that I figured I would expose from 2 a.m. until I got up.
The next morning, I got up and closed the shutter for the second shot, and we got coffee downstairs at Eno Market. I told Momo about the cigarette smell and asked her if last night had convinced her.
She laughed and said no.
I asked her to explain the voice she heard at the restaurant and the person walking by her that wasn't there. She paused for a moment and explained that she had just yawned and her ear popped and she suddenly could hear better, and at that moment someone farther away must have said "excuse me," and the sudden change in volume must have startled her and made it seem like they were closer than they were.
Of all the odd and unexplainable incidents that had taken place, nothing struck me as strange as Momo's rationalization for hearing a voice in her ear and feeling someone brush by her.
After coffee, Momo left for work, and I left to meet Gina Petrone, Heritage Manager at the Hotel del Coronado, to learn more about the history of the Del and Kate and, most importantly, ask her some pressing questions.
I needed to know: Does the hotel have dimmers on interior corridor lighting? Is there original wiring left, or has everything been modernized? Why was Kate here? Who was she supposed to meet? What are the experiences others have reported? And, obviously, did Kate smoke?
Gina graciously spent the morning answering my questions and revealing even more of the fascinating history of the Del.
I retired back to Kate's room to spend the last 30 minutes soaking in the vibe of the place and pondering the implications of Gina's answers to me.
There are no timers on lights at the Del. The hallways don't dim. The electrical system, as one would expect of a luxury resort, is modern and renovated.
Kate's room was decorated and meticulously appointed to match the other modern rooms; however, the layout has remained largely unchanged since she originally checked in. We don't know if she smoked or not, but others have reported smelling smoke as a common experience.
Notably, a famous medium led a séance in the hotel several years ago and agreed to lead two small groups up to Kate's room. During the first group's visit, the medium declared he wanted to leave the room and would not be taking a second group into the room, as he felt too uncomfortable.
For what it's worth, I at no point felt uncomfortable in the room. It was a beautiful room with nice light and a comfortable bed and bathroom (even if there was a beautiful ghost sharing it with us).
For reasons I can't explain, I felt the need to thank Kate out loud for the lovely stay and her hospitality. I also told her that I was sorry to hear she had a tough life based on what I had learned. I remarked that the room was very nice, though, and I could imagine it is not a bad place to stay.
After that, I got up and picked up the room phone to call the concierge to request a bellhop to assist me with my gear.
The concierge picked up and greeted me. I said hello and began to ask for a bellhop when the line apparently went out and the concierge couldn't hear me. After 20 seconds of neither of us succeeding in the hello-can-you-hear-me game, I hung up and hit the button for the concierge again.
It wouldn't ring.
I repeated this two more times.
On the fourth attempt, we connected, and again I could hear the concierge and he could hear me. I attempted to request a bellhop again, and the line again cut out.
I hung up and said firmly, "Kate, I need to go."
I picked up the phone for a fifth time now, hit the button, and this time was able to reach the concierge and request assistance with my bags without any technical issues.
Postscript: I went to the darkroom the day after I checked out and processed all my large-format film images of the Del at the same time with the same developer.
Interestingly, all the images I took outside my room came out beautifully and are included in this story.
The two images taken inside the room while I slept came out almost completely blank.
This is of particular note because I was concerned that, with exposures of two hours and five-plus hours, my images would, if anything, be overexposed.
Do with that information what you will, dear reader.
For me, the simplest explanation for this confluence of incidents is that there are things beyond our realm and comprehension and that ghosts exist.
For Momo, each particular incident already has an answer that starts with "it's not a ghost." Each must separately be explained through an increasingly byzantine logic involving, at the very least, extraordinary timing and happenstance.
