KATE MORGAN

Opening

On Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1892, a young woman checked in alone at the Hotel del Coronado, the grand wooden resort on the coast near San Diego, California. She signed the register as Mrs Lottie A. Bernard of Detroit and carried only a small handbag. Staff remembered her as ladylike, beautiful, reserved and well dressed, but troubled and melancholy. She told them she was dying of stomach cancer and was waiting for a brother, a doctor, who never came.

Five days later an electrician found her dead on the stone staircase that led down to the beach, a revolver beside her hand and a bullet wound in her head. The coroner ruled it suicide. Her real name was Kate Morgan, and the newspapers called her the Beautiful Stranger. Her death has since become the hotel's best-known story, with a murder theory, a ghost and a good many details that do not agree. The documents are thin. The legend is not.

Timeline

About 1864Kate Farmer is born in Fremont County, Iowa. Her mother dies in 1865, and from about the age of two she lives with her maternal grandfather, Joe Chandler.

1870 to 1876Her father, George Washington Farmer, is appointed postmaster of Hamburg, Iowa, in 1870. He remarries in 1871, moves to Texas, and dies there in 1876.

30 December 1885She marries Thomas Edwin Morgan. One account gives the year as 1886.

31 October 1886Their son is born. He lives two days.

About 1890She elopes with Albert Allen, a stepson of Thomas's stepmother. The relationship does not seem to last.

23 November 1892She leaves her job as a domestic servant at a house on South Hill Street in Los Angeles, saying she will return the next day. She leaves her trunk behind.

24 November 1892She registers at the hotel as Lottie Bernard. Over the next days she tells staff she is ill, refuses to see the hotel physician, and asks repeatedly whether her brother or any telegram or letter has arrived. None has.

28 November 1892At about three in the afternoon she buys a .44 American Bulldog revolver and ammunition at a gun store on Fifth Street in San Diego, saying it is a Christmas present for a friend. In the evening she asks a bellboy for matches, saying she wants to burn papers. She is said to have been seen between nine and ten, stepping onto the veranda during a storm, dressed in black with a lace shawl.

29 November 1892At about half past seven in the morning the hotel electrician, David Cone, finds her body on the steps. It is wet, stiff and cold. No autopsy is done.

9 December 1892A trunk marked Mrs Kate Morgan is brought to the police station from the Los Angeles house. It holds photographs, a lock of hair labelled as her mother's, a marriage certificate and a letter from a relative.

12 December 1892Her grandfather replies to the coroner by telegram: bury her and send me the statement.

13 December 1892The funeral is held at an undertaker's parlour in San Diego. She is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in an unmarked grave, which stays unmarked for 98 years.

1980sA San Francisco lawyer, Alan May, speculates that she was murdered.

Key figures

Kate Morgan, born Kate Farmer, was in her twenties and by her own account very ill. She used several names, including Lottie Bernard, and some accounts add Josie Brown, Louise Anderson and others.

David Cone, the hotel electrician, found her. The undertaker's telegram to her husband used the phrase suicided here, but the cause of death was never confirmed by an autopsy.

An anonymous physician who examined the body told the San Diego Union that stomach cancer was unlikely and suggested she might have been pregnant and tried to end the pregnancy with strong medicine. That is his opinion, not a confirmed finding. W. F. Farmer, a relative, wrote to the San Diego police chief that he was more than surprised and doubted she would have killed herself.

Alan May, the lawyer, argued in the 1980s that she had been murdered. He is reported to have claimed her as an ancestor and to have paid for a plaque or headstone at her grave. His main evidence was a passing remark at the coroner's inquest that the bullet did not match the gun.

The hotel's Heritage Department has written its own account, a book called The Beautiful Stranger, which leans towards suicide.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the hotel register, the gun store, the coroner's inquest, the trunk, the telegrams and the newspaper reports of December 1892 in the San Diego Union and the Los Angeles papers. The San Diego County coroner ruled the wound self-inflicted. A .44 revolver lay beside her, the same calibre as the one she had bought days before.

What is missing is nearly everything that would settle the other questions: a copy of the inquest, a ballistic report, any letter. The remark about the bullet is the basis of the murder theory, and it was a passing statement at the inquest, not a documented finding. Her cancer diagnosis rests only on what she told staff. Several details vary between accounts, including the date she was found, the room number, which appears as 302, 502, 3312 and 3327, and even her marriage year. A relative said she had left home with quite a sum of money, and only $16.50 was found on her body.

The gravestone reads that she died on 29 November 1892, while other sources put her death on the night of the 28th, when she left her room.

Things you might not know

• She used a false name. The register says Lottie A. Bernard of Detroit, and nothing in it identified her until a trunk turned up in December.
• She bought the gun herself. She went to a gun store in San Diego on 28 November and said it was a Christmas present.
• The storm washed away the blood. Rain had cleaned the staircase by the time she was found, according to one account.
• Her son lived two days. The baby, born in 1886, did not survive.
• Her grave was unmarked for 98 years. A headstone was added around 1990, reportedly through Alan May.
• The ghost story is recent. The earliest newspaper mention of a haunting that one researcher found was a Coronado paper in May 1983, quoting a hotel spokesperson who said people had booked that room. A 1987 article described flickering lights and a woman in Victorian dress.
• The hotel opened in 1888. L. Frank Baum did much of his writing there, and it is said he based the Emerald City on it.

Competing explanations

Suicide. The coroner's verdict and the hotel's own history lean this way. A young woman who had lost a child and a relationship, alone in a hotel under a false name, who bought a gun and burned papers, is a plausible subject. The calibre matches her purchase.

A failed pregnancy and despair. The anonymous physician's suggestion that she may have been pregnant and tried to end it, and the later speculation about quinine, would explain her illness. It is unproven, and the cancer story is her own.

Murder. May's theory depends on the remark about the bullet. No suspect has been named, and no evidence beyond that remark has surfaced. Other writers have suggested infidelity, mistaken identity or a conspiracy, and a few that the body was not hers. None has support in the record I found.

A legend that grew. The earliest ghost stories I have found in print date from the 1980s, nearly a century after her death. The hotel promotes her as its spirit, ghost hunters book her room in advance, and a claim that a Secret Service officer in 1983 asked to leave it is repeated in retellings but unverified.

Later life of the case

Kate Morgan has become the Hotel del Coronado's resident ghost. It runs Haunted Happenings tours on Friday to Sunday evenings, and offers tours of a room that is among the most requested. The facts of her life are still being corrected: one researcher disputes her birth year, her mother's death and details of her family.

Finding

Kate Morgan did die at the Hotel del Coronado in November 1892, and the contemporary ruling was suicide with a gun she bought days earlier. That is the best-supported reading. The murder theory rests on a remark, the pregnancy theory on a physician's opinion, and the ghost on retellings that begin in the 1980s.

What still will not resolve: why she was there, and what the inquest actually heard about the bullet. The inquest record would settle most of it.