The Hotel del Coronado: The Ghost Upstaging Monroe

The Hotel del Coronado opened in eighteen eighty-eight as one of the largest wooden buildings in the United States, and it has never stopped performing. Marilyn Monroe filmed Some Like It Hot here in nineteen fifty-nine, using the hotel as the backdrop for the fictional Hotel Seminole. But Monroe is not the most famous presence associated with the del Coronado, and the hotel's management would tell you she was never really in competition.

Kate Morgan checked in on Thanksgiving Day, November twenty-fourth, eighteen ninety-two. She was twenty-four years old, estranged from her husband, and she told hotel staff she was waiting for a gentleman who would be arriving shortly. She was well dressed, poised, and clearly ill. Over the next five days she stayed mostly in her room, ate little, took walks alone on the beach, and asked the hotel staff several times if anyone had come for her. No one did. On November twenty-ninth, she was found dead on the exterior beach stairs from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of suicide. There was no note.

The documented history is a story of isolation, abandonment, and quiet desperation played out in one of the most conspicuously luxurious settings in California. The historical record shows a young woman waiting for someone who was never coming, declining in public view over five days in a hotel that continued operating around her. The ghost story that grew from her death is the hotel's way of keeping that story interesting without sitting with what it actually describes.

Kate Morgan's room, number five hundred two, commands a premium rate and a waiting list for guests who want to sleep where she stayed. The hotel has been offering ghost tours in her name since the early twentieth century. She has been the subject of multiple books and a History Channel documentary. She is the del Coronado's most famous resident. The man she was waiting for was never identified.