The Hotel del Coronado

Many of you may know that the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego is rumored to be haunted by a woman murdered there about 100 years ago. The woman was found shot to death on the back stairs of the hotel. She was wearing a black lace dress. The death was officially ruled a suicide, but many now believe the woman was murdered by her lover. Anyway, I can't tell you for sure if the hotel is haunted, but my wife and I did have a strange occurrence during our visit last March.

We were staying at the Del for the weekend. On Saturday morning my wife saw a book about the ghost of the Del in one of the hotel's gift shops. She bought it and read it cover to cover over the course of the day. (it was not a long book.) According to the book the woman had a very tragic life, and my wife felt very sorry for her. In fact she couldn't stop thinking about her all day. This led to her wanting to have a "seance" -- very unusual for my wife -- in our room that night to try and contact the woman's spirit. Not going for that sort of thing, I told my wife that if she wanted to stay up half the night talking to ghosts, be my guest, but I was going to sleep. Well, she did. Or, at least she tried. But, nothing of note happened. So, eventually, she went to bed, too.

The next morning I headed off to Starbucks for coffee and my wife began packing for our flight home. When she pulled the last of her clothes from the drawer she was using she noticed a small, tightly wound ball of black cloth laying in the bottom of the drawer. She did not notice the ball when she put her clothes in the drawer and began unwinding it. Turns out that the ball was a very long, thin piece of black lace that was torn and tattered in spots. Remember, the woman was wearing black lace when her body was found at the Del. I don't know if the lace came from the ghost, but it's definitely not my wife's and it wasn't in the drawer when we arrived.

Scary? Perhaps not. But, it does make me wonder.