Hotel del Coronado

The record of 1892 settles the cause of death and leaves the motive open. The coroner's inquest found a gunshot wound and a suicide. The San Diego Union and the Los Angeles Daily Times, as summarised by Voice of San Diego in 2011, recorded what came before it: the revolver bought in San Diego a couple of days earlier, the brother she said was coming, the cancer she said she had. An anonymous physician who examined the body told the Union that she was only 24 or 25, too young for stomach cancer; he suggested instead that she had been pregnant and had tried to "effect miscarriage" with "strong medicine". Theories of foul play have circulated for decades, some of them in books. Voice of San Diego listed among them that the body was someone else's, and "Maybe she wasn't killed with the gun found next to her body but used it to shoot at her attacker"; it described the theories as alternatives to "the sad and not-very-sexy story of a depressed woman who killed herself". The one it attributes to the San Diego lawyer Alan M. May, author of a book on the case, is of another kind: he declared that she was his great-great-grandmother. He also paid for a plaque and a small memorial statue on her grave at Mount Hope Cemetery. The false name has a documented background: in Los Angeles she worked as a domestic under the name Katie Logan. Gina Petrone, the hotel's historian, told San Diego Magazine in 2021 that Morgan had a different story for everyone she spoke to during her stay: she told staff that she was waiting for her husband, told other guests that she had stomach cancer, and claimed to be very rich, and according to Petrone none of it was true. As for the room, the hotel's page on the ghost lists flickering lights, a television that turns itself on and off, breezes from nowhere, scents and sounds, objects that move, doors that open and close, sudden changes of temperature, footsteps and voices. Petrone herself told San Diego Magazine that the flickering lights and the television are "not unexpected behavior" for the electrical system of a 133-year-old hotel. Voice of San Diego noted that visitors often ask to stay in her room and then report strange happenings, and that ghost hunters book it in advance for Halloween. Her gravestone at Mount Hope, as Voice of San Diego transcribed it, reads: "Kate Morgan/Also Known as/Lottie A. Bernard/Died Nov. 29, 1892/At Age 24 Years".