As anyone who's walked the grounds of the famed Hotel del Coronado knows all too well, the past has a way of catching up with you. There's the ghost of Kate Morgan, whose dead body was found on Nov. 29, 1892, five days after she'd checked in under the alias Lottie A. Bernard. The San Diego coroner ultimately determined that the gunshot wound to her head was self-inflicted. Today, those who stay in her room (3327, previously No. 302) — the most requested one in the hotel — continue to report paranormal activity, including a television set that randomly turns on. Ms. Morgan is not the only famous name on the hotel's guest register. Previous guests have included Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh and Marilyn Monroe, whose film "Some Like It Hot," was shot here. This year, the hotel celebrates its 125th anniversary with a series of events and a new commemorative book, "Hotel del Coronado History."
Inside are extensively detailed notes and historic photographs, tracing the resort's storied past back to 1885 when then newly transplanted Elisha Babcock Jr. and Hampton Story dropped $110,000 to purchase the entire Coronado peninsula across the bay from San Diego. A year later, on Nov. 13, 1886, a land auction was held that garnered $1 million in lot sales. With this money, the duo, along with an architect, James Reid, marched ahead with their plans to build a seaside hotel that would become "the talk of the Western world." Constructed almost entirely of wood, much of which was brought over from the Northwest on massive log rafts, the scale of the hotel was so large that it necessitated the establishment of an electrical power plant to help with its construction.
For his part, Hugh Francis Griffin, one of the hotel's earliest employees, who quit his job at New York's Bartholdi Hotel to travel west and work as a $60-per-month front-office clerk at the hotel, wrote the following letter to his family on Feb. 8, 1888: "We are opened for business here now, and have quite a number of guests. There are a number of novel things to be seen at this place, in and about the hotel, all the rooms are lighted up with electric light … it seems rather odd to go to your room and turn on the light, just as you would gas, and besides it saves all the trouble and annoyance of matches, and can be turned on or off at leisure. I have one of the prettiest little rooms you ever saw, with a fine sycamore bed, dresser, washstand, rocker, two chairs, and one of the nicest carpets imaginable. From all accounts, you people back East are having a very cold winter; we here have the same warm weather, day in and day out."
Also in the mix are photos documenting the changes to the hotel's lobby and guest rooms throughout the years. The presidential suite, for one, was occupied by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in October 1935. That suite housed brocades and gold-framed mirrors, which the couple described as "radiating a warmth and cheerfulness … a homey atmosphere and a pleasing simplicity." Not to be missed are the chapters about the hotel's evolving culinary style. An 1897 dinner menu had oysters on shell, sweet pickled figs, and boiled leg of mutton with turnips. A 1940 cocktail menu, for example, showed that hotel revelers had their choice of good-times tonics ranging from a 40-cent Tom Collins to a pricier two-dollar French "75."
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