The story you are about to read is true on two counts--as a mystery story, and as a ghost story. The real-life mystery story in 1892 became an instant national sensation, laced with beauty, passion, and hope--but also conspiracy, betrayal, and ultimately violent death. This mystery (murder or suicide?) spawned a famous ghost saga that has endured over a century. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, the story of the 'Beautiful Stranger' is a living piece of Hotel del Coronado lore--and even skeptics may at times get goose bumps.

To capture the atmosphere, it is worth dwelling a moment on how I came upon this story. Being an author, semi-retired from the computer systems development industry, and in search of some fresh experiences, I took a part-time job several years ago as a shuttle van driver with the Hotel del Coronado. The Hotel del Coronado (or the Hotel Del to local residents, sometimes just 'the Del') is an official U.S. National Landmark and a San Diego icon. It is usually portrayed on book covers in all its splendor as a white Victorian lady with her famous brick-red roofs. It sits on the Peninsula of San Diego, in the City of Coronado, facing away from the City of San Diego. The Pacific Ocean laps at sugar-white beaches, a tennis ball's throw from the rear stairs. Visible along the shore toward the southeast is the southwestern corner of the contiguous states--Imperial Beach and Nestor--before you reach Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico. The weather in Coronado is usually balmy and sunny, as tall fan palms rustle in a slight breeze under clear blue skies. Visible to the west (the shore runs east-west at the Hotel Del) is the looming ridge of Point Cabrillo, which overlooks the San Diego Harbor entrance where the first Spanish expedition dropped anchor more than four centuries ago. Millions of visitors come to the area every year. But there is another side to the image--dark, atmospheric, spooky.

My two years at the hotel were fascinating--new things to learn, nice people, great surroundings, interesting history, sunshine, fresh air, rustling palm trees, crashing surf ... topped off by the fact that I believe I have solved a great mystery of the Hotel del Coronado: The legend of an unknown woman who died violently and mysteriously on the hotel's back steps during a huge sea storm; and of her ghost, which thousands of visitors and some staff claim to have seen. I personally have met a number of people who claim to have witnessed ghostly manifestations, though I myself can't make that claim. Then again, maybe I missed something. After all, if there is a ghost, it's clear that she would be trying to tell us something, and I unwittingly stepped into the role of oracle to deliver her message: She is not Kate Morgan, as is commonly thought, but a beautiful young woman who was betrayed and abandoned in the midst of a cruel blackmail conspiracy. Her name was Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Wyllie, and she was pregnant when she took her life out of despair--a fallen Victorian angel, in the true sense and sentiment of that age. I will explain it all in this book.

On many an evening when business was slow, we drivers in our black suits would sit in our vans waiting for riders, by turns either in the dark, starlit parking lot below, or under the softly gleaming coach lights around the front entrance of the hotel. A good deal of our traffic was taking guests to or from Lindbergh International Airport, ten miles away including an enjoyable two mile jaunt nearly 300 feet in the air across the Coronado Bay Bridge (another San Diego icon). Another substantial part of our evening traffic was bringing guests to or from eating and entertainment venues in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego. This is a modern salvage and gentrification of the long-decaying Victorian city and its infamous red light district, through which Kate Morgan and her accomplices moved. Today's Gaslamp Quarter (Fourth to Sixth Avenues east-west, and K Street to Broadway north-south) was the heart of downtown San Diego in the 1890s, with the notorious Stingaree district partially overlapping to the south. The Stingaree, which was one of the most violent and dangerous red light districts on the West Coast, took its name from the stingrays that are common on San Diego area shores, and have a poisonous stinger that causes agonizing pain, and can (rarely) kill. The saying was, "You get stung as badly in the Stingaree as in the Bay."

On many nights during the winter months as I sat waiting in the van, fog would roll in off the Pacific Ocean, and a chill would run up and down my spine in the cold, damp air. Sometimes you could hear the booming of naval guns out at sea (the Navy's Special Warfare Command has its headquarters a block away, housing the Navy SEALs). On a breezy night, you could hear the clasps on the main flag pole banging as if shaken by a crazed spirit desperate for attention. There are always stray sounds of someone laughing, or people talking, and snatches of music, or even the distant night cargo train blaring as it slowly rumbles through downtown San Diego. For the most part, though, the atmosphere is softly lit and quiet.

A strange, almost eerie silence descends around the Hotel Del with dusk, amid those jutting turrets and many-angled white walls that overlook pine trees and luscious lawns. In the winter months, it gets dark as early as 4:30 in the afternoon. Fog creeps up from the sea, and dampness brings with it a chill that crawls up your back and touches skeletal fingers along your spine. The valets and doormen stand about talking when things are slow. Some evenings are incredibly busy, and a constant stream of taxis and vans and cars presses through the narrow circular driveway. Men and women in eveningwear move leisurely up the front stairway and through the wide entrance. On other evenings, the entrance has a ghostly calm about it--when the census is down, or during the interstice of the dinner hour, between the rush of arrivals and the rush of departures. A balmy glow of coach lamps bathes the area. Soft light in rich hues emanates from a large stained glass picture window above, which portrays the Amazon queen Califia or Calafia amid all the splendors of her realm. Calafia was, in a Spanish novel of 1510, a fictional queen ruling a mythical island named California, to be found on the route westward from Europe, which Christopher Columbus took in search of a sea passage to India. From this, our state derived its romantic name. As you stand facing the hotel about 50 feet from the main entry, you see the curving windows of the Crown Room to your right. This contains a number of large chandeliers with light bulbs (high tech over a century ago) allegedly designed by L. Frank Baum, who often stayed at the Del after he published The Wizard of Oz in 1900. The Crown Room, at 23,500 square feet, is one of the largest all-wood halls of its kind in the United States. Its pine-vaulted ceiling is beautiful to behold, and has overarched the dinner table of many a president, king, movie star, and billionaire. The first royalty to dine in this room, in fact--and important to this book--was King David Kalakaua, the last King of Hawai'i, who came as a guest of John Spreckels for Christmas dinner in 1890, and died a few weeks later in San Francisco as a guest of Spreckels' Sugar Baron father, Claus Spreckels. John Spreckels, as we will see, was most likely the object of a blackmail conspiracy that puts the entire mystery of the 'Beautiful Stranger' in perspective. If Lizzie Wyllie is the key to the tragic mystery of the 'Beautiful Stranger,' the hotel's owner, John Spreckels, is the hinge upon which this tale turns.

One night, having gone to our office to warm up, I found a copy of the Heritage Department's beautifully written, illustrated, and designed book[1]. I started reading it in the Transportation Department's small office, upstairs in the same row of brick buildings as the original 1880s power plant. As I sat reading amid the odors of rotting carpets, decaying documents, and stale coffee, I was pretty quickly hooked on this captivating story. As is usually the case with history, it is amazing how much we actually know about the story--and yet, equally frustrating is the loss of information and artifacts that could help us resolve the many loose threads, baffling clues, and chilling dead ends.

The challenge I set myself was to see if I could figure out what really happened, using the copious details in the hotel's book, and my own research at the library and online. Although I regaled thousands of visitors to San Diego with tales of the famous ghost--how the maids won't go in her room alone; how they go in to clean and make up beds in teams and get out as soon as possible; how a security officer I know was one of many people who have seen the outline of a Victorian woman on the bed, and if you smooth the blankets, the outline reappears as if by magic; how books fly off the shelves in the downstairs gallery; a whole set of ghostly doings like that--I was less interested in the haunted aspect of the story as I was in the mystery of her life and violent death. All that follows grows out of my analysis of evidence that has been hidden in plain sight for well over a century. I offer many fine little points of reference and detail, most of which are important to the solution of the mystery, while a few will help visitors to the Hotel Del appreciate the history and local color of this national landmark.

Part I. Mystery Story

On Thanksgiving Day, 1892, a beautiful and elegantly dressed young woman appeared at the Hotel del Coronado--the most luxurious resort in the region, whose doors had opened just a few years earlier in February 1888. Signing in as Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, the woman attracted attention to herself from the start. She was traveling alone--frowned upon by Victorian society--and without luggage. She kept anxiously inquiring at the desk--not about her 'husband,' the missing Mr. Bernard, but a man she said was her 'brother.' Her brother, Dr. M.C. Anderson, was supposedly due at any time to help her with a vague ailment. She never mentioned the husband. Both men would prove to be as fictional as Lottie A. Bernard herself. Both were part of the haunting mystery of Coronado that would endure through the centuries.

Over the next few days, she made odd requests of hotel staff (some of them downright chilling when reviewed in the light of new theories). Her health deteriorated rapidly, so that by Monday, November 28, four days after her arrival, she had difficulty walking. Nevertheless, she made an arduous journey on foot, by trolley, and by ferry boat to downtown San Diego, where she bought a gun and some ammunition. She returned to the hotel and was last seen on a balcony with other guests, staring westward at the impending arrival of a great sea storm. The next morning, an electrician found her dead on the back steps, a gunshot wound to the head, and that same gun lying by her side. The Deputy Coroner and his men took the body across the bay to San Diego, where she lay in state for at least two weeks. Thousands of Victorians--mostly women--came to view her embalmed and well-dressed body as if she were a dead princess or, more to the point, a fallen Victorian angel in the best sentimental traditions of the age. The story became an instant national sensation in the scandal-mongering Yellow Press. Daily telegraph dispatches crossed the wires with the latest breathless news, gossip, and innuendoes. What had she been up to? Why had she died? The mystery deepened as people started to realize she wasn't who she said she was. But who was she really?

Even as the police were looking for the illusory Dr. Anderson and a presumed Mr. Bernard, the corpse's identification shifted to that of Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Wyllie, a pregnant and troubled young beauty from Detroit.

That identification was clouded by the allegation that she was really a missing housemaid named Katie Logan from Los Angeles.

Briefly, she was thought to be a renter from Anaheim named Josie Brown. She was also thought to be the wife of a gambler named L. A. Bernard from Iowa.

Except Lizzie Wyllie, all of these women turned out to be fictions, and part of the pattern was that each had a mysterious doctor-brother orbiting unseen somewhere on the periphery, exerting some dark authoritative force that gave Kate Morgan's schemes some ephemeral credibility. Finally, the dead woman was reported to be Kate Morgan of Hamburg, Iowa, a shady lady of many false identities, unknown but dark secrets, and a pungent aura of sexual disgrace that electrified the Victorian imagination. The Kate Morgan legend persists to this day. Nobody has figured out why she came to this hotel, what really went on while she stayed here, or why she shot herself. Some even claim she was murdered.

I suggest in this book that the dead woman was not Kate Morgan but Lizzie Wyllie. If there is a ghost at the Hotel del Coronado, it is that of Lizzie Wyllie, who wants us to know it is she who is buried in a lonely grave up on Market Street, at that time outside town, in Mount Hope Cemetery. I think the mystery of why she appeared under a false name at this great resort was a blackmail plot gone horribly wrong. The owner of the hotel was the only man left standing financially after San Diego's terrible financial collapse of 1889--John Spreckels, heir to a fabulous Hawai'i sugar fortune, and one of the richest men in the United States. Kate Morgan was a ruthless schemer who dreamed up this blackmail scheme. She draped herself in false names with the same ease that Mata Hari tossed scarves about. Kate's target was Spreckels, the place of execution was his grand hotel, and her tool was a pregnant and desperate young Lizzie Wyllie. There were at least two men involved. One was John G. Longfield, Lizzie's lover and former book bindery foreman, a married man with several children, who had been fired from his job along with Lizzie and her sister May when word of their affair became known. The other was a shadowy figure, possibly Kate's husband Tom Morgan, or some lover of hers, who appears briefly in a bank in Hamburg to help deliver a letter of credit for the alleged wife of 'a friend' in California--a woman named Lottie A. Bernard who was staying at the great hotel halfway across the country in Coronado.

I do not quite have a smoking gun, like a blackmail note. In fact, the woman at the Del was seen urgently burning a stack of papers in her hotel room, the day before she killed herself--and those probably included such documents. What convinces me of my case is how my theory solves every one of the dozens of loose ends that have dangled for over a century. It is an old and brittle case--a true cold case, in police parlance--that begins to make sense when you put all these many little pieces together in a way that every last detail makes sense. There are, in fact, several bits of evidence that are so egregious that it is almost laughable not to think that (a) the dead woman was Lizzie; (b) Kate Morgan was the planner who almost literally got away with murder; (c) Spreckels was the victim of a blackmail plot gone bad; and (d) there were also two men involved. Those are highlights of the evidence I sort through in this book.

Also, to solve the case, I believe I am the first to analyze the situation in its global context. The key to the whole thing is John Spreckels. He owned the Hotel del Coronado. Though still based in San Francisco, he had bought or was buying up much of the financially devastated Greater San Diego, including Coronado. At the moment that Kate Morgan chose to strike with her ill-considered plan, John Spreckels was in Washington, D.C., lobbying with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress to prevent the overthrow of the Hawai'ian monarchy. The monarchy's fall would mean the loss of the Spreckels family's vast sugar plantations in the Hawai'ian kingdom, which the elder Claus Spreckels managed by controlling the monarchy and its royal cabinet appointments. Claus Spreckels was at that very same time doing desperate shuttle diplomacy between San Francisco and Honolulu. It is impossible to imagine that John Spreckels did not have an army of accountants, bankers, reporters, and other workers in San Diego to mind his affairs. That would include the local police and private security agents, possibly Pinkerton people. Spreckels owned the banks, the newspapers, all of Coronado, much of downtown San Diego, the light rail company, the utilities, the water flume, and anything else that could be bought and sold. Kate Morgan not only had an ill-conceived plan, but picked a bad time to put it into effect. As I will point out, there are moments when we can glimpse the dark hand of what I call the Spreckels Machine at work, shielding John Spreckels and his reputation at a time when his enemies would have been glad to smear him. As it would turn out, the corporate and missionary interests bent on ending Hawai'i's sovereignty--and getting it annexed as a U.S. territory--would win a huge victory less than a month after Lottie A. Bernard's death in Coronado. U.S. military and local militia deposed Queen Lili'uokalani at bayonet point on January 17, 1893, and a transitional government (followed by a short-lived republic ruled by Sanford Dole, cousin of the soon-to-be 'Pineapple King' James Dole) was established in preparation for annexation in 1897. On the hundredth anniversary of the annexation, in 1997, President Clinton and Congress would issue an official joint, bi-partisan apology to the Hawaiian people.

To fully understand what happened in the life and death of the 'Mysterious Stranger' at the Hotel del Coronado, it is necessary to understand both the local facts on the ground--outside the doors of the Hotel Del, and beyond what the official book covers--and the context, both national and global--in which those events took place.

And in the end, again, it comes down to the tragedy of Lizzie Wyllie--a beautiful woman, a fallen angel, a betrayed lover, and perhaps a grieving mother--who took her life when she saw no other recourse.

The Heritage Department's book is filled with more questions and mysteries than answers. My book picks up where the Heritage Department's book stops--at the border of speculation, where a weird scatter of myriad and ill-fitting facts lies like objects abandoned on the beach after a storm. With some daring, I thought my way through--from fact to puzzling fact, from mischievous clue to frustrating dead end, from loose end to logical trap--until I could finally make sense of it all. There was such a profusion of people's names and place names that I ended up drawing charts and maps, on which I connected people and places with variously colored pencil lines. When I published the first edition of my book in mid-2007, I decided to release it as historical fiction. After much deliberation and more insights--like about the sponge and medicine bottle she ordered during her stay, of whose chilling implications I have more to say in this book--I am now confidently releasing this as nonfiction, true crime and history. It is the most comprehensive and coherent theory anyone has yet developed to explain a truly complex and tangled web of--yes--sex, violence, deceit, ruthless cunning, greed, and something approaching murder.

Some readers will find the ghost story more intriguing. Others will find that the ghost story pales in the shadow of an 1890s gaslamp true crime mystery that is contemporaneous with the world of Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria. Both realms will intrigue you.

There are actually two layers of conspiracy. The inner conspiracy (in which Kate Morgan was the driving force) stretch from Coronado to other cities around the U.S. We can begin organizing the endless profusion of named cities into several clusters of interest: Lake Ontario (Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids); Iowa/Nebraska (Hamburg, Iowa); San Francisco (San Francisco, Hanford, Visalia); Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Orange, Anaheim); and of course San Diego (San Diego and Coronado).

Independent but relevant is the global conspiracy in which the Spreckels family played their historic and losing defense. Those tentacles of conspiracy (framing the smaller conspiracy at the Hotel del Coronado) reached around the globe, from Honolulu to London, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. They involved the last King and Queen of Hawai'i; a beautiful and tragic Crown Princess of Hawai'ian-Scottish origin; and indirectly the Empress of India herself, Queen Victoria, after whom Crown Princess Victoria Kai'ulani was named.

Part II. Ghost Story

The Hotel del Coronado is a U.S. National Landmark, floating like a vast white fairy castle with brick-red turrets over a remarkable vista under clear blue skies. She sits long white beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean's placid expanse--framed to her west by palm-encrusted cliffs, and toward south by Mexican beaches. The view could be straight out of the South Sea Islands described by Robert Louis Stevenson in his pirate adventures (a topic not as far removed from the conversation of this book as you'd think--more on that when we discuss another beautiful and tragic woman, young Crown Princess Victoria Kai'ulani).

The Hotel del Coronado is a great rambling sugar-white confection, whose design makes up in beauty what she omits in symmetry. She is one of the only surviving Victorian structures of her size and genre in the world. The grounds sprawl over about 31 acres of prime seascape property along the Pacific Ocean in the exclusive City of Coronado (pop. 26,600), which lies across the bay from the City of San Diego (metropolitan pop. 1.3 million). The original hotel contains over 330 rooms. The modern Ocean Towers and Cabanas add yet another 330 or more rooms, for a total of 679[2]. She holds over 1,000 guests when fully occupied, most of the year. At least one of those guests, it has long been rumored, is a ghost.

Arguably, the most enduring guest and legend in the Hotel Del's history is its famous ghost[3]. There are at least two ghost stories associated with the Hotel Del, actually. The dead woman stayed in Room 320 (now 3327) overlooking Orange Avenue. As you approach the hotel, heading east on Orange Avenue coming from the Bay side, look toward the hotel approaching on your right at the intersection of Orange Avenue and R. H. Dana Place (which turns into Adella Avenue on the left side of Orange Avenue). Look straight from the street corner over the fence, at the square white tower with the mitre-shaped dark red roof. From there, look down to the right at the curving corner of the building, which at that point is convex pointing toward you. You see two low roofs, atop thin white pillars, and the second floor windows behind those. On the next floor up, the third floor of four stories, is the triple set of windows through which Lottie A. Bernard must have looked over Victorian Coronado.

The list of reported ghostly incidents surrounding that room, and other areas of the hotel, is legion. Some are documented at length in the Heritage Department's book. I will relate a few in this book. If the ghost is real, what would be the purpose of her haunting and her capricious activities? I believe it would be to try and communicate the truth about who she really was (Lizzie Wyllie, not Kate Morgan) and what really happened. One hears that ghosts live in the moment. Usually it is the moment of their sudden and often violent death. Perhaps, in that moment, she is still trying to reach out to her grieving mother, Elizabeth, and her sister, May, in Detroit. Everyone else in her life had betrayed her, especially her lover, John G. Longfield--and Kate Morgan, whom she had trusted, but who probably stole Longfield from her, and used her and the baby growing within her to commit a crime against John Spreckels. Lizzie was, to put it bluntly, a beautiful airhead without much common sense, but she never harmed anyone, and she clearly showed regret and remorse at involving herself in Kate Morgan's conspiracies. She was the only person in the saga with any genuine, admirable emotions. That makes her victimhood and cruel, lonely death all the more tragic. She really was that Victorian ideal of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Dickens' readership--the good angel, brought low by the machinations of evil people in a cruel and senseless world.

Ghosts and ghost stories have been with us since the beginning of the human race. Many primitive peoples burned or crushed their dead out of fear that otherwise they might walk again at night. Ghost stories have been told around campfires since Paleolithic times, as some of the ancient cave paintings around the world suggest. Most cultures believe in the survival of the soul beyond death, and that not all souls wander off into some reward, but a few wayward ones get stuck for one reason or another and stay behind to frighten the living. Ancient Roman and Greek culture was rife with ghost stories. Among the Romans, it was more common for the ghost to be described as wearing a black toga while scaring the daylights out of people. In fact, the Romans were animists who believed in a profusion of spirits living in a parallel shamanistic world. They believed in countless numina (from numen, to nod or gesture) who inhabited every nook and cranny of the world. In the household, it was the ancestor spirits, or lares, and they had their altar in the entrance of the house. The father and sons of the household were the priests of the lares, and tended their shrine or lararium, which occupied a closet-like structure along with the death masks of the ancestors--and these ancestors haunted every house. The mother and daughters were priestesses of the kitchen part of the house, which was haunted by the penates, literally 'cupboard gods.' The custom was to throw a crust into the fire at each meal, and a few drops of wine on the floor, to appease them. These ancient customs are just a few that have survived into modern Italy in the form of stregheria, or witchcraft. Since Rome occupied most of Europe for centuries, much of the Roman culture survives in both northern and southern Europe as well as North Africa, the Middle East, and Britain. Every culture has its wealth of scary stories, and ours is no exception. One only needs to look at the popularity of books and films like William Blatty's 1973 story The Exorcist to realize the power of these ideas in modern society. What's remarkable about that movie is not only that people were badly affected while viewing it, but a whole urban lore sprang up about alleged deaths among those who worked on the film, fire on the set, and so forth. Some of this lore parallels the 'Curse of the Pharaos' legends that followed discovery of the XIII Dynasty Egyptian Pharao Tut-Ankh-Amun's tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter.

In contrast with all the black tales and nightmares since ancient and medieval times, including succubi that torment people in their sleep, and vampires who drink our blood, the ghost at the Hotel del Coronado is a very light touch. That doesn't mean she won't scare you out of your wits.

A friend of mine moved into management at the hotel, and a few weeks later I asked him if we was aware of any ghostly doings. He told me, with a bemused expression, that he had only a few days earlier received notice of a 'dead move' during the night. The expression 'dead move,' from which this book gets its name, is a hotel industry term for moving someone's belongings from one room to another. The case my friend referred to is one that often happens at the Del--in Room 3327 in particular (though 3519 is said to be heavily haunted also). There is little lore attached to Room 3519, except that a maid is said to have hung herself long ago in there. This maid is sometimes associated with the housekeeper mentioned in connection with Lottie A. Bernard, although the maid's name is not known and the story may be entirely urban lore. The hotel's official policy is not to rent out Room 3327 unless it is the only room available or if a guest specifically requests it. The story my friend related is fairly common. Often, a guest will light-heartedly and skeptically ask for Room 3327, and then become so frightened during the night that they call the front desk downstairs in a panic and demand to be moved immediately--a dead move, in the dead of night.