April 22-24, 2018
The La Fonda Inn, Sante Fe is perhaps the oldest running hotel in the United States, having been erected during the time of the Spanish Rule here in 1607. They have a supposed "paranormal active" room where a man committed suicide in more recent years, but it was unavailable to us during the stay. We stayed in a room down the hall from it, and we must say that it didn't matter. Our room was extremely active to the point that we could ask whatever it was that was setting the EMF detectors and REM pod off to move from one device to another, and it would comply. Whatever it was made every effort to make contact with us, and it did appear that there was more than one personality that filtered throughout the room.
Surveillance captured an extreme field that caused a wavy pattern on the monitors: some high EMF emanation that we could not define. Ghost tour guide (author and long-time local) Alan Pacheco told us that during the 1960s, the shop below our room was a "head shop" for kids during the Anti-Vietnam war protests and that there had been several drug overdose deaths during its years in operation. During our stay, the shop downstairs was closed and had no discernable source of electricity emanating EMF that could have filtered up into our room above.
April 25, 2015
Just up the road from the La Fonda Inn is the more modern Drury Hotel which was rebuilt using the framework of the old St. Vincent's hospital. A former nursing home, Marian Hall, sits adjoining it. Marion Hall sits vacant with a lone guard to check in on it. The old St. Vincents hospital had a famously haunted room, room 311, which supposedly has the ghost of a young boy staying there for eternity. The Drury Hotel chain was well aware of the haunted rumors and told the public (kind of tongue in cheek) that ghosts remaining on the property would be evicted before they took over. We booked room 311 and looked forward to proving or disproving the claims. Upon check-in, a local historian working at the front desk told us that when Drury bought and refurbished the hospital, they moved the flooring numbers and elevator keys so that, in effect, room 311 was now room 411 above our rented room. When we asked to change it, a registry check showed it was already occupied. We then stayed in the room below it and, several times in the early morning, heard loud noises and thumps coming from above us, and we remarked that someone else got to do our ghost hunt. The next day we went up to photograph the hallway and found no room 311. The Drury had boarded room 311 and two other alleged haunted rooms and removed the doors. Whether they are now being used for storage (which could account for the noises we heard upstairs), we do not know. We get a lot of views from viewers who want to see how a hotel could board up a room to try to stop a ghost. Funnier than that, when we asked the front desk attendants why the rooms had been boarded up, the employees did not know about it as they were not permitted to walk the hotel hallways. They had always just assumed that there were long-term renters in those rooms.
At the end of the video is an interview with a paranormal investigator and author, Alan Pacheco, a native of the city and an expert on Santa Fe haunted lore.