The Haunted La Posada de Santa Fe: Julia Staab and Room 256

La Posada de Santa Fe sits on six acres a few blocks east of the Santa Fe Plaza. Most of the resort is low adobe casitas and gardens, but at its heart stands something you do not expect in this city: a three-story brick mansion in the French Second Empire style, built in 1882 by merchant Abraham Staab for his wife Julia and their children. Today the resort is part of Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio and a member of Historic Hotels of America, and the Staab House holds its bar and some of its most requested rooms.

It is also home to one of the best-known ghost stories in the Southwest. Julia Staab died in 1896, and since 1979 staff and guests have reported a woman in a black Victorian dress on the stairs and in the halls of her old home. Her former bedroom, Room 256, also known as Suite 100, is the room ghost-minded guests ask for. Here is the story, the history behind it and how to plan a stay at one of the most famous haunted hotels in New Mexico.

The ghost of Julia Staab

The woman in the black dress

According to the hotel’s own account through Historic Hotels of America, the first reported sighting came in 1979. A janitor mopping a floor in the Staab House looked up to see a woman in a long black Victorian gown with her hair pulled into a severe bun. Other staff later described the same woman, who vanished as quickly as she appeared, and one security guard who met her in a hallway is said to have simply run.

Guests and staff have reported her on the main staircase and in the bar, and she has been heard as well as seen. Most describe her as a presence rather than a threat.

Fireplaces, chandeliers and a shelf of glasses

The reports that pile up around Julia are mostly small and domestic. Gas fireplaces switch themselves on and off. Chandeliers sway with no draft. Items go missing from certain rooms. Other accounts mention slamming doors, covers pulled off beds, toilets flushing by themselves and even hair being tugged.

The best-known story comes from a busy night in the bar, when a bartender watched every glass on one shelf fly off and smash on the floor at once.

The scent of roses

Julia loved her garden and decorated the house with roses. Some visitors say they catch the smell of roses inside the Staab House when there are no flowers in sight, and take it as a sign she is near.

Room 256, Suite 100

Many of the guests who report experiences stayed in Room 256, also called Suite 100, which the hotel says was Julia’s room. One older story claims she died in the bathtub of her suite, but her death notice gave no cause, so treat that as rumor.

The hotel notes that the activity seems to stay inside the original mansion. Guests in the newer casitas have not reported anything similar.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 256 (Suite 100): Julia Staab’s former room in the Staab House and the room with the most reports. Ask for it by name.
• The Staab House staircase: Where Julia is most often said to appear, descending in her black gown.
• The Staab House bar: The old mansion’s ground floor bar, scene of the shattered glasses. Anyone can visit for a drink.
• Other Staab House rooms: If 256 is taken, ask for any room in the original mansion rather than a casita; that is where reports cluster.

History of La Posada de Santa Fe, a Tribute Portfolio Resort & Spa

Abraham Staab came to New Mexico from Germany as a young man and became one of Santa Fe’s richest merchants. He went back to Germany to find a bride and returned with Julia Schuster, who was about 16 when they met. In 1882 he finished their house at 330 East Palace Avenue, a three-story brick mansion in the French Second Empire style and the first brick mansion in Santa Fe.

Julia became a celebrated hostess of Gilded Age dinner parties, and the couple raised seven children to adulthood. Her pregnancies were hard: she suffered miscarriages and at least one stillbirth, and her health, physical and mental, declined. Abraham sent her to European spas in search of a cure. Legend says she withdrew to her room after the death of her youngest child and rarely came out. Some later accounts describe the marriage as unhappy. She died in 1896 at 52; the local notice gave no cause, which has fed rumors ever since. Abraham died in 1913.

In 1930 Chicago businessman Robert H. Nason bought the house and its grounds. He built a Santa Fe-style apartment complex around it that opened as La Posada in 1935, divided the mansion into eight apartments, and later added an inn and the Cactus Tea Room restaurant. The property grew through the decades, with a $2 million renovation in the late 1980s and a major expansion that reopened in August 1999 with about 159 rooms, a spa and new pueblo-style buildings.

The hotel changed hands again in 2013 and is now La Posada de Santa Fe, a Tribute Portfolio Resort and Spa. Its ghost has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries, Weird Travels and Lifetime’s The Haunting Of, and the hotel’s restaurant has carried Julia’s name. Julia’s descendant Hannah Nordhaus later used letters, diaries and newspapers for her book American Ghost, which describes a lonely woman whose husband was often away and who spent much of her last years in her room after losing a child. Nordhaus neither embraces nor dismisses the ghost.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for Room 256 (Suite 100) when you book, and be flexible on dates; it is a single room in a large resort.
• If you cannot get 256, ask for any room in the Staab House rather than a casita.
• Have a drink in the Staab House bar in the evening and look at the staircase where Julia is said to walk.
• Look for the portrait often said to show Julia; it was painted in 1939, so it may actually show a descendant.
• La Fonda on the Plaza and the Drury Plaza Hotel are both a short walk away if you want to make a haunted night of it.

More haunted hotels nearby

• La Fonda on the Plaza, Santa Fe: the historic inn at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, a few blocks west
• Drury Plaza Hotel, Santa Fe: the old St. Vincent Hospital, almost next door
• Plaza Hotel, Las Vegas: an 1882 hotel about an hour east with a haunted Room 310
• Hotel Andaluz, Albuquerque: Conrad Hilton’s 1939 hotel, an hour south
• Haunted hotels in New Mexico

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• Historic Hotels of America: La Posada ghost stories
• Wikipedia: La Posada de Santa Fe
• Santa Fe New Mexican: Chasing Julia
• Reform Judaism: Review of American Ghost by Hannah Nordhaus
• My Jewish Learning: The Ghost
• New Mexico Magazine: Three haunted hotels for ghostly lodgings

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