The Haunted Hotel Eklund, Clayton: Irene, Room 307 and Black Jack Ketchum

Hotel Eklund stands on Main Street in Clayton, a ranching town in the far northeast corner of New Mexico, close to the Texas and Oklahoma lines. The sandstone building went up in 1892 with a saloon and gambling hall downstairs, opened as the Eklund Hotel in 1898 and gained its third story in 1905. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its saloon still has its original bar and back bar and a tin ceiling with bullet holes in it.

The ghost guests ask about is Irene, said to be a former maid, who is blamed for creaking floorboards and faces in the wallpaper of Room 307. The owners are relaxed about her and leave guests to decide for themselves. Add the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum, who is said to have loved the hotel’s chicken dinners and whose botched 1901 hanging took place a few blocks away, and you have one of the most characterful haunted hotels in New Mexico.

The ghosts of Hotel Eklund

Irene in Room 307

Irene is the hotel’s resident spirit. The story is that she worked here as a maid, and she has stayed attached to Room 307 on the top floor. Guests report floorboards creaking as if someone is pacing the room, and some say they have seen faces in the patterned wallpaper.

Owner Keith Barras told New Mexico Magazine that he considers her benevolent. No record has been published that confirms who Irene was, so treat her as a house legend.

The hand in the night

Barras tells another story about a couple who stayed at the hotel. The wife went to bed with a severe migraine, and in the morning she thanked her husband for stroking her head through the night. He told her he had been asleep the whole time and had done nothing. Barras’s take is that an angel may have helped.

A skeptical owner

For all the stories, the man who owns the building is not pushing them. Barras, an architect, often calls the Eklund “just an old building” and says old buildings have stories. That honesty is part of its charm: you get the history straight, and the ghosts are yours to find.

Black Jack Ketchum, down the street

Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum was a train robber who rode with outlaws out of the Hole-in-the-Wall country. New Mexico Magazine says he was a regular at the Eklund and a fan of its chicken dinners. He was hanged in Clayton on April 26, 1901, and the hanging went badly wrong: the rope was too long, and he was decapitated. He was buried in Clayton.

His ghost is not tied to the hotel. It is the Union County Courthouse, where his old jail cell is said to hold a chill, that gets the Ketchum stories. Clayton’s Herzstein Memorial Museum covers his life and death, and ghost hunters there reported a “sassy older woman” in 2015.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 307: Irene’s room on the top floor, with the creaking floorboards and faces in the wallpaper. Request it when you book.
• The saloon: Look up for the bullet holes in the tin ceiling. The current owners’ family tells of a relative who tended this bar and fought a gunfight here.
• The lobby: Victorian furnishings and old family photographs, including Carl Eklund and his family on the front porch in the 1920s.
• Union County Courthouse: Not part of the hotel, but a short walk away: the place linked to Black Jack Ketchum’s ghost.

History of Hotel Eklund

Clayton is a ranching town on the high plains of Union County, born with the railroad in the 1880s. The stone building that is now the Eklund went up on Main Street in 1892. Clio’s history, drawn from the National Register file, describes it as a hostel for railroad travelers with a saloon and gambling hall, complete with a front and back bar, billiard tables and a poker table; New Mexico Magazine calls it a mercantile, and at times the ground floor did serve as a clothing store.

Carl Eklund was a Swedish cattle rancher. The owners tell local TV that he reportedly won the saloon in a poker game in 1894. In 1898 he leased the building to Thomas S. Rose and the Eklund Hotel opened, and in 1905 it was raised from two stories to three; a metal “1905” still sits in the roof pediment. A photo from the 1920s shows Eklund with his family on the front porch during a celebration.

The hotel ruled Clayton’s trade through the 1920s, serving railroad passengers and the first motor tourists, but in 1923 it went through foreclosure and passed to R. K. Wootten, who put in hot and cold running water. The Eklund family bought it back in 1938 and passed it to son-in-law John D. Alford Jr. between 1944 and 1952. The building is Early Commercial in style, three stories of quarried stone, and was added to the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties in 1971 (No. 220) and the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. Its 24 rooms were remodeled in 2004.

The hotel had been closed for two years when architects Keith Barras and Jeannette Vigil Barras, with Jeannette’s sister Jo Beth Vigil Price, bought it in February 2011. Jeannette’s family has deep roots in Clayton: her great-uncle Cipriano worked behind the saloon bar, and the family tells of a gunfight in which he shot a man who had knocked out her great-grandfather. The owners restored the hotel with Wild West furnishings and family photographs, and today it has 25 rooms with private baths on the upper two floors, served by an elevator.

The hotel’s literary moment came in James Lee Burke’s novel Bitterroot, which describes it as a hotel “built of quarried stone” that was “truly the West”. The hotel quotes the line on its website. Across the street stands the Luna Theater, also on the National Register.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for Room 307 when you book, and confirm it before you arrive.
• Plan dinner for Thursday, Friday or Saturday, when the saloon and restaurant are open from 5 to 9 pm (kitchen closes at 8:30).
• Look for the bullet holes in the saloon ceiling and the Eklund family photo in the lobby.
• Walk to the Union County Courthouse and the Herzstein Memorial Museum for the Black Jack Ketchum story.
• Clayton Lake State Park, with its dinosaur trackways, is a short drive north and makes a good daytime stop.

More haunted hotels nearby

• St. James Hotel, Cimarron: the Wild West hotel with the locked Room 18, west toward the mountains
• Plaza Hotel, Las Vegas: an 1882 hotel with a haunted Room 310
• Laguna Vista Lodge, Eagle Nest: an 1898 saloon and lodge on the Enchanted Circle
• The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park: Colorado’s most famous haunted hotel, if you are heading north
• 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.

• New Mexico Magazine: Sleeping with spirits at Hotel Eklund
• Wikipedia: Eklund Hotel
• Clio: Eklund Hotel
• KFDA NewsChannel 10: Hotel Eklund going strong for over 130 years (2025)
• Wikipedia: Black Jack Ketchum
• HMdb: Eklund Hotel marker
• Hotel Eklund: official site

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