HotelChatter

Check out the hottie Kate on her Wikipedia page.
I covet her dress.

Forget the dress, give me Kate's butt!

Shouldn't this be on your sister site 'Haunted'?

You are wrong about it not being possible for Kate Morgan to have been in San Diego. She was working as a maid for the Grant family in Los Angeles and asked permission to take off the day before Thanksgiving. She promised to be back in time to cook the holiday meal the next day. She never returned.

No one knows where she was that evening, but she could have taken the next morning's train from L.A. to San Diego, and arrived at the Del in the early afternoon.

The Grants gave the first indication for the identity of the suicide. The police opened the trunk their maid left behind, and found Kate Farmer's marriage certificate to Tom Morgan. There was a photo of her in the trunk, and the San Diego Chief of Police positively identified her as the suicide.

An artist did a sketch of the body's face that was published in the newspapers to try and identify her, and it is strikingly similar to the photograph on Wikipedia (which I got from Tom Morgan's granddaughter).

People discount these facts because Joseph Jones, who checked in to the Del right after she did, claimed to have seen her on the train from Omaha. If the Grants and the S.D. Chief are to be believed (and they have little motive to fabricate a story) then Jones must be either lying or confused.

I suspect, but have no proof, he had more involvement with Kate than he let on. That's why he didn't come forward at the inquest, but got his story into the newspaper via the bell boy.

By the way, Tom Morgan was NOT a gambler did NOT desert Kate - he was a rural mail carrier in Blanchard, Nebraska at the time of her death. I have the ORIGINAL telegram advising him of her death and asking what he wanted to do with the body. She had deserted him and ran away with another man, so he responded by saying he wasn't claiming the body. I believe this telegram was first sent to his uncle, Thomas Orr Morgan, and got re-directed to Tom by T.O.

The desertion of Kate was recorded on the back of the aforementioned photograph by Tom's daughter.

I have discovered all this information, and much more, facts through my genealogy research. Tom Morgan was my grandmother's half-brother.

Hi Everyone,

After several discussions with the poster above, even with his exhaustive research he cannot determine a reason why Kate Morgan would come to the Hotel Del Coronado.  It is certainly not a day trip.  He cannot track her whereabouts from the time she left her employer. The fact is that Kate Morgan left her employer to get some papers signed saying she would be back the next day.  She never returned.  Kate Morgan was under an assumed name in Los Angeles.  Her employers knew her as Katie Logan.  

We did not do any further research on Kate Morgan since it was made clear to us that she had nothing to do with the dead woman at the Hotel Del Coronado, who claims she is Lottie Bernard from Detroit.  Lottie's identity was only questioned when they could not locate a "next of kin".  As is so beautifully stated in the prior post, Kate Morgan had plenty of relatives as well as money.

The Chief of Police had a very good reason to close the case.  Kate Morgan's grandfather had agreed to pay for the burial even though he really didn't think it was her. The publicity was bad for business in Coronado and for the hotel, and the woman at the undertaker's was not getting any fresher.  It was bad publicity for the Morgan family as well who refused to step forward to claim the body.  It seems to me that all parties concerned just wanted to get this out of the press and move on. No family members ever came to identify the body.    

The mystery continues, but thus far the statements made by the spirit of Lottie Bernard have not been proven to be "wrong" or false in any way.  Her story makes a lot more sense than the legend.  Lottie also claims no involvement with gambling.  According to newspaper accounts it was Kate Morgan who spread the rumor that her husband was a gambler.  She told this to her employers "The Grants" and a relative of hers in the Farmer family.

The research process has just begun.  I can honestly say that this case is the most compelling I have ever worked on.

Thx,
Bonnie Vent
San Diego Paranormal Research Project
www.sdparanormal.com    

Hi Again,

I thought you might like a link to the video: Conversations with the Dead.  Some of the information we are discussing here are in the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbfLHjTeVQ

Thx,
Bonnie Vent

I am the investigator who appears on the video with Bonnie Vent. For 40 years I have been engaged in the research of phenomena and mediumship. I have been privileged to work with some quite gifted individuals.

This current case is fascinating. The opportunity to converse interactively and extensively with an individual deceased for over a century is unusual. We placed this video on the Internet to make this type of rarely seen communication visible to everyone.

Many viewing this are likely asking "What is this?" or "Is this fake?" Those questions are quite rational.

This is completely real - you are seeing a small part of the process. We spent over a year in conversations with Lottie Bernard, mostly at the Hotel Del Coronado.

You might have noticed that she has a slight lisp. This was detected by a neither myself nor Bonnie Vent; a third person noticed it. Bonnie Vent does not lisp at all.

Most important here though is the use of mediumship to enhance and where necessary even rewrite history. This has happened before.

During a study in early 1980s near Washington, D.C., information was developed regarding as to why a specific apparition had been witnessed in a specific place. This information was passed to a highly credible historian who worked for the U.S. National Park Service. That historian developed the history of Ford's Theater where President Lincoln was assassinated, and was considered at the time the world's leading authority on the Lincoln and Grant Presidencies and the Lincoln Assassination.

At first, he did not believe the new information to be correct. But he did agree to check into it. In two days he called: working with another historian they had together discovered a detail that had completely eluded everyone up to that point and therefore we had just changed American History. It gets no better than that.

During an early validation of Bonnie Vent's mediumship, we conversed with another San Diegan named Thomas Whaley. During this conversation I smelled cigar smoke in the kitchenette of Bonnie's home where we were working. There was no physical source for the cigar smoke. Most interesting was the nature of the smoke. It was the smell (really 'stench' is a more accurate word) of a Havana Cubano cigar, a cigar Thomas Whaley smoked, unavailable today.

It is unclear how the precise smell could have been produced given these conditions. In fact, this same cigar smoke smell is a common phenomenon experienced in his home in Old Town San Diego.

While we believe we have successfully demonstrated this form of mediumship and more importantly begun to validate it, more work needs to be done.

We believe it is significant that nothing has yet turned up that disproves anything Lottie Bernard has told us. We are currently seeking funding to continue this important work and bring more of it in yet more detail to the public and to the scientific parapsychology community for review and comment.

Thank you for your interest!

More details are now available on this case.

The person who checked into the hotel in November 1892 was signed in by the front desk clerk according to a book written by the Hotel Del Coronado historian.  This is where the misidentification came into play.  He misspelled her last name by one letter.  Her real last name is Barnard not Bernard.  We were able to locate her in the city directory of Detroit on Ancestry.com. To view the city directory record and the Hotel Del Coronado register please go here:  http://www.sdparanormal.com/page/page/507340.htm

We are still looking into the murder question.  Stay tuned.

Bonnie Vent
www.bonnievent.com