ST. JAMES HOTEL
Hotel — Cimarron, New Mexico
Status: Closed · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/st-james-hotel-cimarron-new-mexico/

Historic hotel with gambling-related ghost folklore.

A hotel in Cimarron, New Mexico, St. James Hotel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic hotel with gambling-related ghost folklore. The name the accounts keep returning to is T.J. Wright. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. It is closed now; the account outlives the building.

The St. James Hotel is where Lincoln's chef served gunfighters — Henri Lambert left the White House after the assassination and opened a saloon on the Santa Fe Trail in 1872, where 26 men were killed and the ceiling still has the bullet holes. Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, and Billy the Kid all slept there; Clay Allison danced naked on the bar.
The hotel was the trail's violence — the saloon where the morning question in Cimarron was 'Who was killed at Lambert's last night?' The Lambert children counted 400 bullet holes in the ceiling before it was replaced; 22 are still in the dining room's pressed tin. Room 18 was the dying room — the only one with its own outside door, so the bodies didn't cross the lobby. Fourteen men died in it.
The hotel is still there — the 1880 adobe, the bullet holes in the ceiling, Room 18 that was padlocked for decades because the strange events got too numerous. The file keeps the saloon: the 1872 gambling hall, the 26 killings, and the ceiling that still counts the shots.
The St. James is the archive's Santa Fe Trail file — Lincoln's chef's saloon, the 26 dead, and the bullet holes that are still in the tin.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
The St. James is the archive's Santa Fe Trail file — the chef's saloon, the 26 documented killings, and the bullet holes that survived the ceiling's replacement.
A hotel that kept its bullet holes keeps its count — the file's suggestion being that the St. James's hold is the ceiling: the 22 holes still in the tin, Room 18's outside door, and the saloon that counted its dead.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: New Mexico Tourism Department recounts a legend connecting room 18 with an alleged spirit named T. J. Wright. St. James Hotel, a hotel in Cimarron, New Mexico, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. Sources including 'Haunted New Mexico' keep the claim in circulation. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.
  source: Haunted New Mexico (https://www.newmexico.org/haunted/)

SOURCES — 2 cited
· Haunted New Mexico — New Mexico Tourism Department
  https://www.newmexico.org/haunted/
· St. James Hotel — official site — The St. James Hotel
  https://www.exstjames.com

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/