Roses, Broken Glass and Julia Staab: La Posada Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Set on six acres of gardens and fountains a short walk from the end of the old Santa Fe Trail, the La Posada Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, began life as a private house rather than a place to stay. It was built in 1882 as the Staab House, a French Second Empire mansion raised by a wealthy merchant for his family, and the woman who ran that household is the reason people now book rooms hoping for company they cannot explain.

Quick Orientation

• Built: 1882, originally the Staab House
• Style: French Second Empire mansion, later expanded into a hotel
• Grounds: roughly six acres of gardens and fountains
• The name attached to the stories: Julia Staab, wife of the builder
• Status: a working hotel and cultural hub, open to guests

Abraham Staab Builds a Mansion in Santa Fe

Abraham Staab was a prosperous merchant, and the house he put up in 1882 was designed to say so. The French Second Empire style was fashionable and expensive, and the Staabs used the building the way ambitious families of the period used their money: they entertained. The grand ballroom hosted lavish parties, and the family became a fixture of Santa Fe society at a time when the town was still shaking off its frontier reputation.

The grounds mattered as much as the house. Six acres of gardens and fountains set the mansion apart from the adobe streets around it, and that footprint is still what a visitor notices first today, long after the private residence became a hotel.

The Losses Inside the Staab House

The public face of the house and the private life inside it were not the same thing. Many of the Staab children did not survive to adulthood. Julia Staab, Abraham’s wife, suffered badly after the loss of an infant son, physically as well as emotionally, and her decline is the piece of the family history that every retelling returns to. Nineteenth century language for what she went through was blunt and unhelpful, and the modern accounts tend to describe it as a long struggle with mental health following bereavement.

The building itself took damage over the years too. The mansion has come through fires as well as deaths, and that combination, tragedy inside the walls and destruction to the walls themselves, is the ground from which the ghost stories grew.

Julia Staab died in 1896. Abraham followed in 1913. The mansion eventually changed hands and changed purpose, absorbed into the hotel that stands there now, which has kept the Staab name in circulation rather than letting it fade with the family.

The Woman in Black by the Fireplace

Of all the figures said to move through the property, Julia Staab is the one people name. Descriptions are unusually consistent: a woman in black Victorian dress, hair pinned in a tight bun, most often reported near a fireplace. Guests and staff alike have said they felt a presence in a room before seeing anything at all, and some report nothing visual whatsoever, only the sudden smell of roses, a flower Julia is said to have loved in life.

What is striking about the Julia Staab accounts is their tone. She is almost always described as benign. Nobody claims to have been menaced by her. The stories treat her less as a haunting to be survived than as a former hostess still keeping an eye on her house, and staff tend to speak about her with something close to affection.

It is worth stating the obvious: there is no verified event behind any of this. The historical record supports a family, a house, a series of deaths and a woman who suffered. It does not confirm that she stayed. What people describe are reported experiences, and consistency between them is not the same thing as proof.

Swaying Chandeliers and Glasses Off the Shelf

The rest of the reported activity is more mundane in flavour and easier to argue about. Guests and staff describe chandeliers swaying with no breeze to move them. Glasses are said to launch from shelves and shatter on the floor. Gas fireplaces are reported flicking on and off with nobody near the controls.

Every one of those has a plain explanation available in an old, much altered building: settling floors, foot traffic on upper storeys, air movement through a property that has been extended and rebuilt more than once, and gas fittings of uncertain age. Whether any of it adds up to something else is the question guests come to answer for themselves, and the hotel has never needed to oversell it.

Staying at the La Posada Hotel

This is a functioning hotel, not a ruin or a tour stop, so access is straightforward: you book a room. The draw is layered, and most visitors come for more than one reason. The gardens and fountains are worth the walk on their own, the surviving mansion rooms are a genuine piece of Santa Fe’s Victorian gilded age, and the Julia Staab stories sit on top of that rather than replacing it.

Anyone hoping for a specific encounter should temper expectations. The reports cluster around quiet moments in the older parts of the building rather than around anything scheduled, and the most commonly reported experience of all is simply the smell of roses where no roses are.

One practical note for anyone searching online: a separate and unrelated hotel called La Posada stands in Winslow, Arizona, and the two are frequently confused. The Staab House and its ghost stories belong to the Santa Fe property.

See La Posada Hotel for Yourself

Address: 330 E Palace Ave

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