High Heels in the Kitchen: Herzstein Memorial Museum

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 5, 2026 · How we verify

A building that has been a church, a library, a roller rink and a bowling alley has collected a lot of footsteps. The Herzstein Memorial Museum in Clayton, New Mexico, occupies a 1919 structure that has worn most of those identities in turn, and among the things staff say they still hear in it are the sharp clicks of a woman’s high heels crossing the kitchen when the kitchen is empty.

Clayton’s Museum at a Glance

• Building: erected in 1919 as a combined Episcopal-Methodist church
• Later uses: community center, library, roller-skate rink, bowling alley
• Became a museum: 1972, under the Union County Historical Society
• Renamed: in the 1980s, after the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation funded major renovations
• Admission: free, donations welcome
• Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 9:30 AM to 3:00 PM; Thursday and Friday 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM; Saturday 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM; closed Sunday and Monday

One Building, Half a Dozen Lives

The 1919 structure went up to serve two congregations at once, an Episcopal-Methodist arrangement of the sort that small plains towns adopted when neither denomination could fill a building alone. That first purpose did not define it for long. Over the following decades the same walls housed a community center, a public library, a roller-skate rink and a bowling alley, which is an unusual career even by the standards of repurposed church buildings.

The sequence matters for anyone weighing up the ghost stories. A room that has hosted worship, lending shelves, skaters and league bowlers has been worn by thousands of people, and the accumulation is part of what any visitor is reacting to when the place feels occupied.

In 1972 the Union County Historical Society bought the property, intent on keeping it in local hands and giving the county’s past a permanent home. The modern name arrived in the 1980s, when the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation paid for a substantial round of renovations.

From the Santa Fe Trail to Black Jack Ketchum

The collection is squarely regional, and it is the reason most people stop here. Exhibits cover the Wild West era and the Santa Fe Trail, life in northeastern New Mexico through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and the pioneer and ranching history that built Union County.

The museum’s single most requested story is that of the outlaw known as Black Jack Ketchum, hanged in Clayton in 1901. His presence in the exhibits is a reminder that the town’s frontier reputation is not borrowed; the gallows business happened here, and the town has never entirely put it down. For travelers moving along U.S. Route 87, the Herzstein is the obvious place to understand what the surrounding country has been through.

The Woman in White and the Heels in the Kitchen

None of what follows is part of the documented history of the building. It is reported experience, gathered from staff, visitors and paranormal investigators over a span of years, and it should be read as such.

The best known figure is a woman in white. A paranormal investigation group claimed to have seen her in 2015. No name or identity has ever been attached to her, and no event in the building’s record has been offered to explain who she might be, which leaves her as pure local curiosity rather than evidence of anything.

The more persistent account, and the one with the most weight behind it simply because so many different employees describe the same thing, concerns the kitchen. Multiple staff members say they have heard the click of high-heeled shoes crossing that room while nobody else was in it. It is the museum’s signature claim, and the fact that it keeps surfacing from people who work there rather than from visitors passing through is what has given it staying power.

Voices, Cold Spots and the Back Bedroom Exhibit

Investigators working inside the museum have reported electronic voice phenomena recordings that sound like a child speaking, captured in a back bedroom exhibit. EVP is a notoriously soft category of evidence, dependent on what a listener expects to hear in recorded noise, and it should be treated accordingly.

Other reports are more diffuse. Visitors describe sudden drops in temperature and the sensation of being watched near the staircases. Objects are said to move without explanation, doors rattle, and faint knocking has been noted during investigations. Skeptics point out, reasonably, that a century-old building with a long history of heavy public use will produce drafts, settling timber and odd acoustics on its own. What keeps the Herzstein on haunted travel lists is not the strength of any single incident but the consistency of the accounts across years and across different people.

Visiting the Herzstein Memorial Museum

This is one of the easier haunted stops in the Southwest to actually get inside. The museum is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday on the hours listed above, closed Sunday and Monday, and admission is free, with donations welcome. There is no ticketed ghost tour attached to it: you are visiting a working county museum, and the paranormal reputation is something staff may or may not be willing to discuss depending on who is at the desk.

Come for the Santa Fe Trail and Dust Bowl material and the Ketchum exhibit, and treat anything else as a bonus. If you do go looking for the stories, ask politely and respect that the building’s first job is preserving Union County’s history.

As always, never trespass on property that is not yours without permission, and take care when ghost hunting anywhere.

Address: 22 S 2nd St

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