Shaffer Hotel: Inside New Mexico’s Most Haunted Hotel

The Shaffer Hotel: New mexico’s small town with a big ghost problem

Ninety minutes south of Albuquerque, in a town most people drive through without noticing, sits a concrete hotel covered in hand-carved animals and folk art. Guests keep leaving with stories they didn’t ask for. Some check out early. Let’s get into why.

A blacksmith who refused to lose to fire — twice

The Shaffer Hotel sits on West Main Street in Mountainair, New Mexico, a town that calls itself the “Pinto Bean Capital of the World.” Not exactly a tourism slogan built to draw crowds. But the hotel itself? That’s a different story entirely.

Clem “Pop” Shaffer showed up in Mountainair in 1908 with his first wife, Pearl, planning to run a blacksmith shop. Pearl died of pneumonia before their first year in town was even over. Shaffer remarried a local woman, Lena Imboden, in 1913, and the two built a life around blacksmithing, hauling water, and general hustle. Their shop burned down in 1922 — a loss that would’ve ended most people’s plans.

Not Shaffer’s. He rebuilt in 1923, and this time he wasn’t messing around with wood. He built the new hotel out of cast concrete reinforced with scrap iron from his destroyed shop, then covered nearly every surface — walls, ceilings, fences — in his own hand-carved and painted folk art, much of it inspired by Native American design. The building is now a Registered Cultural Property in New Mexico and sits on the National Register of Historic Places.

Here’s the detail nobody expects: some of that carved facade includes swastika motifs. Before you assume the worst, know this predates the symbol’s association with the Nazi party — Shaffer used it decades before World War II, back when it was still a common folk symbol in Southwestern art. It still throws first-time visitors, and it’s worth explaining before you show up.

So… who’s actually haunting the place?

Depends who you ask. And that’s part of what makes this hotel interesting — the stories don’t all line up, which is exactly how real folklore usually works.

The most consistent reports point to Pop and Lena Shaffer themselves, still hanging around the building they poured their lives into. But they’re far from the only names that come up.

• A cowboy who allegedly hung himself in what’s now the shared bathroom between rooms 17 and 18 — though ghost researcher Cody Polston points out that specific bathroom didn’t exist until the 2005 remodel, which makes the exact location a little shaky.
• A “big fat lady,” described as all in white with an unusual yellow and red face, spotted moving through the halls.
• A woman who cooks in the restaurant kitchen, even when nobody’s supposed to be back there.
• A ghostly little girl, rumored by some to be connected to a violent crime, whose laughter guests report hearing with no child anywhere in sight.

Room 16 gets singled out constantly as the hotel’s “most haunted” room. One well-documented account describes a father who specifically requested it for a Halloween stay with his daughters. In the middle of the night, he woke up, felt a sudden chill, and saw the outline of a body on the bed. He tried to get to his daughters in the adjoining room — the door wouldn’t budge. They were stuck on their side too. By morning, the family was packing up and leaving their money behind. They just wanted out.

What guests and investigators have actually reported

Strip away the campfire-story stuff, and you’re left with a pretty consistent pattern of reports across the years:

1. Personal items moving in guest rooms overnight, with no explanation.
2. Lights switching on and off on their own.
3. Water taps turning on by themselves.
4. Dark, shadowy figures in the second-floor hallway and the first-floor conference room.
5. The unmistakable feeling of being watched, even alone in a room.
6. Footsteps directly behind guests in empty hallways.
7. A woman’s voice, described as confrontational, coming from an empty lobby.

Joel Marks, who bought and renovated the hotel in 2004 (dropping it from 30 rooms to 19, most with private bathrooms), told his own story that’s become something of a hotel legend. He described a dark presence in the hallway outside the Wedding Suite that hit him and his girlfriend with enough force to press their cheeks back against their faces — like standing in a wind tunnel. He also claimed the presence didn’t stay behind when he left. It followed him home to Albuquerque.

Marks reopened the hotel in December 2005, and that’s roughly when the first published ghost reports started showing up. He specifically flagged the east upstairs hallway as the hotel’s most active spot — his theory being that it sits directly above the hand-painted restaurant ceiling that Shaffer spent so much time on. Make of that what you will, but it’s a detail that keeps surfacing.

What a paranormal team found during a private investigation

One New Mexico-based investigation group got the rare chance to close the entire hotel for an overnight session, no guests, no interruptions. A few things stood out from their notes:

• The smell of chocolate, out of nowhere, in a first-floor handicapped room that had been sitting empty all winter with no linens on the beds.
• EVP recordings — audio picked up on digital recorders that shouldn’t have caught anything — including what investigators described as a spirit taking its “last breath” in the Abo Suite, the same room where a former owner reportedly died before Marks bought the property.
• A meter physically falling off an end table, captured on a DVR camera, in a room that had been empty for over an hour.
• Unusually high EMF readings in two guest rooms above the kitchen storage area, with no power source nearby that would explain it.
• A dark, bat-shaped form on the ceiling, caught on camera in the connecting hallway.

None of this is peer-reviewed science, obviously. EMF meters and EVPs are tools paranormal researchers use, but they’re not accepted by mainstream science as proof of anything supernatural. Still, it’s worth noting how specific and repeatable some of these reports are across totally different visitors, years apart, with no obvious way they’d have compared notes.

Should you actually stay there?

If you’re planning a New Mexico road trip and want something more memorable than a chain motel off the interstate, the Shaffer Hotel delivers on atmosphere alone — even if you never see a single shadow move. The folk art covering the building is genuinely one-of-a-kind, and the history of a small-town blacksmith building something this ambitious, twice, after losing it all once, is a story worth knowing regardless of what else might be wandering the halls.

Just maybe skip requesting Room 16 unless you’re specifically hunting for the experience.