Old St. Vincent’s Hospital (Drury Inn)

The corner of Palace Avenue and Paseo de Peralta in downtown Santa Fe is one of the most historically saturated pieces of ground in the American Southwest. Before European contact, it sat within the territory of ancestral Pueblo peoples. After Spanish colonization established Santa Fe as a capital in 1610, it cycled through two centuries of colonial administration, conflict, and change. By the time Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy arrived in the mid-1800s to transform the church's presence in New Mexico, this corner was already ancient by American standards. The building that now operates as the Drury Plaza Hotel carries that entire weight — plus decades of hospital death, a nursing home, state offices, film sets, and years of abandonment — inside a structure that still looks, to many guests, like it remembers everything.

The hospital's origin traces directly to Lamy. After his arrival, he invited the Sisters of Charity to New Mexico to help care for the sick. In 1865, Lamy sold them a building originally constructed as a rectory adjacent to what would become St. Francis Cathedral, and the Sisters opened Santa Fe's first hospital inside it. That original structure and the 1911 Craftsman-style Marian Hall built next door served the community for nearly a century before the Sisters outgrew them entirely. In 1953, renowned architect John Gaw Meem — known for the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico and the Cristo Rey Church in Santa Fe — was commissioned to design a proper city hospital on the site.

The resulting building was notably austere for Meem: yellow brick, sharp corners, large windows, only a faint nod to Territorial style. It opened as the new St. Vincent Hospital and served Santa Fe for roughly two decades before the hospital relocated to St. Michael's Drive in 1977. The state of New Mexico then took over the buildings for use as offices for the Department of Cultural Affairs and, eventually, a nursing home. That nursing home, which locals called La Residencia, occupied the old hospital until the early 1980s. The building then sat largely empty for years — used occasionally as a film location, including Jeff Bridges' 2009 film Crazy Heart — before Drury Hotels purchased it in 2007 and began a years-long adaptive reuse project. Archaeologists working the site in 2008 uncovered what appeared to be an underground vault of unknown origin before the economic collapse shut the project down. The Drury Plaza Hotel finally opened in 2014.

The paranormal reputation of the building predates the hotel by decades and is concentrated in two areas: the basement and the third floor. During the La Residencia years, the basement became so unsettling to staff that sending new employees down there alone at night became a formal initiation ritual — a rite of passage that the longtime employees themselves refused to repeat solo under any circumstances. Multiple accounts describe the basement walls appearing to ooze blood, particularly near a storage room that had once been used to incinerate amputated limbs and surgical remains. A nurse coordinator investigating a disturbance in that room reported finding what looked like fresh blood on a wall surface. A former candy striper who worked at the original St. Vincent Hospital in the 1970s recalled that the area near the basement incinerator produced intense cold, a sense of presence, and disembodied voices — and that hospital staff uniformly avoided it after dark. During the Drury renovation, a security guard working nights described refusing to enter an adjacent structure called Marian Hall, reporting consistent unease throughout the basement level.

The state museum's use of the building added another layer: Native American artifacts, and reportedly skeletal remains in cardboard boxes, were stored in the basement hallways during the state offices era. That detail appears in documented interviews with former employees and has fed persistent theories about the nature of the activity.

Room 311 — or the fourth floor, depending on the account — carries its own specific legend. A young boy brought into the hospital on Christmas Eve after a severe car crash is said to have died crying for his deceased father throughout the night. Long after the hospital years, nurses at La Residencia reported hearing a baby crying in that room with no source, eventually keeping it vacant unless the census demanded otherwise. The sound has been reported by visitors as recently as the hotel era. A nurse who worked the top floor during the hospital years described a short Hispanic man in old-fashioned clothing appearing alongside a woman in a black mantilla — both seeming confused and in need of something they couldn't name. A worker who accidentally rode the elevator to the basement described the doors refusing to close until he stepped out, then ascending without him while a shadowy presence moved nearby.

The Drury Plaza Hotel operates today as a functioning boutique hotel in one of Santa Fe's most storied locations. The basement is there. Room 311 is numbered. The history goes back further than the building — and, by most accounts, it hasn't stopped moving.