Cosmopolitan Hotel

The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Old Town San Diego gives every room a journal for guests to write in. Most of them are still the originals from the day the place opened. Room 11 is on its newest book — the staff say they have to replace it every couple of months, because it fills up faster than any other room in the building.

Room 11 is the Ysidora Bandini Room, and Ysidora is the reason. Guests who stay there report the lights turning on and off, the curtains pulling open, the mirrors sliding, the bathrobe found on the floor. They write it down, and the book fills, and a new one goes in. The other rooms still hold their opening-day journals. Hers is the only one that won't keep a single book.

She has a real claim to the place. The building started as Casa de Bandini, a single-story adobe family home raised in the late 1820s by Juan Bandini, a wealthy Californio rancher — an estimated 10,000 bricks, some weighing 60 pounds. Ysidora was one of his daughters. She grew up inside these walls before they were ever a hotel.

There's a romantic version of why she stayed. The legend says she fell from a balcony, in some tellings into the arms of the army officer she'd marry. It doesn't hold up. The adobe had no second story while Ysidora was alive — Albert Seeley built that wood-framed upper floor in 1869, after he bought the house and turned it into a stagecoach hotel. And Ysidora didn't die here at all. She married, moved to Rancho Guajome near Vista, raised ten children, and died there in 1897.

So the woman in Room 11 never lived in the building as it stands now, and didn't die in it either. She knew it only as her father's house. Paranormal investigators who tried to reach her say she answered only when they asked their questions in Spanish, the language of the home that used to be here.