A story within an old hotel

Last week we returned from Colorado Springs after visiting our daughter and her husband where we stayed at the lovely Cheyenne Mountain resort. Traveling there we found the Eklund Hotel in Clayton, New Mexico.

I couldn't remember the name of the hotel or the town or whether it was in Texas or New Mexico, but I had stopped there once on the way to a writer's retreat for lunch and the lengends surrounding this historic place remained with me. It turned out a truck driver we spoke to at a rest stop asked another driver about it and we found it!

The Eklund hotel had just reopened after a major renovation. We were given a room on the second floor overlooking the main street, except Clayton looks like a ghost town.
And the Eklund hotel has its own ghost, a woman in a long flowing dress who hangs out on the 3rd floor in a room over ours. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see this spirit. The next morning when checking out I told the desk clerk I was disappointed. "Don't be," he said. "You ought to sit behind this counter all night when every groan and creak and rattle is magnified."

It was then I noticed the rosary in old gold frame and read the printed caption. The rosary had been found embedded inside a plastered wall during the recent renovation on the 3rd floor with the cross dated 1835. Fascinating. Was it meant to be a blessing or had the mysterious ghost left it as a claim she'd really been there?