A preserved 1880s mining village south of Santa Fe whose dirt-street storefronts, old saloon, and operating general store carry a long local reputation for cold spots and quiet apparitions.
First Street (NM-14 / Turquoise Trail), Cerrillos, NM 87010
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Walking the village is free. The general store and trading posts are small businesses; purchases optional.
Access
Limited Access
Unpaved dirt streets, uneven boardwalks, and historic adobe storefronts in a small rural village
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1879 · Thousand-Year Turquoise and Lead Mining Tradition · 1879 Hard-Rock Mining Boom · Preserved Old West Village · Western Film Location (Elfego Baca, Young Guns)
Cerrillos, Spanish for 'little hills,' sits in the Cerrillos Hills of Santa Fe County, roughly 27 miles south of Santa Fe along the Turquoise Trail. The surrounding district holds one of North America's oldest documented mining traditions: turquoise and lead deposits at sites such as Mount Chalchihuitl were worked for centuries by Ancestral Puebloan peoples and later by Spanish colonists, and turquoise from the area held deep cultural and religious significance for Indigenous communities of the region.
Gold mining in the area remained modest until 1879, when hard-rock miners arriving from Colorado struck a major lode. Cerrillos rapidly became the center of the regional mining industry, which spanned gold, silver, copper, turquoise, lead, and coal and connected the nearby camps of Madrid and Golden. The arrival of the railroad reinforced the town's role as a supply and shipping point.
By the early 1900s the village's commercial buildings included saloons that were later converted to a clothing-and-dry-goods store and a general store. Many of these adobe and wood-front buildings survive today with their hitching posts, boardwalks, and dirt streets largely intact, giving Cerrillos the appearance of a frontier town frozen in time.
The village's well-preserved Old West character has made it a recurring film location, including Walt Disney's productions on Elfego Baca and the Western films Young Guns I and II. Today Cerrillos has only a few hundred residents and operates as a near-ghost town with working trading posts, a small general store, galleries, and a historic church, drawing visitors traveling the Turquoise Trail between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Sources
According to regional ghost-town accounts and paranormal directories, the village of Cerrillos has a reputation for quiet, atmospheric hauntings rather than dramatic ones. The most frequently repeated account, recorded in haunted-place directories, concerns the operating general store: visitors and staff describe a distinct cold spot toward the front of the store, on the right as you enter, even though windows directly ahead would be expected to keep the area warm. No one has offered a settled explanation for it.
Beyond the store, accounts describe a sudden breeze of cold air felt near a counter, the uneasy sense of being watched, and the suggestion of voices in otherwise empty rooms. Some visitors report glimpsing ethereal figures along the dirt streets after dark, consistent with a town that spent its boom years filled with miners, drifters, and railroad workers.
Because Cerrillos sits within a landscape of deep Indigenous and Spanish mining heritage, local interpreters are careful to frame these accounts as folklore tied to the village's frontier and mining past rather than to any single tragedy. The reports are treated here as part of the town's living oral tradition, corroborated across multiple ghost-town and paranormal sources but not tied to documented events.
Stroll the dirt streets of Cerrillos past 1880s adobe storefronts, the old bar, the church, and the railroad tracks. Stop in at the operating general store and trading posts, where locals have long described a cold spot near the front of the store with no obvious source.
Visit the streetscape used in Walt Disney's Elfego Baca films and Young Guns I and II. The village has changed little since its mining heyday, making it a self-guided window into a frontier mining town.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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