Santa Fe's Gothic chapel and its unsupported spiral 'Miraculous Staircase'
207 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87501
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Small admission fee for the self-guided museum visit; check the official site for current pricing and hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved approach; the chapel floor is level, though the historic staircase itself is roped off
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1878 · Sisters of Loretto · Gothic Revival Architecture · The Miraculous Staircase · Frank Rochas, Probable Builder
The Sisters of Loretto, a Catholic teaching order, built the chapel beside their Santa Fe academy. Construction began in 1873 and the Gothic Revival building, modeled in part on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, was finished in 1878. The chapel was later deconsecrated and is now operated privately as a museum and wedding venue.
The chapel's fame rests on its spiral staircase to the choir loft. The wooden helix makes two complete 360-degree turns and rises about twenty feet without a central newel post or other obvious support, joined largely with wooden pegs. For generations a legend held that an unknown carpenter built it and vanished without payment, and Catholic tradition credited the work to St. Joseph, the patron of carpenters, giving the staircase its 'Miraculous' name.
In the early 2000s, the amateur historian Mary Jean Cook proposed a documentary explanation. She identified the probable builder as Francois-Jean 'Frank' Rochas (1843-1894), a French immigrant rancher and skilled woodworker. A January 1895 notice in the Santa Fe New Mexican, reporting Rochas's death, described him as the man who built the staircase at the Loretto chapel and at St. Vincent sanitarium, and a Sisters' ledger recorded a payment to him for woodwork. Rochas had been killed in a shooting at Dog Canyon, near Alamogordo, in December 1894.
The chapel remains one of Santa Fe's most-visited landmarks and a fixture of its tourism, including the evening ghost-tour circuit.
Sources
For most visitors the mystery of Loretto Chapel is the staircase itself. The traditional story holds that the Sisters of Loretto, left without a way to reach the high choir loft, prayed to St. Joseph, and that a stranger appeared, built the freestanding spiral staircase with simple tools, and left before he could be paid or named. The engineering -- two full turns and roughly twenty feet of rise with no central column -- was taken as evidence of the miraculous, and the staircase is still presented in that devotional framing.
Ghost-tour operators in Santa Fe include the chapel on their evening routes, where the unresolved question of who built the staircase blends into the broader storytelling of the plaza district. The strongest documentary candidate, Frank Rochas, was a reclusive French woodworker who was killed in a shooting in 1894, and his death gives the legend a real and sober ending in place of the vanished-stranger tradition.
The chapel is not known for the kind of apparition reports attached to Santa Fe's haunted hotels; its place in the city's ghost lore comes from the staircase mystery and its setting rather than from witness accounts of phenomena inside. Visitors come chiefly for the staircase and the Gothic interior, with the supernatural framing supplied largely by tour narration.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Pay a small admission to walk the deconsecrated Gothic chapel and see the helix staircase that rises to the choir loft with two full turns and no central support. The chapel is privately operated as a museum and wedding venue and is a regular stop on Santa Fe's ghost tours.
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