The Taos villa that drew D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe, where staff say a door still latches itself
240 Morada Ln, Taos, NM 87571
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
An operating inn and conference center; room rates vary by season. Check the inn's website for current availability and pricing.
Access
Limited Access
Historic adobe compound with steps, thresholds, and unpaved garden paths
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1922 · National Historic Landmark (1991) · Taos Arts Colony Gathering Place · Home of Mabel Dodge Luhan and Tony Lujan · Visited by D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ansel Adams
Mabel Dodge Luhan was a wealthy patron of the arts who moved to Taos in the late 1910s. After divorcing the painter Maurice Sterne, she married Tony Lujan, a man from Taos Pueblo, and together they acquired roughly twelve acres of meadowland beside the Pueblo and built a Pueblo Revival adobe house through the 1920s.
Luhan used the house to gather creative figures from across the country, and the guest list became part of the cultural history of the Southwest. D.H. Lawrence visited in 1922 and famously painted the windows of one of the bathrooms. Georgia O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, Aldous Huxley, Ansel Adams, and the dancer Martha Graham were among the writers, painters, and performers who passed through. The household helped establish Taos's reputation as an arts colony.
Mabel Dodge Luhan died in 1962. In 1991 the property was designated a National Historic Landmark in recognition of its role in twentieth-century American arts and letters.
The house is now run as an inn and conference center. The original adobe holds nine guest rooms, with additional accommodations in the Juniper House and several cottages spread across the grounds. The operators keep the place intentionally low-tech, with communal meals and no televisions, presenting it as a retreat that preserves the atmosphere of its arts-colony years.
Sources
The haunting attached to the Mabel Dodge Luhan House is modest and domestic, centered on the rooms Mabel herself occupied. The most repeated account from staff describes a door in Mabel's former bedroom that latches on its own, found closed after being left open. Some who work in the house frame it as Mabel keeping her own room as she liked it.
Taos paranormal investigators have included the house in their work, and local lore extends the presence to Tony Lujan as well, holding that both Mabel and Tony remain attached to the compound they spent years building beside Taos Pueblo. The accounts are quiet ones — a sensed presence, the self-latching door — rather than dramatic apparitions.
Because these reports come largely from staff anecdote and a single local investigation rather than multiple independent sources, the haunting is best treated as unverified Taos folklore. The house's documented value rests on its arts-and-literary history; the ghost story is a smaller layer that has accumulated around a place so closely identified with the woman who built it.
Notable Entities
The main house holds nine rooms within the original adobe Mabel Dodge Luhan and Tony Lujan built in the 1920s, with additional rooms in the Juniper House and cottages on the 12-acre grounds. The inn keeps the building deliberately analog — no televisions, communal dining — and its history as an arts-colony hub is woven through the stay.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Taos, NM
The Kit Carson Home is a four-room adobe in Taos built around 1825. Frontiersman Christopher 'Kit' Carson bought it in 1843 around the time he married Josefa Jaramillo, and the couple lived there until 1868. Now operated as a museum, the Spanish Colonial structure was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963.
St. Louis, MO
The Lemp Mansion was built in 1868 at 3322 DeMenil Place in St. Louis, serving as the residence and later brewery office headquarters of the Lemp brewing dynasty. Between 1904 and 1949, four members of the family died by suicide within the property, ending one of America's most prominent pre-Prohibition brewing empires.
Monticello, IL
Allerton Mansion is a 40-room Georgian Revival country house completed in 1900 on the central Illinois prairie. Designed by Philadelphia architect John Borie for Robert Allerton, heir to a Chicago banking and stockyard fortune, the 5,500-acre estate was deeded to the University of Illinois in 1946 and now operates as a public park and retreat center.