HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
A 1923 Pueblo Deco hotel folk artist Clem 'Pop' Shaffer built from cast concrete and scrap iron in Mountainair, NM.
103 W Main St, Mountainair, NM 87036
Research updated October 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Rooms from roughly $89-$150/night across 19 individually decorated rooms; dining room and antique shop on site.
Access
Limited Access
1923 concrete building with original stairs; the ground-floor dining room and shop are more accessible
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1923 · Built 1923 by folk artist Clem "Pop" Shaffer from cast concrete and salvaged blacksmith iron · Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, 1978 · Example of New Mexico Pueblo Deco architecture
Clem Shaffer — known locally as "Pop" — arrived in Mountainair in 1908 to work as a blacksmith, bringing his first wife, Pearl, who died of pneumonia before their first year in town was out. Shaffer married Lena Imboden, a Mountainair native, in 1913, and the two ran his blacksmith shop and an adjoining hardware store for the better part of a decade.
That business burned down in 1922. Rather than rebuild in kind, Shaffer used the fire as an opportunity to construct something more ambitious: a hotel made of cast concrete, reinforced with iron scraps and fittings salvaged from his old blacksmith operation. He completed it in 1923 and filled it with his own folk-art carvings, murals, and ironwork, extending the building's Pueblo Deco style throughout. A dining room addition followed in 1929, with hand-painted ceiling artwork and period chandeliers that survive today.
"Pop" and "Ma" Shaffer operated the hotel until their deaths — Lena in 1978, shortly after the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The hotel changed hands several times afterward, closing without notice in 2000 before a $1 million renovation under new ownership reopened it in December 2005. It has continued operating under a succession of owners since, offering 19 individually furnished rooms alongside its dining room and an antique shop that displays some of Pop Shaffer's original work.
Sources
The Shaffer Hotel's ghost stories center on its builders. Guests and staff describe personal items moved between visits, lights and water taps switching on with no one nearby, and shadows reported moving through the second-floor hallway and the first-floor meeting room — activity longtime staff attribute to Pop and Lena Shaffer continuing to look after the hotel they built and ran for decades.
A second, older account concerns a guest's death decades ago connected to one of the upstairs rooms; the circumstances are not widely documented, and the hotel does not promote the story, but it appears consistently enough across regional ghost-story collections that later owners have acknowledged it when asked. Unlike the Shaffer accounts, this one is not tied to a name the hotel confirms, and no primary documentation — a coroner's report, a contemporary newspaper account — has surfaced to verify the details.
None of these reports come from a formal paranormal investigation; they are staff and guest anecdotes collected over decades of continuous operation, consistent with a working small-town hotel rather than a staged attraction.
Notable Entities
Nineteen individually furnished rooms in a 1923 building Clem "Pop" Shaffer built from cast concrete reinforced with scrap iron from his blacksmith shop. Staff and guests report footsteps, moved belongings, and taps and lights switching on by themselves, attributed to Pop and his second wife, Lena.
The hotel's 1929 dining room addition retains its hand-painted ceiling artwork and period chandeliers, alongside an antique shop displaying some of Pop Shaffer's original folk-art carving and ironwork.
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