The Hotel California in the small Pacific coast town of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, was founded in 1948 and has long traded on its name's association with the Eagles' famous song (though the band denies any connection). Beyond the marketing, the hotel has a genuine haunted reputation. Staff and guests have reported encounters with several entities including a woman in white who walks the upper-floor corridors at night, a male figure in early 20th-century clothing who sits in the courtyard, and unexplained sounds of music and conversation from empty rooms.
The hotel's thick adobe walls, its interior courtyard draped in bougainvillea, and the dry heat of the Baja desert create an atmosphere of timeless isolation. Todos Santos sits on the edge of the Sierra de la Laguna, where the Baja California desert meets the Pacific, and the town's history includes indigenous Pericú settlement, Jesuit missions, and a sugar cane boom that left behind haciendas and their ghosts. Some locals attribute the hotel's haunting to the spirits of Pericú people displaced by Spanish colonization, while others point to more recent tragedies connected to the building.