Who Really Built the Miraculous Staircase of Loretto Chapel?

Background

Loretto Chapel is a small Gothic Revival church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, built between 1873 and 1878 for the adjoining girls' school run by the Sisters of Loretto, Loretto Academy. French-born architect Antoine Mouly designed it after the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and oversaw construction with his son Projectus, but failing eyesight forced him to return to France before the building was finished — taking with him the person best placed to solve one remaining problem. The choir loft at the back of the chapel had no way up: the space was too small for a staircase built to the period's usual dimensions, and, according to the account the Sisters have told for well over a century, no local builder could offer a workable alternative.

The popular version of what happened next says the Sisters prayed a novena, nine consecutive days of prayer, to St Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. On the ninth day, so the story goes, an itinerant carpenter arrived with a donkey, a few basic hand tools, and tubs for soaking wood, and asked to be allowed to try. Working largely alone over several months, he built a freestanding, two-turn wooden spiral staircase to the loft, then left before the Sisters could pay him or learn his name. What survives is genuinely striking: the staircase is 20 feet (6.1 metres) tall, makes two complete 360-degree turns, rises through 33 steps built from seven curved segments in its inner stringer and nine in its outer, and is held together entirely with wooden pegs rather than nails, screws, or glue — with no central pole visible anywhere in the structure.

That combination, an unnamed builder, no obvious means of support, and wood some retellings call unidentifiable, is what has kept the staircase famous well beyond Santa Fe. Historical research published in 2002 identified the builder by name from primary sources, and structural analysis has independently explained how the staircase stands. Neither finding has meaningfully slowed the legend's spread.

Main Theories

The Miraculous Carpenter (Popular Speculation)

For most of the chapel's history, the Sisters' own retelling was the only account most visitors ever heard: a mysterious stranger solved a problem that had stumped every local builder, using tools no more sophisticated than a saw, hammer, and square, then vanished without collecting payment or leaving a name. Because the Sisters had specifically prayed a novena to St Joseph immediately beforehand, the carpenter came to be popularly identified with the saint himself — an answer that arrived, worked, and departed once the work was done. The Loretto Community, the Sisters' own religious congregation, still documents this tradition today as the story passed down through its members, while noting in its own archival materials that "there are still doubts as to who built the mysterious staircase" and that the order's records "do not hold the answers to all the questions" the case attracts.

The legend's staying power rests on a genuine engineering puzzle any visitor can see for themselves: a wooden helix with nothing running up its centre, carrying foot traffic for well over a century, apparently built by one man with basic tools and no formal design in a matter of months. Proponents of the miraculous account point to the staircase's real structural sophistication, unusual for its time and place, and to the absence of any name for the builder in the Sisters' own contemporaneous records.

François-Jean Rochas, the Historian-Identified Builder (Historical Record)

The stranger has a name in the documentary record, even though it took over a century to surface clearly. Historian Mary Jean Straw Cook spent roughly seven years researching the chapel's own archives before publishing her findings in Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2002). Cook traced two independent primary sources to the same man: an entry in the Sisters' own day-book recording a $150 payment in 1881 to a "Rochas" for wood, and a short notice in the 5 January 1895 Santa Fe New Mexican reporting the death of François-Jean Rochas, a French carpenter, and stating that "he build [sic] the handsome stair-case in the Loretto chapel." Rochas, born in France in 1843 and known locally as "Frenchy," appears in surviving records as a somewhat reclusive rancher and skilled woodworker who emigrated to New Mexico in the 1870s; the inventory of tools taken after his 1894 death was extensive enough to support his reputation as an accomplished carpenter.

Cook's identification does not rest on a single document, which is a large part of why it has held up since 2002: the payment record places a man named Rochas doing paid woodwork for the Sisters in the year construction is understood to have finished, and the death notice, written by contemporaries with no evident motive to fabricate the connection, independently names him as the staircase's builder. No competing name has surfaced with comparable documentary support, and no historian has published a rebuttal of Cook's sourcing since her book appeared.

How the Staircase Actually Stands

Separate from the identity question is a purely mechanical one that has circulated just as widely: how does a wooden spiral staircase with no central pole and no wall support carry weight at all? A structural inspection by wood technologist Forrest Easley found the answer in the staircase's proportions rather than in anything exotic. The inner stringer, the wooden beam running up the centre of the spiral, is wound so tightly around such a small radius that it behaves mechanically as an almost solid vertical cylinder rather than a flexible curved plank. That tight coil resists the twisting force, or torsion, that would otherwise cause an unsupported spiral staircase to rack and fail, letting the two stringers act together as a single continuous helical beam able to carry ordinary foot traffic. Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell reached the same conclusion independently, describing the structure as governed by standard helical-beam mechanics and, in his words, "subject to the laws of physics like any other," rather than by any undocumented technique.

That does not mean the original 1881 staircase was as stable as it feels to a visitor today. It initially had no handrail and was not fastened to any wall, pillar, or the choir loft itself, and by multiple later accounts it swayed and felt noticeably springy underfoot — enough that the Sisters reportedly grew fearful of using it and sometimes climbed it on their hands and knees. In 1887, roughly six years after construction, a second craftsman, Phillip August Hesch, added a wooden handrail and an iron bracket anchoring the outer stringer to a nearby loft column, the change that gave the staircase the fixed, wall-attached stability it has had ever since. That 1887 repair itself argues against the version of the legend claiming the original structure was flawlessly stable from the day it was finished.

Common Misconceptions

Popular retellings often claim the staircase's wood is of a type "unidentifiable" or "found nowhere in New Mexico," implying an inexplicable material to match an inexplicable structure. Analysis has identified the wood straightforwardly as spruce, genus Picea, a dense, close-grained softwood well suited to steam-bending and peg joinery. What is genuinely unusual is only that spruce is not native to the immediate Santa Fe area and would have had to be sourced and transported from further afield — not that the species itself defies identification; disagreement among analysts is over the wood's precise regional origin, not over what kind of tree it came from.

A second persistent claim holds that the staircase uses no fasteners of any kind. It is accurate that the treads and stringers are joined entirely with wooden pegs rather than nails, screws, or glue, a choice that lets the joints flex slightly with humidity and temperature rather than splitting the way a rigid nailed joint eventually would. It is not accurate to describe the finished structure as entirely without added hardware: the 1887 handrail installation added a metal bracket precisely because the peg-and-stringer design alone had proven unstable without it.

Current Consensus

Historians researching the chapel's own records treat Cook's 2002 identification of François-Jean Rochas as the best-documented account of who built the staircase, resting on two independent contemporaneous sources and unrebutted since publication. Structural engineers and skeptical investigators independently agree that the staircase's stability is fully explained by its tightly coiled inner stringer and, after 1887, its handrail bracket, without requiring any technique unknown to nineteenth-century carpentry. What remains genuinely open is narrower than the popular "impossible staircase" framing suggests: comparatively little is documented about Rochas's own life and training beyond his 1870s arrival from France and his 1894 death, so exactly how, and from whom, he learned the specific joinery techniques the staircase displays is not established in the surviving record. The Loretto Community, the Sisters' own congregation, continues to present the traditional novena account alongside the historical research rather than formally endorsing one over the other, and Loretto Chapel's private owners, who have run it as a museum and wedding venue since buying it in 1971 after the Archdiocese of Santa Fe declined the property, have limited commercial incentive to retire a story that draws visitors specifically to see a "miracle."

Why This Mystery Endures

The Loretto Chapel staircase endures as a "miracle" in popular telling for reasons that have little to do with how much evidence has accumulated against the supernatural reading. The core image, a wooden spiral rising without a post to hold it up, is one a visitor can see and feel unsettled by in person, in a way a wood technologist's account of stringer torsion never quite dislodges; understanding the engineering intellectually does not change how the staircase looks when standing beneath it. The story is also, structurally, a satisfying one: a specific prayer, answered within days, by a helper who refuses payment and vanishes, is a far more complete and emotionally resolved narrative than "a French immigrant carpenter did skilled, well-paid work and was later named in a death notice," even though the second version is the one the documentary record actually supports.

Commercial incentive has reinforced rather than corrected the legend. Loretto Chapel stopped operating as a working chapel when Loretto Academy closed in 1968 and has been a privately owned museum and wedding venue since 1971; its owners depend on visitor admissions, and "the miraculous staircase built by St Joseph himself" is a considerably stronger draw than "a staircase built by a documented nineteenth-century tradesman." The Sisters' own community has been more measured, continuing to note in its archival materials that questions about the builder remain open in its own institutional memory even as outside historical research has closed most of them.

The staircase also sits alongside a wider pattern this site documents elsewhere: a physically striking structure acquires a supernatural origin story that later, well-sourced research traces to an identifiable, unremarkable human cause. The Winchester Mystery House shows the same shape from a different angle — a real building's genuinely unusual construction history reworked into a ghost story by commercial operators after the person actually responsible for it was no longer alive to correct the record. Loretto Chapel's case differs in one respect worth noting: the Catholic Church's own miracle-investigation process was never formally applied to the staircase at all. It was never submitted to the Vatican as a claimed miracle for official review; the St Joseph attribution is entirely a matter of popular devotion and local tradition, running alongside, rather than through, the deliberately sceptical process the Church uses for canonisation miracles and apparitions. This page is part of this site's debunked myths coverage, within the wider hoaxes and debunked claims cluster.