The Lordsburg Door

Is it a portal to another time, another dimension, or even another universe…or is it all of the above? Whatever it is, at least there's one thing we can be sure of: "it's pretty cool…"

Aerial view of Lordsburg, NM, and surrounding countryside. (Courtesy of The City of Lordsburg)

A doorway is many things.

To the weary traveler, it holds out the promise of shelter, warmth, and a much-needed respite. To the condemned man, it is the difference between a life of freedom and one of soul-crushing confinement.

To many, however, a doorway is just that—a simple connection between indoors and outdoors, or between one room and the next, with nothing special about it at all.

But to come across a doorway where, by all rights, there ought not to be one—that is when this everyday thing suddenly becomes pregnant with a great deal of mystery, wonder, and maybe even a little bit of fear.

And this is undoubtedly the case with the so-called “Lordsburg Door,” also known in some quarters as the “Lordsburg Gate.” Call it a “door,” a “gate,” a “dimensional portal,” or even a “time vortex”—call it whatever you will, the Lordsburg Door is something that has no right to exist in a well-ordered universe.

But speak with some of the colorful locals who live near the small, dusty railroad town of Lordsburg, New Mexico, and they’ll tell you that the Lordsburg Door not only exists, but that it produces—from time to time—some of the strangest phenomena you’re ever likely to see in the Land of Enchantment.

And that’s saying something.

Now, reliable information on the Door is somewhat hard to come by, and descriptions of its location and the phenomena it produces can be somewhat muddled—but that is, after all, only to be expected in a mysterious portal to another dimension or perhaps even another time.

All that can be said with any certainty is that the Lordsburg Door is, in fact, located in the vicinity of the town of Lordsburg, a classic Old West railroad town located in the state’s far southwestern “Bootheel.” Suitably for a town located so near to the borders of Arizona and Mexico, Lordsburg has a great deal of history; it was founded in 1880, right in the midst of the Wild West heyday, and local legend has it that none other than Billy the Kid himself used to wash dishes at the Stratford Hotel in the nearby Shakespeare Ghost Town.

Now just about every city, town, crossroads, rest stop, and hole-in-the-wall in New Mexico has a Billy the Kid story; but not every place can lay claim to a genuine inter-dimensional (or inter-temporal?) gateway. That’s where Lordsburg—with its population of only a little over 2,000—stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Most of the information we have on the Lordsburg Door comes from the work of writers Mike Smith and Rob Feightner, writing for My Strange New Mexico back in the 2000s. In 2007, Feightner even decided to take a road trip to Lordsburg to question the locals and, if possible, discover the location and perhaps even observe the effects of the Door for himself.

One Lordsburg local told Feightner that she had indeed heard of the Door, and that evidence for its existence and its puzzling effects was both abundant and obvious:

“Ranchers told [her] that hybrid, high-grade cattle would sometimes ‘disappear’ and be replaced by low-grade, Mexican cattle. Apparently, some cattle would enter the portal and others would exit the portal. This replacement indicated that rustling was not involved in the disappearance of the cattle because cattle thieves would not ‘replace’ stolen cattle with inferior stock.”

Probably not the smoking gun one would hope for; in fact, that sounds exactly like something cattle thieves would do…if they had a sense of humor, or at least a slight twinge of conscience.

But it’s compelling stuff nonetheless.

Feightner then heard that there was one local—a Sufi no less¹—who knew the precise location of the Lordsburg Door, which prompted him to attempt to make contact with this individual. Alas, it was not to be, for Feightner was deemed unsuitable for this adventure, as he learned through a comment posted on his blog:

“I just talked to ‘the Sufi’ about your story.

“He says it is ‘the Lordsburg Gate’ not ‘Door.’

“He says he will not show it to you, that you are not worthy. Too bad, cause he says it’s pretty cool!”

Some things, I suppose, are not meant to be.

But this leads us to another mystery of the Lordsburg Door (or Gate), and that is its geographical slipperiness. Some state that the Door is located somewhere south of town; others swear that it is just north of town. In fact, in his comprehensive article on the Lordsburg Door, Mike Smith quotes local ufologist Ramón Ortiz with a precise location of the Door, along with a catalogue of the wonders it has produced from time to time:

“…the Door stands in Gold Gulch just north of town, near mile marker 17 on State Highway 90, and he said it resembles Moses’ biblical burning bush, burning fiery red…A small chair and table carved of rock sit next to it, Ortiz said, and an old stump sits just in front of it, with a human leg bone trapped in its center—a bone said to be the end result of someone who stepped straight out of the Door and into a tree, a la the Philadelphia Experiment…²

“The Lordsburg Door, Ortiz said, has already let in everything from shadowy giants, to living pterosaurs, to the spirit of Geronimo—the legendary Apache warrior. The Door can only be seen by those who are ‘wanted there,’³ can only be opened with a peacefully made burnt offering, and can only be closed with a sword. Ortiz also said the Lordsburg Door is one of seven such doors in New Mexico’s Boot Heel region, all of which lead, circuitously, to Heaven, and one of which happens to be in Ortiz’s basement.

“Ortiz said there are also twelve blue-colored gates that lead to Hell, and he claimed all of these portals will soon be opening wide.

“‘Everything is coming through these doors, these gates!’ Ortiz warned. ‘It’s Judgment Day! Jesus is coming.’”

Now I can neither confirm nor deny that Jesus is coming, nor have I any sure knowledge of whether there is a door to Heaven in Mr. Ortiz’s basement; but it is fair to say that the quaint Old West town of Lordsburg, NM, does indeed seem to straddle the distant past and the remote future.

For one thing, it is said that in the late nineteenth century the place was positively lousy with prehistoric pterosaurs, or at least antediluvian flying creatures of some no-longer-extant variety.⁴ Most agree that this is plainly evidence that extinct creatures—hailing from a period anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of years ago—flew out of the Lordsburg Door and into the modern world. And although claims of visitors from the future are much less common in the Lordsburg area, there is still the occasional UFO sighting, such as the strange star-like thing described here, or the “two gold shining orbs” mentioned here.

Might these represent hapless future aircraft that inadvertently flew through the Lordsburg Door, winding up in the disagreeable past (our present) before realizing their mistake? There often seems to be an aerial component here, what with ancient pterosaurs and futuristic flying vehicles; perhaps some of Mr. Ortiz’s “seven doors” in the Bootheel region are located high above the ground—at the perfect height to nab an incautious flying creature or absentminded UFOnaut.

Maybe those doors were even at ground level in the distant past, or will be in the distant future; maybe it’s just the southwestern New Mexico desert that changes around them.

And as far as gates that lead to Hell…well, there are plenty of those in New Mexico, so the less said about them the better.

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“Ready for the Round Up,” undated Lordsburg street scene from a postcard (likely in the 1890s or 1900s). (Courtesy of The City of Lordsburg)

Verdict: So what are we to make of the Lordsburg Door (or Gate)?

Well, on the face of it, there’s nothing especially surprising nor even all that noteworthy about the existence of a doorway to another time or dimension anywhere in the American West. The place is rank with the things, as even Ramón Ortiz himself suggests when he claims that there are many more “Doors” in the region than just the Lordsburg one.

In fact, there’s a fascinating tale of a remarkably similar “time portal” or “dimensional gateway” near the small town of Arivaca, AZ, south of Tucson, and maybe I’ll discuss that mysterious aperture—along with some of the incredible stories that swirl around it—in a future article. Of course, while I’m on the subject, I can’t overlook the intriguing matter of the infamous “Incident at Pot Mountain,” which is often chalked up to being a UFO close encounter of the First and Third Kinds.

But something about that strange episode feels different…almost like an unexpected glimpse of an unborn future, or a peek into another dimension or even an alternate reality. The episode just seems too fragmentary and surreal, and I wonder if there isn’t another “Door”—just like the one near Lordsburg—on the Taos Plateau, overlooked or forgotten, or perhaps even in the process of forming as we speak.

Who knows, in another hundred years or so, there might even be tall tales circulating about the infamous “Taos Door.”

And just what are these “Doors,” anyway? Are they spacetime wormholes, of the kinds the eggheads like to talk about? Or are they something like Ivan T. Sanderson’s infamous “vile vortices,” responsible for the disappearance of so many vessels and aircraft in the Bermuda Triangle and elsewhere?

Hell, maybe they’re none of these things; maybe they’re more spiritual in nature—a window of sorts, vouchsafing the chosen few a glimpse of another world or another time, for reasons that elude the ability of human intelligence to grasp.

On the other hand, Michael Harris Hoffman, in the most recent issue of

The Observer

, advocates using an “anthropocentric model” to understand these doorways. He posits two scenarios: “UFO-centric scenarios” and “cryptid-centric scenarios.” In the first scenario, these doorways are either natural phenomena exploited by canny UFOnauts (or chrononauts) to travel between worlds, times, and universes, or they were actually built by the extraterrestrial intelligences themselves to act as a kind of intergalactic transportation infrastructure.

Not a bad hypothesis—it would certainly explain the prevalence of UFOs in the vicinity of the Lordsburg Door.

In the second scenario, the portals are again natural phenomena, used both by UFOs and the occasional migrating cryptid; or, perhaps the cryptids themselves are inter-dimensional or trans-temporal, migrating willy-nilly from one universe or time period to another, perhaps as a natural part of their life-cycles.

That would certainly explain all those pterosaurs that had such an unusual penchant for the American Southwest in the nineteenth century…if all those sightings from Lordsburg and Tombstone are any indication. Without question, it was their seasonal migration spot—until all those rowdy, rifle-toting cowpokes started taking potshots at them and scared them off.

As for the Lordsburg Door itself…well, that’s something that demands a closer investigation before a final verdict can be rendered. So I think I’ll take a trip down to Lordsburg later this spring or summer, to take a look for myself and provide an update.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to find. South of town, I believe it was, or maybe just north of it, in Gold Gulch near mile marker 17, on State Road 90; I’ll keep my eyes peeled for something that looks like Moses’ burning bush, with a chair and table carved of rock hard by it, and an old tree stump with a human femur stuck in its center—just as if a hapless person had stepped from an inter-dimensional gateway and merged into a solid object.

No, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find at all…

1. The Sufi connection is an intriguing one, if true. Sufism is an Islamic esoteric order; it is a path within Islam that is intended to provide access for the initiated to batin, or pure spirituality. Some notable Western Sufis include the Traditionalists René Guénon (1886-1951) and Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), whose knowledge of what might be termed the “hidden” or “paranormal” aspects of life is generally considered to be quite profound. Moreover, there is a Sufi presence in Crestone, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley—which is home to its own strange doorways and plentiful paranormal and ufological phenomena.

2. That’s not all, for some say that artifacts have apparently been found near the Door that attest to the presence of visitors from distant times and places. On the TreasureNet site, someone who goes by the handle “Homesteader” posted this intriguing tidbit in 2015 about the Lordsburg Door: “Also supposed to be some glyphs there showing an Egyptian Ankh and other marking[s] that don’t really look Native American. Talked to a feller who showed me an old copper sheet that had some similar symbols and was supposedly found there.” If true, and the “feller” wasn’t simply pulling one over on Homesteader (or a figment of his imagination), it suggests that those who pass through the mysterious Door sometimes leave behind material evidence proving that they do, in fact, hail from some other time or dimension.

3. Recall Mr. Feightner’s misadventure.

4. For instance, an article in UFO Digest asserts—with no attribution—that “[i]n Lordsburg in the 1800s locals talked constantly about the sightings of pterosaurs,” and paranormal investigator Jason Offutt writes in an article for Mysterious Universe that “in the 1800s residents of Lordsburg, New Mexico, claimed to see giant featherless birds often.”