The Ghost of the Cuban Queen Bordello (by Peggy Hicks)
In 2025, my husband and I stopped in Jerome, Arizona, on a side trip from Sedona. We visit Sedona often and have come to love this old copper-mining town clinging to the mountainside. In one of the shops, a conversation with the owner of Jerome Heritage Shop ended with her gifting me a signed copy of Peggy Hicks’s The Ghost of the Cuban Queen Bordello: A Story of a 1920’s Jerome, Arizona Madam. For more on Jerome, see my Adventures post here.
Hicks braids a ghost story with a researched biography of the madam known as the Cuban Queen. After her own unsettling visit to the crumbling 1920s bordello, she follows Bessie Johnson—also Anita Gonzales—from New Orleans’s Storyville and a link to Jelly Roll Morton to the Jerome house that sold sex, gambling, and bootleg whiskey. At the center is a 1927 murder and the claim that the madam and her partner fled with the dead woman’s young son.
I expected a slice of Jerome history and a mysterious madam. I got more. The ghostly sighting becomes a full biography and a tour of the notable people around her. For most of the book, Hicks stays close to researched fact. Only near the end does she invent likely conversations and moments that cannot be proved. She flags that liberty at the outset. Fortunately, it didn’t pull me out of the story; it reads as texture, not invention for its own sake.
By the end, I no longer thought of the Queen as merely colorful. She comes across as manipulative and self-centered for her entire life. Those traits are hardly rare in prostitution and gambling, but Hicks makes a hard case that she treated Jelly Roll and his wife badly after his death—and that she kidnapped the murdered woman’s child.
Hicks writes that the haunting began while she was working as a real estate agent and visiting the bordello. I was surprised she tied the apparition to the Cuban Queen rather than to the woman murdered there. The photographs she found of the Queen may simply have looked like what she saw.
I was impressed by the book and grateful for the history. I look forward to our next trip to Arizona, when I hope to reunite with the owner of Jerome Heritage Shop and hear how the small hotel on the old Cuban Queen site is coming along. (I wrote about that in the Adventures post.) Now that I’ve read the book, I’d also like to talk with her about Hicks’s account and Jerome’s past. Jerome notes from that 2025 trip, and from 2023, are linked below.
I don’t think many flowers bloom like this one in Jerome—at least not in late summer, when we tend to visit. The tiger flowers I paired with the book cover have been a joy to watch this summer, a mix of yellow, white, and pink.
Garden photos, some by my husband at lostthepath.com
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