The Loretto Staircase On Screen and In Print: TV, Film, and Books
The Loretto staircase has been on television since at least 1990 and in print for longer than that. If you’ve seen it in a documentary, a novel, or a true-crime search that went sideways, here’s the full map — what’s about this chapel, what only shares its name, and where each one lands between careful history and good storytelling.
On screen
| Title | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Unsolved Mysteries, “Miracle Staircase” (S3 E10) | 1990 | The Robert Stack series investigates and re-enacts the story — the appearance that put the legend in front of a national audience. |
| The Staircase (CBS TV movie) | 1998 | A dramatisation with Barbara Hershey and William Petersen. See our film disambiguation — this is not the Michael Peterson true-crime Staircase. |
| The UnXplained, “Mysterious Structures” (S1 E2) | 2019 | The William Shatner-hosted series features the staircase among unexplained structures. |
| Dark Winds, “Hooghandi” (S1 E4) | 2022 | The chapel appears as a setting in the AMC crime drama — a location cameo rather than a documentary treatment. |
| Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, ep. 232 | 2022 | A long-form podcast/video episode, “The Miraculous Spiral Staircase,” weighing the legend and the evidence. |
In print
Two kinds of books carry the story: the ones that shaped the popular legend, and the ones that did the archival work behind it.
- Alice Bullock, Loretto and the Miraculous Staircase (Sunstone Press, 1978) — an early book-length telling that helped fix the legend in print.
- Ann Rinaldi, The Staircase (2000) — a young-adult novel built on the tradition; the 1998 film’s credits point to a Rinaldi source, though the dates make that link murky.
- Michael O’Brien, Voyage to Alpha Centauri (2013) — a novel in which the chapel appears in a character’s childhood memories of Santa Fe.
- Mary Jean Straw Cook, Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2002) — the archival research that named Frenchy Rochas as the probable builder (see who built it).
- Ben Radford, Mysterious New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014) — a chapter of careful skeptical analysis, including the carpenter’s read of the construction.
The name it keeps getting confused with
The single biggest mix-up isn’t on this list at all: the true-crime The Staircase — a 2004 docuseries and a 2022 Colin Firth dramatisation about the death of Kathleen Peterson — shares only the title. It has no chapel, no nun, and no spiral. We sort the two out in full on the film disambiguation page.
Keep exploring
- Loretto’s film vs the Netflix “Staircase”
- The Loretto Chapel staircase: story, mystery & facts
- Debunked or miracle? Every claim vs the evidence
Researched & fact-checked by the Loretto Volunteers Editorial Team
Loretto Volunteers is an independent research project documenting the history, architecture, and enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel staircase. We work from primary and archival sources and show our evidence. Last reviewed: June 2026.