[2] Ghost Ranch is part of Piedra Lumbre (Spanish, "Shining Rock"), a 1766 land grant to Pedro Martin Serrano from Charles III of Spain.

A group of local men then came to the ranch, fighting through their fear, and hanged the remaining brother and his gang from a cottonwood tree that still stands next to one of the casitas on the property.

[5]: 15–16 Roy Pfaffle, a guide, outfitter and former park ranger, won the deed to the undeveloped ranch sometime early in 1928 in a poker game, details of which remain shrouded in mystery.

[5]: 16  His wife Carol (née Caroline Bishop Stanley), a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music who had ventured West in 1915, recorded the deed in her name and decided to call the property Ghost Ranch, reflecting legend and lore about evil spirits in the area.

He spoke with the YMCA, the Boy Scouts of America, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and the United Brethren Church about acquiring and maintaining the ranch, but none of the organizations was in a position to accept.

Georgia O'Keeffe, intrigued by Arthur Pack's statement that the Piedra Lumbre was "the best place in the world",[7] visited the ranch and fell in love with the geography.

200 million years ago Ghost Ranch and the American Southwest were located close to the equator, and had a warm, monsoon-like climate with heavy seasonal precipitation.

[citation needed] In 1947 the palaeontologist Edwin H. Colbert documented the discovery of over a thousand well-preserved fossilized skeletons of a small Triassic dinosaur called Coelophysis in a quarry here.

[10] In April 2010, a team of scientists led by Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution reported the discovery of Daemonosaurus chauliodus, a basal theropod species, at Ghost Ranch.