for me to fulfill my obligations to them while I was focusing so much of my attention on this project.
Finally, if there is anyone I have left out of these acknowledgments, I would like to sincerely beg their forgiveness and thank them for the roles they played in the completion of this book as well!
Welcome to America’s Haunted Road Trip
BY VIRTUE OF THE FACT you are reading this book, there is a pretty good chance you believe in ghosts or are at least open to the idea that something referred to as such might be real. If so, you are in pretty good company. Surveys over the years tend to show that more than half of all Americans believe in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Some 61% of participants in a September 2013 Huffington Post poll, in fact, indicated that they “believe some people have experienced ghosts.” (Those overall numbers skew up by as much as 8% and down as much as 16% based on factors that include gender, age, political affiliation, race, education, and geographical region).
Paranormal phenomena that you or someone you know might have experienced can vary widely, from the subtle to the profound and the comforting to the disturbing. Many people not seeking supernatural experiences have felt the presence or touch of recently departed loved ones, for example, or even seen them, often just once, as if in final farewell. Others have at various points, and perhaps in places reputed to be haunted, experienced things like disembodied footsteps, inexplicable cold spots, or sounds with no discernible sources, including someone calling their names.
Those who are psychically sensitive, exposed to extremely haunted sites, or actively engage in paranormal investigations of various sorts, of course—including what have been widely referred to for some years now as ghost hunts—might experience any number of other things as well. These can include anomalies not audible to the naked ear or visible to the naked eye captured in recordings or photographs, such as electronic voice phenomena (EVPs) in the former and orbs, mists, or even coveted full-frontal apparitions in the latter.
Our intent with the America’s Haunted Road Trip series is to provide readers with resources they can use to personally discover and explore publicly accessible places that might be occupied by ghosts or the sites of other paranormal activity. We are not in the business of trying to prove that any particular place is or is not haunted; every single one of the places that appears in Ghosthunting San Antonio, Austin, and Texas Hill Country certainly could be, and I firmly believe that a number of them definitely are. The purpose of this volume and the others in the series is to tell everyone, from the casual historical traveler to the hard-core ghosthunter, about places of potential interest to them and to provide actionable, concrete information about how to visit those places.
As noted, all of the places covered in this book and the other volumes of the America’s Haunted Road Trip series are, to a lesser or greater extent, publicly accessible; there is simply no point in creating a travel guide to places people cannot easily visit. Sorts of places we cover in our guidebooks therefore include appropriate bridges, cemeteries and graveyards, churches and other places of worship, colleges and universities, government buildings, historic sites, hotels, museums, neighborhoods/districts of towns or cities, parks, railroads, restaurants and bars, roads and highways, shopping areas and malls, sports stadiums, and theaters.
Sorts of places we do not cover in our guidebooks or encourage people to visit generally include assisted-living facilities; elementary, middle, or high schools; hospitals; private homes and residential apartment buildings; private property; or prohibited areas like abandoned mental institutions or condemned buildings. It also bears mentioning that all potentially haunted places, their intersection with the other world notwithstanding, are still subject to all the hazards of the real world. So, show due respect to other good people and watch out for bad ones, do not fall afoul of local laws, be prepared for environmental hazards, and, in keeping with the mantra of respectful exploration, “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.”
Beyond that, we hope this book and the others in the series will be useful to you and that you have an enjoyable, informative, and fulfilling journey on your own haunted road trip!
—Michael O. Varhola
Editor, America’s Haunted Road Trip
INTRODUCTION
TO SAY THAT I LIVE IN THE MIDST of a haunted landscape would hardly be an exaggeration. About a half mile east of my home, in the little wooded valley below the ridge it sits on, lies a tiny, haunted, 19th-century German graveyard, its half-dozen headstones clustered around an ancient oak and enclosed in a rickety fence. A half mile west of my home, the deep, overgrown ravine known as Devil’s Hollow—a dry creek bed within which ancient peoples once lived—descends from the spine of low, rocky mountains to the north. Four miles north of my home, the haunted highway that locals call the Devil’s Backbone runs along the top of the aforementioned chain. And, on a miniature charter-school campus located on that road, between a haunted one-room schoolhouse and a somewhat desolate historic cemetery, I have taught children history.
Innumerable haunted and otherwise strange or spiritually charged sites of every sort radiate out from there in every direction, as if from the center of a supernatural vortex. Forty miles south, in the heart of San Antonio, you will find some of the most haunted locales in all of Texas, including the Alamo and the hotels that sit on the site of the battle that was fought around it, the Crockett and the Menger. Within blocks of these two are other hotels, colonial Spanish buildings, and the oldest continuously used cathedral in North America, all haunted by the ghosts of people who dwelled, visited, or worked in them in life. A little farther away lie the Ghost Tracks, where spectral children are known to move people’s stopped cars. If you head 25 miles east, you will come to the town of New Braunfels, which houses the historic village of Gruene and the beautiful and creepy Faust Hotel. Fifty miles north, in the state capital of Austin, government buildings remain occupied by the spirits of officials, their mistresses, and others who met strange or violent ends there, and numerous haunted parks, restaurants, and other sites can be found. And for a hundred miles north and west, up into the rugged, rolling highlands known as Hill Country, uncounted haunted crossroads, caves, wilderness areas, and towns dot the landscape.
Urban legends abound in the area about things like zombie outbreaks and supposed encounters with devils at dance halls, as well as accounts of cryptozoological creatures like the Donkey Lady and chupacabra, UFOs and alien encounters, and other paranormal but nonghostly phenomena. We have decided that these things stray too far from the core subject of this book, however, and that they do not quite fit in with places reputed to be haunted by ghosts. Maybe one day they will warrant a book of their own!
Texas is certainly one of the most haunted of all the states, as befits its vast size; long, violent history; and brief status as an independent nation. And, settled by Spanish explorers more than three centuries ago, San Antonio in particular has a rich haunted history that includes conquistadores, the local Apache and Comanche Indian tribes, old monasteries, lost gold mines, battlefields, and elegant hotels. Perhaps because of its bloodstained heritage, people have also always felt the presence of evil and the supernatural in Texas, evidence of which remains in the names of desolate, isolated, or forbidding places throughout the state—names like the Devil’s River, Devil’s Sinkhole, and Purgatory Road. Perhaps the iniquity that has occurred in Texas has inspired people to see the devil in its landscape, or perhaps he really is present and has inspired much of the evil that has been perpetrated here and the spiritual residua that remains.
My own interest in the paranormal goes back as long as I can remember, in large part from having spent the first half of my life visiting spiritually charged or haunted places like the Tower of London in England, the Parthenon in Athens, the
