FOUNDED IN 1716 as La Misión San José de los Nazonis in East Texas, Mission San Juan Capistrano also was established by Spanish Franciscans on the eastern banks of the San Antonio River in 1731. It was named for Saint John of Capistrano, a 15th-century theologian and warrior priest who resided in the Abruzzo region of Italy.
The missionaries constructed San Juan’s first chapel from mud and brush and eventually added to it a tower containing two bells. Then, around 1756, they replaced this primitive building with a long hall with a flat roof and a more substantial belfry that remains on the site to this day. They also constructed a dam in order to provide water for the mission’s acequia irrigation system.
“San Juan was a self-sustaining community. Within the compound, Indian artisans produced iron tools, cloth, and prepared hides,” Kathy Weiser writes in her Legends of America online magazine. “Orchards and gardens outside the walls provided melons, pumpkins, grapes, and peppers. Beyond the mission complex, Indian farmers cultivated corn, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, and sugar cane in irrigated fields …. By the mid-1700s, San Juan, with its rich farm and pasturelands, was a regional supplier of agricultural produce. With its surplus, San Juan established a trade network stretching east to Louisiana and south to Coahuila, Mexico. This thriving economy helped the mission to survive epidemics and Indian attacks in its final years.”
Despite its prosperity, however, Mission San Juan was not able to maintain a large native population, and that affected its viability. At its height in 1756, for example, some 265 Coahuiltecan Indian neophytes lived at the mission, but 34 years later only 58 lived there. It was then that the missionaries broke ground on a larger church building on the east side of the complex, but they were never able to complete it. Work on it was abandoned and, eventually, it was used as a crypt for native residents.
Mission San Juan was secularized in 1794 and had a decreasing level of religious activity until 1824, when it ended altogether. The site was largely abandoned until 1840, when priests from the Diocese of San Antonio resumed conducting mass at it.
In 1934, some of the Indian quarters and the foundations of the unfinished church were unearthed as part of a public works project. Then, in the 1960s, the chapel, priests’ quarters, and other structures were reconstructed. Today most of the original plaza remains within the courtyard walls and authentically depicts the floor plan and layout. Members of the Claretian and Redemptorist orders also held services at the site until 1967, when the Franciscans once again took control of the mission.
MISSION CONCEPCIÓN
FRANCISCAN FRIARS ESTABLISHED Misión Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, more commonly referred to simply as Mission Concepción, near the San Antonio River in 1731. Most of the native people in the mission were Pajalats, a local tribe that used to live in the area south of San Antonio, and their chiefs served as governors of the affiliated Indian community.
At least one large battle took place between Spanish settlers and Indians here, resulting in great loss of life, in the 1700s. Then, on October 28, 1835, the first significant battle of the Texas Revolution was fought between Texian insurgents, led by James Bowie and James Fannin, and Mexican soldiers under the command of Colonel Domingo Ugartechea. About 90 of the Texians had encamped near the mission while searching for a suitable and relatively safe place for the remainder of the army to rest when they were attacked by a mixed force of about 275 Mexican infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The Texians took cover in a U-shaped gully and, between their defensive position and superior small arms, drove off the Mexican troops in the ensuing 30-minute battle, winning the Battle of Concepción. One Texian and as many as 76 Mexican troops were slain during the skirmish.
On October 31, 1984, the San Antonio Express-News ran a story that described activity experienced in the area around Mission Concepción and some of the possible reasons for it. “Some 300 soldiers died in that area during an 18th-century battle near the mission. A Dr. Navarro, who lived there around the turn of the century, is said to have murdered Juana, who was either his live-in maid or his lover. Nobody knows for sure,” this account reads. It goes on to describe how, while saying a rosary, a local resident “saw a plume of smoke waft in from a back room. Forming a column in front of him, it didn’t take on masculine or feminine features … but simply stood and watched him. He moved towards the apparition and it disappeared. Going back to his rosary, the column of smoke reappeared.”
Mission Concepción is the best preserved of the Texas missions, remains active as a church with a congregation that attends Sunday mass there to this day, and in 2009–2010 had its interior completely restored.
With their strange, turbulent, and violent histories, and events that have included abandonment, violence, death, fervent passions, theft of holy relics, and the full range of human emotions, it is not surprising that the San Antonio missions would be haunted. People have reported paranormal phenomena of all sorts at them, including relatively prosaic things like inexplicable cold spots and a feeling of melancholy on the one hand, to full-blown apparitions on the other, and everything from anomalies like EVPs to orbs in between. There are perhaps no better places to get a sense for the history of San Antonio, mundane and paranormal alike.
CHAPTER 2
Alamodome
DOWNTOWN SAN ANTONIO
Wikimedia Commons/Billy Hathorn
WHEN ONE CONSIDERS what sorts of places are most likely to be haunted, they might not necessarily think of large, public, relatively new structures like event arenas constructed during the past two or three decades. But almost everything is built where other things with their own histories used to be and on ground that may have already been a site of spiritual activity. And even places that are the brightest under the best of conditions sometimes have dark pasts of their own. Short of a battlefield, there are perhaps few places where so many people congregate in one place and express such strong emotions as a sports stadium. It should thus not be too surprising that people have, over the years, reported so much paranormal activity at the Alamodome.
Located at the southeastern edge of downtown San Antonio, the Alamodome is a domed, five-level, multipurpose, rectilinear venue that has been used for everything from basketball and football games to musical concerts to conventions and trade shows. It was designed so that it could easily be converted into a basketball or hockey arena, and, in this configuration, it can seat 20,662 spectators if only the two lower levels are used, and up to 39,500 if seats in the upper level are also opened. It can seat up to 65,000 spectators for a typical football game but be expanded to accommodate a full 72,000, meaning it is able to host a Super Bowl game if that opportunity should arise.
“The Alamodome is what is known as a ‘third-generation’ facility,” according to its official history. “It features column-free spans for unobstructed viewing and curtain wall system for configuration flexibility. [It has] the advantage of both a convention center and a dome without the drawbacks of either [and] is large enough to easily accommodate assemblies and trade shows. The column-free design makes it unlike other domes in one very important way: It has an intimate, ‘human’ scale.”
This $186 million brick, concrete, steel, and glass facility, owned and operated by the city of San Antonio, opened to the public on May 15, 1993. Among other things, it was intended to increase the city’s convention traffic, attract a professional football franchise, qualify the city to host the Olympic Games, and placate demands by the San Antonio Spurs basketball team
