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In 1859 brewery proprietor William Menger built an inn so his patrons could sleep
off their drunkenness, rendering them less likely to fall off their horses on the way out of town. Since
then, 7 additions have been erected and the historic hotel now boasts 300 rooms, some with a unique
history of notable guests and infamous occurrences. It is common knowledge that Theodore Roosevelt
recruited many of his Rough Riders in the hotel bar. Probably the most famous spirit said to haunt
the hotel is the ghost of Sallie White, a chambermaid shot by her husband on March 28, 1876, who
roams the fourth floor of the original wing wearing a long skirt and a bandanna around her head. But
the paranormal activity isn't confined to that area: stories of hauntings pervade the hotel and the
property surrounding it. The newer rooms face the Alamo and guests have witnessed ghostly wanderings on
the grounds from their windows above. The Mengers assistant hotel manager Ernesto Malacara has been with the
hotel twenty years, and has become both a spirit enthusiast, a historian and the hotel's best PR
agent. We asked him about the reputation that the Menger boasts, of ghosts.
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 What have
been some of the recent disturbances at the hotel?
And believe it or not, I was actually talking to some women doing a local story about ghost sightings when a woman walked up and said she'd like to register one small complaint. She said the night before she had gone to bed and all of a sudden the TV came back on so she got out of bed to turn it off. She went back to bed and shortly after the TV came back on again. Two weeks ago I had a repairman working on the movies back here. We have three large steel lockers and each one of these units houses video players -- about eight units per locker. The repairman was working on one locker and all of a sudden the door of another locker opens and a tape pops out. Do you know what the title of this movie was? The Devil's Own. Whether this is someone trying to tell us something or something else, who knows? I hear these kinds of stories all the time. The girls back in PBX say they feel as though someone is watching them. And when they turn around to see if anyone is there they see only half of a face left. I have a room service waitress who tells me she goes up on the floors in the morning to bring down dishes at about 5:30am and somebody plays hide and seek with her. She'll hear her name called, "Yolanda," and when she looks there's no one there. A few moments later she'll hear her name again, and this goes on while she does her job. |
We seem to be getting quite
a bit of activity nowadays. We're getting about one occurrence about every two or three days. We
had a lady here that was in town for a convention for an entire week. We assigned her a room in the
original building and when she went into the room she felt something was wrong. She said that when
she and her husband laid down that night, when she closed her eyes, she saw skulls. Not skeletons, but
just two skulls. Later in the evening, whomever or whatever it was started getting a little frisky
with her; they started pawing at the bed sheets and she felt hands all over her body. So she got up
and she told her husband, "We're getting out of this room right now." He of course didn't want to do
it, but being a modern woman as she was, she said, "I've got my own credit card and if you're not going
to do this, I'm going down to get another room myself and you can stay here." She did.
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Has anything specifically happened to you?
And I've seen the woman in the blue dress more than once. When I first got here twenty years ago I heard the story of a lady in blue, but at that time I was told of a woman in a blue evening gown, and this woman had on a blue dress. It certainly wasn't an evening gown but it was blue. It was a design from the late 30s or early 40s, and her shoes were like a short version of combat boots. And she had on these little round glasses. Sam Nesmith, a local psychic and the one-time curator of the Alamo was here in the hotel and we had been discussing things that had happened here. We were on the second floor in the Rotunda area and he's looking over in a northerly direction and he says to me, "Ernest, she's there." He said this woman is over there reading a newspaper; she dropped it down and raised it back up. The woman he describes is the same exact lady in blue that I'd seen on the second floor knitting, and a banquet waiter had seen her once on the second floor, going into the Renaissance room. You see things when you least expect them.
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The chairs on the second floor where Ernesto Malacara saw a ghostly visage of a woman knitting |
