Staff at the Crockett Hotel in San Antonio call them the haunted elevators, and ghost-tour accounts put a man in a dark blue military coat on the patio they describe as a onetime tavern. The one death the record actually holds is in none of the ghost stories.
The staff at the Crockett Hotel in San Antonio call them the haunted elevators. The cars skip past floors guests have already selected. They open and close on empty hallways, for nobody. That is the everyday haunting here, the one the front desk will tell about without much prompting.
The one people come for is the man in the dark blue coat. Guests and staff report him out on the patio, which Alamo City Ghost Tours describes as a onetime tavern, dressed in something close to Alamo-era military uniform, and Haunted Rooms America says he has been seen there "many times by guests and staff alike." The same tour company counts the bar among the most active spots in the building, with items going off the counter by nothing at all. Guests have reported chanting in the halls, and horses trotting past on floors with no horses on them.
The hotel opened in 1909, a block east of Alamo Plaza, and the reason every ghost in it wears 1836 is the dirt underneath. The 1976 National Register nomination states that the Crockett "was erected on a portion of the original Alamo grounds." Davy Crockett and his men held the southeast palisade during the 13-day siege, and the hotel's own history has hundreds of Santa Anna's troops moving into the ground where the swimming pool now sits, on the night before the final assault. No excavation has ever confirmed the pool deck overlies the palisade line. Nobody has dug to check.
The death the record does hold happened at about 4:50 in the afternoon on December 28, 2011. Gloria Rodriguez, 65, a housekeeper NBC DFW reported had worked there 12 years, was near the service elevator when the housekeeping manager heard a loud noise from her office in the basement. The car was sitting out of level with the lobby floor. She ordered it out of use and called Otis. When the technician got the basement doors open, he found Rodriguez at the bottom of the shaft. She had fallen six stories, or seven, depending on the account.
The San Antonio Current, working from the state inspector's report, had the hotel two weeks overdue for its state-mandated inspection and a maintenance worker rigging a brake repair with a jumper cable. Texas regulators fined Otis $60,000 for negligent work on the brakes and the hotel's owner $25,800 for skipping inspections. The inspector's summary of the maintenance history ran to one sentence: "no one actually did anything meaningful or effective to uncover the real problem(s)."
Her daughter said it plainly that December. "It's no accident, there was negligence here."
They still call them the haunted elevators. Not one of the ghost stories is about her.
