Guests on the fourteenth floor of the Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio report a silent woman in white pushing a gurney. The floor is really the thirteenth, and for 50 years the building was a medical tower full of operating rooms.
On the fourteenth floor of the Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio, guests keep meeting a woman in white pushing a gurney. Sometimes she is in a nurse's uniform, sometimes a hospital gown, sometimes a long dress or a bride's gown, and sometimes she is walking the corridor with nothing in front of her at all. She never speaks. She never looks at anyone. She is gone before anyone can follow. "The details change," Jennifer Jones wrote in The Dead History, gathering up the accounts. "The feeling doesn't."
There is no fourteenth floor. The hotel's own history page lays out the arithmetic: the floor labeled fourteen is structurally the thirteenth, and there is no Room 1408, because those digits add to thirteen. The numbers run to 1407 and then skip to the Duke Suite.
The building spent 50 years as the Medical Arts Building, put up across from Alamo Plaza in the 1920s to hold more than 380 doctors' and dentists' offices. Terra-cotta gargoyles ring the exterior, and each one was carved to portray a medical ailment. One of them has a toothache. The top floor was laid out as a hospital: 30 patient rooms, 5 operating rooms, and its own ambulance entrance around on Avenue E. Doctors worked in the building until 1976.
Guests on the twelfth floor, where the surgeries were, report the clank of metal and the sound of an electric saw running in the early morning hours. On the hotel's own account, the rooms upstairs smell of antiseptic and rubbing alcohol.
The most corroborated thing here is water. The Dead History has the story of Deborah McNabb, a sales manager staying overnight for an event, who came back from dinner to a bathtub half full of bright blue water, pulled the keycard logs, and found that nobody had entered the room while she was out. Guests have called the front desk to report every faucet in the bathroom running at once, and the sinks are dry by the time staff get upstairs. In 2021 the general manager confirmed those calls and said there was no plumbing explanation.
The hotel is unusually willing to take its own legends apart. The lobby fireplace is not burning the original flame from a crematorium. The elevators do not deliver guests to the old morgue; those were technical faults, and they have been fixed. Staff do not avoid the basement morgue, because the employee cafeteria is down there and it is popular.
And Kole Siefken, the general manager, keeps his office in it. "In all my time with this hotel I have never been scared or seen shadows or heard voices," he says.
