The Excelsior House Hotel in Jefferson, Texas keeps a journal in Room 215 for guests to write down what happened in the night: a rocking chair that moves, a veiled woman rocking a baby, a headless man in the hall.
The Excelsior House Hotel in Jefferson, Texas keeps a journal in Room 215 so guests can write down what happened to them in the night. The room is the Jay Gould Room, second floor, and the entries have a shape to them. A rocking chair that moves with nobody in it. A door that opens and shuts on its own. Cold spots, footsteps in an empty hallway, the flat sense of being watched. A woman in black, sometimes veiled, carrying a baby she rocks. And out in the corridor, a man with no head.
The most-told night in that room never made the journal. In the early 1970s, scouting locations for The Sugarland Express, Steven Spielberg is said to have been given 215. He threw his briefcase into the rocking chair and the chair threw it back at him. He lay awake feeling watched. Sometime after midnight he woke to a small boy in old-fashioned clothes standing there, asking whether he was ready for breakfast.
He got his entire crew up instead. "I swear my room was haunted," he said in a quote traced to Dallas Morning News columnist John Anders. "I made everyone wake up, pack up, and get back in the cars at about two o'clock in the morning. We had to drive 20 miles to the nearest Holiday Inn, and everybody was hot at me. I should add that I am not normally superstitious."
The guide who has walked tour groups past the hotel for years on the Historic Jefferson Ghost Walk went looking for his signature and says his name is not in the register. She rests the story on the Anders column and a television interview she remembers, in which Spielberg said he had never been in a haunted house but had been in two haunted hotels, the Stanley in Colorado and this one. Nobody has turned up the column or the interview since. And the documented Texas locations for The Sugarland Express run to Sugar Land, San Antonio, Floresville and Del Rio, none of them within about 300 miles of Jefferson.
The hotel is older than the story and stranger than it. The frame wing went up in 1858 for a riverboat captain, back when steamboats could reach Jefferson from New Orleans, and the state marker by the door calls it the oldest hotel in East Texas. Authentic Texas credits the Excelsior name to Kate Wood, a German-born widow who bought the place in 1878 and held it for decades. One traveler who stayed here in 2019 wrote about hearing voices in empty rooms, speaking German.
Ask at the desk and you get the house line. A Houstonia writer checked in during 2019 and asked about the ghosts, and the clerk told him, "Oh no, those are just stories." He went up to his room. A small plaque by the desk gave him the wi-fi password. It was Casper123.
