The elevators at Hotel Gibbs in San Antonio have not run in years, and guests keep watching them open and close on their own. The hotel stands on the northwest corner of the old Alamo compound, on the line of the north wall where Travis fell.
The elevators at Hotel Gibbs in San Antonio stopped running when the building was turned into a hotel, and guests keep watching them work anyway. The doors on the dead cars slide open, hold, and shut again with nobody near the call button. People describe seeing "a billow of a dress skirt slide inside before they close."
Two passengers turn up in those cars. The haunted-travel accounts describe a woman in a vintage 1940s suit boarding and stepping off again, and a blue-uniformed elevator operator wearing white gloves. The elevators themselves were among the first in the city. The Gibbs Building went up in 1909 at 105 N. Alamo Street, eight stories of white glazed brick and terra cotta, San Antonio's first high-rise office building, with the owner's initial carved into the door-knobs and the elevator grills. Even after a major restoration in 1998, the place went on employing live operators, probably the last downtown building in San Antonio to do so.
The corner it sits on explains the rest. The building occupies the northwest corner of the original Alamo compound, on the line of the fort's north wall. The final assault came around five in the morning on March 6, 1836, and was over inside ninety minutes. William Barret Travis was among the first defenders to die, shot in the head at the north bastion while firing his shotgun down at the soldiers below him. The Haunted Rooms listing puts the hotel's front desk on the spot where he fell, and has guests and staff hearing him shout, "Come on, boys, give 'em hell!"
Something else came out of that ground. The Conservation Society of San Antonio records that brass cannon, buried and later reused to reinforce the foundation of a drugstore on the old Maverick homestead, turned up again while the Gibbs was being built. The ghost-tour tellings say there were two of them. No excavation report, museum accession or 1909 newspaper item has been found to settle the count.
The cannon did not stay in the foundations, and neither did whoever is said to be pushing them. Figures are reported out on the street, shoving a cannon toward the hotel before they vanish. The sighting everyone traces it back to belongs to a security guard at the post office next door, who watched two shadowy shapes haul a heavy cannon through the early morning, took them for a reenactment crew, and afterward established that no reenactment had been scheduled. No source gives a year for it.
In one telling, on a travel blog, the hauntings began only once the cannon left the site for museums across the city: one to the Alamo across the street, the other to the Briscoe Western Art Museum, some blocks south. The Briscoe opened in 2013.
