Guests at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio phone the front desk about a maid in a lace apron who walks past and won't answer. Staff say she's Sallie White, a chambermaid shot by her husband in 1876. The hotel paid $32 to bury her.
The Menger Hotel has stood beside Alamo Plaza in San Antonio since 1859, and its front desk keeps a stock answer ready for one kind of late-night call. A guest phones down to report a maid in the corridor who walked past and wouldn't answer: long skirt, white apron, a bandana tied around her head. In Kinky Friedman's 2001 Texas Monthly account of a night here, the clerk's reply is that maids haven't worn those lace uniforms in eighty years.
The staff know who they mean. Her name was Sallie White, and she made up rooms here.
On March 28, 1876, her common-law husband shot her. She died two days later. Ernesto Malacara, who worked at the Menger for 24 years, told Texas Monthly that Sallie is the most frequently sighted ghost in the building, that he'd fielded hundreds of reports from guests, and that he'd seen her himself. "She was a pretty mulatto chambermaid at the hotel," he said. "She often tied her hair back with a bandanna."
She seems to be working her shift. Guests and staff describe her at night in the oldest part of the hotel, carrying an armload of clean towels or folding linens, on the second floor or the third depending on who's telling it. San Antonio Magazine adds the smell of lavender and a towel cart nobody is pushing.
The hotel paid to bury her. Ghost City Tours quotes the 1876 receipt displayed in the lobby, which records the cash paid out for Sallie White, "col'd chambermaid, deceased, murdered by her husband" — $25.00 for the grave, $7.00 for the coffin.
She isn't the only one who stayed on. Richard King, the cattle baron who founded the King Ranch, died in his suite at the Menger in April 1885. That suite is the King Ranch Suite today, remodeled since, its door moved to a different wall. Ghost City Tours and Haunted Rooms both tell it the same way: he comes in through the wall where his door used to be.
Friedman's piece reports "two rooms in the Menger into which some maids will enter only in pairs, like animals at Noah's ark, because of recurrent ghostly activity." Texas Monthly gives no room numbers for them, and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, which describes a second-floor room maids prefer to clean in pairs, gives none either. He also woke to something at the foot of his own bed, and when he described it over breakfast, Malacara answered without pausing. "That's our Sallie."
Everyone at the Menger can name her. Nobody can find her. No newspaper account of the 1876 shooting has surfaced, no record of an arrest for the man who killed her has ever turned up, and the grave the hotel bought for $25.00 has never been located.
