The Holiday Inn Express on Camaron Street in San Antonio was the old Bexar County Jail, with a gallows trap door cut into its third floor. Guests report apparitions dropping through the ceiling, hymn music before dawn, and chains rattling at 5 a.m.
The Holiday Inn Express on Camaron Street in San Antonio spent 84 years as the Bexar County Jail, and guests there report apparitions falling through the ceiling, as though a body had just been dropped through it.
One was. The county built its gallows inside the jail rather than out in a yard, unusual for a time when hangings were staged in public. Alamo City Ghost Tours' account of the building has zoning limits pushing it from two stories to three, with the execution chamber going onto the new third floor and a trap door cut into it. The condemned man stood up there. Officials, reporters and other inmates waited on the second floor to watch him come down. Haunted Hotel Stays describes the body left hanging in the central atrium afterward, where the rest of the prisoners could see it. Men were walked to the block with chains latched around their ankles.
The last of them was Clemente Apolinar. A Ghosthunting San Antonio write-up has him living in the jail a year and a half before they came for him on 23 February 1923. He refused the hood. The drop was miscalculated. When the trap released, the rope nearly took his head off. A federal narcotics agent, writing it up 17 years later, recorded "a drop longer than usual" that "jerked the jugular vein in two, and that the blood spurted on the people around the scaffold."
He was 31, and the last man Bexar County ever hanged. Every execution after his went to Huntsville and the electric chair.
The jail closed in 1962. The building passed through the county archives and an earlier hotel before this one, and the reports never stopped. Faint hymn music turns up on the third floor before dawn, described as the tune prisoners sang on the walk to the gallows, though no jail record, memoir or newspaper says they sang anything at all. Ghost City Tours collects guest accounts of chains rattling across the floors around 5 a.m., and names two of the figures people describe: Brother Miguel, who turns up in the business center where a chapel used to be, and Maria Consuela, who appears out by the pool. The Ghosthunting San Antonio write-up and the Haunted Rooms directory both have beds showing the indentation of someone lying in them, then smoothing out, and a propped-open third-floor door that shuts on people.
What put Apolinar on that third floor happened on 16 August 1921, when he beat a 14-year-old boy to death with a rock beside a creek outside town. Deputies found him hours later at a relative's house with one of the boy's eyes in his pocket. He said he just wanted to keep it. His lawyers argued insanity; the court declared him sane. The same narcotics file that described the blood on the scaffold noted that many believed a crazy man had been hanged, and that his was one of the largest funerals San Antonio ever held.
