In Brief
At the Sainte Claire Hotel in downtown San Jose, the floors were carpeted years ago. Staff still hear high heels clicking down the upstairs halls. The story they tell to explain it is a bride named Julia, left at the altar in the 1930s.
The Full Story
At the Sainte Claire Hotel in downtown San Jose — open today as the Westin, all 171 rooms modernized — the staff keep hearing high heels in the upstairs corridors. Clicking, click-clacking, the way a hard sole carries on a hard floor. The trouble is the floors were carpeted over years ago. There's nothing up there for a heel to strike.
The story they tell to explain it has a name, though it's the ghost-tour guides who supply it, not any record: Julia. The way they tell it, she came to the hotel sometime in the 1930s to be married in the Palm Room, in her wedding dress, and was left at the altar. She went down to the basement and never came back up.
None of that is written down. No newspaper, no death record, no coroner's note names a Julia, or the wedding, or the basement. The whole figure lives in the telling — a bride who stalks the corridors, in the words of one published account of haunted San Jose, and otherwise nothing you can point to.
What the staff and guests report is more specific than the story behind it. A guest photographing near the Palm Room fireplace, where Julia was supposed to have married, said the pictures came back with a bride's feet and the train of a gown behind a figure no one had seen. On the second and sixth floors there's a "smoking ghost" — a shadow that comes with the impression of smoke. In the lobby, objects move and doors go on their own.
The building sits over the footprint of the old Eagle Brewery, closed by Prohibition in 1918, and the lore folds in dead brewery workers down where the lobby's worst disturbances cluster.
But it's the heels people come back to. A woman walking angrily down a hall, in shoes that should make no sound, over carpet that's been there for years.
