Sainte Claire Hotel

Guests at The Westin San Jose (the old Sainte Claire Hotel) keep hearing high heels click down the hallways, which is impossible because every floor has been carpeted for years. Staff think it's Julia, a bride abandoned at the altar in the Palm Room in the 1930s who killed herself in the basement that same night.

Guests at The Westin San Jose keep hearing high heels click-clacking down the hallways. That shouldn't be possible. Every hardwood floor in the building has been covered in thick carpet for years. But Julia walked these halls in heels in the 1930s, and she apparently hasn't figured out the floor changed.

Julia's story is the one the ghost tour guides always lead with, and for good reason. In the early 1930s, she was dressed and ready to marry in the hotel's Palm Room when she got the news. The groom wasn't coming. He'd abandoned her at the altar in front of the whole guest list. That night, she went down to the basement of the hotel and killed herself in her wedding dress. Staff have been meeting her ever since.

The hotel opened in September 1926 as the Sainte Claire, built in exactly one year on the footprint of the Eagle Brewery (Santa Clara County's first brewery, closed by Prohibition in 1918). Construction and furnishings ran a million dollars, a staggering number for the era, and San Jose papers started calling it the "Million Dollar Hotel." It hosted Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Hope. The Spanish Revival Renaissance building made the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. It's a beautiful place. It also has layers.

Julia is the ghost everyone talks about, and she's the one who shows up in the evidence. A photographer working an event near the Palm Room fireplace later noticed something odd in one of the frames: the train of a wedding gown trailing behind a figure that nobody on the scene had seen with the naked eye. Staff members have walked into offices and found her standing there. Late-shift employees describe footsteps in empty corridors and the sound of heels on floors that should only be carpet.

She isn't the only one. Housekeeping and security refer to the "Smoking Ghost," a dark figure that appears on the second and sixth floors, always with the impression of smoke around it. Guests have called the front desk to complain about cigarette smoke in rooms where nobody was staying. The first floor has the loudest activity, though. Objects move in the lobby on their own. Doors swing. Noises come from empty corners. Staff attribute at least some of that to the brewery workers who came before the hotel. The Eagle Brewery reportedly had brutal working conditions and several workplace deaths during its operation. That history was paved over, literally, when the hotel went up, but the lobby sits right on top of where much of it happened.

The Sainte Claire shows up in Elizabeth Kile's book Haunted San Jose and appears on most of the downtown ghost tours. It's a regular stop because the activity is consistent. Guides don't have to embellish it. They just tell Julia's story, point out that the floors are carpeted, and let the guests make up their own minds about the click of heels in the hallway upstairs.

What's striking about this place isn't the drama of Julia's death. It's the fact that a century later, in a fully modernized Westin with 170 rooms and a good breakfast and a Starbucks off the lobby, the staff still talks about her like she works there. Nobody tries to exorcise her. Nobody acts particularly rattled. They've just folded her into the building the way you fold in a difficult regular. She's the one in the wedding dress. She walks at night. Don't worry about her. Worry about whatever's in the basement.