Staff at the San Antonio State Hospital say figures show up in the windows and shadows move through the halls. The ground behind them holds around 1,100 patients who died in residence, buried under markers with nothing written on them.
The San Antonio State Hospital is a working psychiatric facility on the south side of San Antonio, Texas, and the people who work there say the grounds are haunted. RJA Ghost Tours reports ghastly figures in the windows and employees who keep seeing shadows move down the halls. "I work there. Been there for 8 years," one current employee told Ghost City Tours. "It's a scary place." Another was shorter: "There's Death around... We hear and see things."
Nobody names the ghost. No account ties it to a patient, a ward, or a room. What sits under the hospital is more specific.
It opened in 1892 as the Southwestern Insane Asylum, built for a few hundred people. An ArcGIS StoryMap on the asylum describes those first grounds as a self-contained village of crops, livestock and a lake for fishing. By 1940 it held 2,854, and a waiting list of more than 700 sat in county jails across the state.
Ghost City Tours' history keeps the names. Chuauhtemoc "Chino" Garcia, a 19-year-old University of Texas student, was admitted and died three days later with no cause given. Raul Chapa, admitted after a nervous breakdown, was dead in 11 days. "Chapa was not a violent mental case," his physician said. "He was physically healthy." The same account has a 75-year-old man beaten, starved and dehydrated, down 30 pounds in 15 days before he died. Of Rose Fisher Harrison, elderly and immobilized, a hospital doctor is quoted: "She's so old, we want the young ones."
Stephen S. Aldridge, a World War II veteran, spent three months there as a patient and testified about the attendants. "I've seen attendants walk up and slap an inmate down on an impulse, for no reason." Governor Coke Stevenson opened an investigation. By Ghost City Tours' account, little came of it.
The dead never left the property. Texas Standard reports 1,100 people buried in the hospital's cemetery, all of them dead in residence, only a handful with a headstone. Find a Grave describes South Mount Calm flatly: mostly plain rectangular markers, a very few carrying numbers or names. The same Texas Standard report follows one of the unmarked graves to Jules Lucadou, a schoolteacher turned county tax assessor admitted around 1896. He stayed roughly 23 years and died in 1919, and his great-great-grandson drove down from Houston on the hundredth anniversary to stand near where the records put him.
No source says which buildings the staff were watching. A 2016 assessment found 80 percent of the campus in critical condition and recommended tearing it all down. A $357 million replacement opened in April 2024 under the same name. The windows may not be there anymore.
A News 4 San Antonio investigation found the second cemetery lost its only road around 2020, when an apartment complex went up beside it. It was the road the chaplains and the families used. Jerry Alderete, a former hospital nurse, spent more than nine months trying to get it back.
