A hooded figure with the cowl pulled over its face turns up at the back of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, motionless, then gone. Just inside the door sits a marble coffin of charred bones the Archdiocese named as the Alamo dead.
The most-reported ghost at San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio stands at the back of the nave in a hooded robe with the cowl pulled forward over where a face should be. It doesn't approach anyone. It's there, motionless, and then it isn't. Ghost tour guides call it the Man in Black, or the Shadow Monk, and one paranormal site quotes demonologists who say the thing is no monk at all, only something wearing the shape of one, and that nobody should follow it.
A man in black eighteenth or nineteenth century clothing once trailed a tour group from the front of the cathedral to the back and disappeared; several people in the group described the same figure. One tour company reports shadow figures climbing the walls and columns at night with no body anywhere to cast them. Visitors report faces surfacing in the exterior stone, "a gaping mouth, two sunken eyes, the features of a skull."
Just inside the entrance sits a small marble coffin, and people who put a hand on it say it is cold. The inscription tells you what it holds: "Here lie the remains of Travis, Crockett, Bowie and other Alamo heroes... Exhumed July 28, 1936. Exposed to public view for a year. Entombed May 11, 1938."
Workmen found the box during a 1936 renovation, buried under the sanctuary railing near the altar. Charred bones, nails, buttons, shreds of military uniform. Archbishop Arthur J. Drossaerts declared them the Alamo dead. It was the centennial year of the battle.
The historian L. W. Kemp said the find couldn't be what it claimed. A pyre hot enough to burn roughly 180 bodies down to what Juan Seguín called "a few fractions" does not leave you hair and fabric and near-whole bone. The San Antonio Express reported in July 1936 that "tufts of light colored or red hair were found with the remains." Dr. Jack Shackleford, in the city weeks after the battle, wrote that the bones "had been reduced to cinders."
No cathedral burial record logs an Alamo interment, though the registers note other prominent dead. The Handbook of Texas says the defenders are almost certainly not there. In February 1996, Lee Spencer of the Alamo Defenders Descendants Association asked the Archdiocese to let the Smithsonian test the bones. "I just want the truth," she said. No record shows an answer.
The one ghost here with paperwork behind it is outside. People report a white stallion galloping in front of the cathedral, and the lore ties it to a horse buried in the plaza. That part happened. Four Apache chiefs and the presidio commander dug a pit in the middle of the square, set a live horse in it with a hatchet, a lance and six arrows, danced three times around the hole hand in hand, then rushed in and buried the animal alive to end the war.
