A woman in gray watches from the windows of the Spanish Governor's Palace in San Antonio, a well in the courtyard gurgles when it should be dry, and a hanging tree nobody can find in any record of the building stands in the same yard.
The Spanish Governor's Palace sits on the west side of Plaza de Armas in San Antonio, and the story people tell about it starts at the windows. A woman in gray stands inside, looking out, watching whoever walks onto the grounds. Ghost-tour histories say she was a guest of the presidio captain who died mysteriously the night she arrived. Sisters Grimm guide Lauren Schiess Swartz tells it another way: in the mid-1800s, when the place was a private home, burglars caught the woman of the house in the courtyard, and when she would not tell them where her valuables were, they beat her to death in a room on the far side of the building. Visitors who photograph through that room's window say figures turn up in the pictures that nobody saw standing there.
Ghost City Tours puts a 37-foot well in the courtyard, and a servant girl bound and dropped into it by robbers who came over the wall at night, her body recovered only after one of them confessed. "She drowned in that well," the telling goes, "on that dark night when robbers stole into the fortification." Another version has a dark-haired girl who simply fell, and is seen sitting on the well wall, weeping. Visitors and a custodian report gurgling and water moving in a well that should be dry.
The ghost tours put a hanging tree in the same courtyard. They call it the Tree of Sorrows, and it stood in, they say, for a jail the settlement never built: criminals tried, judged, and hanged where they stood, roughly 35 of them. KSAT's roundup of San Antonio haunts puts the count at more than 30. People claim to see figures swaying from branches that are not there anymore, and say a mark is still visible where the rope sat.
No record of the building mentions any of it. Not the landmark nomination, not the Handbook of Texas, not the markers bolted to the walls, not the museum's own website, which says nothing about ghosts at all.
In 2019, KSAT reported that San Antonio Paranormal Investigators had worked the building one August night with K2 meters, cameras, and recorders. They said the meter answered their questions, a recorder caught what sounded like a child giggling, and one photograph came back with a woman's figure in it.
The name was wrong from the beginning. Buildings of Texas says flatly that this is "not really a palace and never occupied by the governor of the province of Texas." It was the house of the presidio commander, finished in 1749, and the Texas preservationist Adina De Zavala gave it the grander name in a San Antonio Express column, thirteen years before the city bought it. Then the city hired architect Harvey P. Smith to restore it, and he rebuilt it so heavily that "it is difficult to say where the colonial ends and the restoration work begins." The U-shaped plan is his, Buildings of Texas says. So is the courtyard.
