Guests on the fifth floor of the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio report a shadow in the corner, angry voices, the sounds of a struggle. In 1965 the man police cornered in Room 536 shot himself there, and the woman he is said to have killed was never found.
The St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio rents one of its old fifth-floor rooms as two rooms now, and the guests who sleep there report the same handful of things: a shadowy man in the corner, angry voices, the sounds of a struggle in a room where nothing is moving. Employees say the fifth floor has a feeling to it. The space they mean was Room 536.
On February 8, 1965, a housekeeper named Maria Luisa Guerra opened Room 636 at the Gunter Hotel a few blocks away and found a man standing beside the bed holding a bundle. Blood had soaked the carpet, the walls, and the bed. Police found small pieces of flesh in the bathroom and concluded a body had been taken apart in there.
The man was Walter Emerick, 38. Legends of America's account of the case describes him as a petty criminal who lived with his mother in San Antonio, and has him checked into the Gunter under the name Albert Knox and a fictitious Ohio address. Staff at Schilo's delicatessen knew him as a regular, and said that on February 1 he had been dining there with a tall, slim blonde woman.
Emerick left the Gunter and came to the St. Anthony, where he asked for Room 636 — the same number. It was taken. He accepted 536 instead. Police traced him there, and on February 10, as they came to the door, he shot himself in the head with a .22.
She was never found. The woman was never identified, nobody matching her description was ever reported missing, no body was recovered, and San Antonio Magazine still calls it the city's most famous unsolved murder. Haunted Rooms America carries the ugliest account of what he is supposed to have done with her, involving a meat grinder and the hotel plumbing. No police report, inquest record, or newspaper story survives to support it.
The hotel's other ghosts are gentler company. There is a woman in a red evening gown, stood up at the hotel by a married lover, though the tellings disagree on whether she died in a third-floor bathtub or of a heart attack after leaving a party early, and on whether she appears in the upstairs halls or a ground-floor restroom. And near the Cavalier room there is one you only smell. Debbie Gonzalez, the hotel's senior sales manager, described her to KSAT in 2024: "you could go into that bathroom and smell lavender. You look under the stalls and there was nobody in there."
The bar off the lobby is called Haunt. It pours a cocktail named The Emerick — orange bitters, rose water, sugar, "ghost" whiskey, Amarena cherry juice — and the bartenders tell their version of the killing while they build it. A second drink is named for the Lady in Red. The man who died upstairs is on the menu.
