EMILY MORGAN HOTEL Hotel — San Antonio, Texas Status: Operating · Access: Open to public · est. 1926 Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/emily-morgan-hotel-san-antonio-texas/ 1926 medical-arts building turned hotel with hospital-era ghosts. A hotel in San Antonio, Texas, built in 1926, Emily Morgan Hotel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. 1926 medical-arts building turned hotel with hospital-era ghosts. The archive files it under haunted places, former hospitals and historic hotels. The dossier holds 3 reported claims, 1 legend and 2 documented facts, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. It still takes guests. The thirteen-story Gothic tower at 705 East Houston Street opened on April 12, 1926, as the Medical Arts Building — doctors’ offices and a fifty-bed hospital stacked over a granite base, one block off Alamo Plaza. The San Antonio Express reported the public called it the most talked-about building in the city; at 205 feet it was the tallest in San Antonio until the Milam Building passed it in 1928. The architects left the diagnosis on the façade: architect Ralph Cameron trimmed the Gothic Revival shaft with terra-cotta gargoyles depicting medical ailments — toothaches and worse — ornamental patients crawling the outside of the building that treated them inside. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD Construction began in November 1924 under developer Joseph Madison Nix, with Jack P. Haynes as general contractor. The medical floors ran until 1976; the building spent eight years as offices, then was gutted to the frame and reopened in 1984 as the Emily Morgan Hotel — the interior entirely rebuilt, the exterior kept. It entered the National Register in 1977 as part of the Alamo Plaza Historic District and became a DoubleTree in 2012. The name is its own erratum. The hotel honors “Emily Morgan,” theYellow Rose of Texas legend — the mulatto girl said to have occupied Santa Anna’s tent while Sam Houston charged at San Jacinto. The record says otherwise: Emily D. West was a free Black woman from New Haven who signed a year’s housekeeping contract with James Morgan in October 1835, was seized by Mexican cavalry at New Washington on April 16, 1836, and was in Santa Anna’s camp by force, not design. Historians note she probably never set foot in San Antonio, and that the song predates the myth. The hotel is named, incorrectly, in her honor — the error is on the register, literally. The corner spire was not ornament alone — it marks the northeast corner of the original Alamo courtyard, so the hospital was raised directly over the mission’s old footprint line. When the 1984 conversion gutted the interior, preservationists kept the skin: every interior wall a guest now reports through is younger than the building’s reputation. WHAT GETS REPORTED The claims index the floor plan the hospital left behind. Guests on the twelfth and fourteenth floors — the old hospital and surgery levels — report opening their doors on patients in the hallway who are gone on the second look. Seventh floor and basement, where the morgue sat, draw their own reports; so do bathtubs found filled, lights on at night, phones ringing with no call on the line. Guides attribute the activity to the hospital era, and the hotel neither confirms nor discourages — USA Today once ranked it among the most haunted hotels in the world, which is the kind of listing a front desk keeps framed. San Antonio Magazine’s accounting adds the mundane inventory: medicine smells on floors that have not held a pharmacy since 1976, bathtubs found filled, lights answering switches nobody touched. WHAT REMAINS The gargoyles still diagnose passersby, and the building still watches the Alamo courtyard it was sited to overlook. The file’s summary: fifty years of surgery produced a roster no legend had to invent, and the name over the door is itself a documented error — fitting, for a file built on report rather than proof. The neighboring Menger runs its own haunted file — downtown San Antonio’s ghost map is dense enough that the Emily Morgan’s distinction is structural. It is the only tower on the list that came by its corridors medically. FILED CLAIMS — 3 on record, reported not verified · [Anecdotal] reported anomalies: Emily Morgan guests report voices, medicine smells, and figures on the former hospital floors — the claims attached to a Gothic tower that was a medical building before it was a hotel. The phantom smell of a hospital that closed in 1976 is the detail that makes the file: the building, the lore says, still remembers its first job. source: Emily Morgan Hotel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Morgan_Hotel) · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures in the halls tied to the hospital era and the Alamo view — apparitions distributed between the building's two identities: medical past and landmark present. The Emily Morgan stands close enough to the Alamo to share its shadow; the lore draws on both. The telling survives; the proof stays folklore. source: Emily Morgan Hotel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Morgan_Hotel) · [Anecdotal] reported anomalies: Reported footsteps and a presence in the upper floors — the ambient claims at the Emily Morgan, where the old operating floors are now guest rooms. San Antonio's skyline keeps one genuinely unsettling tower, and its guests keep the minutes. The telling survives; the proof stays folklore. The lore keeps its witness. source: Emily Morgan Hotel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Morgan_Hotel) HISTORY — 2 documented facts · [1926] Opened in 1926 as the Medical Arts Building; converted to a hotel in 1984. The hotel in San Antonio, Texas has its past on record — this entry belongs to that verified layer. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'Emily Morgan Hotel' carry the record. The record keeps it — history, not lore. · [1926] Opened 1926 as a hospital; named for the Yellow Rose of Texas legend. Emily Morgan Hotel's history is documented rather than told — this entry is part of that spine. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The record appears in 'Emily Morgan Hotel'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it. SOURCES — 1 cited · Emily Morgan Hotel — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Morgan_Hotel — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/