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CHAPTER 6

Emily Morgan Hotel

DOWNTOWN SAN ANTONIO

LOCATED IN ONE OF THE LARGEST AND MOST imposing buildings in downtown San Antonio, the Emily Morgan Hotel is one of the city’s quintessential lodgings—all the more so in that it is the “official hotel of the Alamo”—and at the same time stranger and much different from any of the others. Its merits as a beautiful luxury hotel aside, it has both a unique and atypical history and, as its namesake, the woman who may well have inspired the classic song “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

“The Emily Morgan Hotel was originally developed as a hospital, and then in 1984 it was converted into a hotel,” Allison Schiess of the Sisters Grimm Ghost Tours told me. “It is named after the woman, an indentured servant, who was ‘distracting’ Santa Anna when the Texians attacked the Mexicans during the Battle of San Jacinto. So, she helped us win our independence.”

The history of the building itself is interesting but fairly straightforward. However, the story behind its current namesake is equally fascinating and somewhat more complex.

In 1924, what is now the Emily Morgan Hotel opened as the Medical Arts Building. Noted architect Ralph Cameron designed the distinctive 13-story reinforced concrete Gothic Revival tower, a style popular for high-rise buildings during that era, and its ornamentation includes terra-cotta gargoyles depicting figures with toothaches and other medical ailments. It is distinguished by a glazed terra-cotta exterior on its top three and bottom three levels and faced with light-colored brick on its intervening ones. The marquee over its main entrance and the panels between its first and second levels are made of cast iron painted to simulate bronze, while its roof is fashioned from wooden ribs covered with copper.

In 1976, the former medical building was converted into a modern office building and then, eight years later, retrofitted once again and opened as the Emily Morgan Hotel. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of Alamo Plaza, and in December 2012 became part of the DoubleTree by Hilton organization.

Emily Morgan, the woman for whom the hotel in San Antonio is named, has a somewhat more complex history. Everything, in fact, from her very name, to the role she played during the Texas Revolution, to whether or not she is the subject of the state’s most iconic song is the subject of some dispute. Some sources hold that she was a veritable Texas Mata Hari at the one extreme, while others dismiss her as a pawn of circumstances and try to ignore her entirely. As is often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Emily D. West (c. 1815–1891) was a free woman of color, “high yellow” in the parlance of the day, who was born in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1835, when she was about 20 years old, West was contracted by Colonel James Morgan of New York to work as an indentured servant for a year—and, following the custom of the era, was supposed to have taken the surname of her patron. She was, accordingly, sent to serve as a housekeeper at the New Washington Association’s hotel in Morgan’s Point, Texas, on the shores of Galveston Bay and not far from what is now Houston.

In the meantime, war broke out in the region in October 1835 with the start of the Texas Revolution. Thus it was that on April 16, 1836, several months into her term of service, the woman known as Emily Morgan was captured by Mexican troops and, along with other local people, forced to travel with the forces of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. This led to her being in the Mexican army camp at Buffalo Bayou, at a spot in what is now the city of Houston, on April 21, six weeks after the fall of the Alamo. There, Santa Anna was preparing to face forces under the command of Sam Houston and expected to achieve yet another victory and put down the revolution once and for all.

According to legend, the attractive Morgan was in bed with and entertaining the womanizing generalissimo during his afternoon siesta (some variants include her merely dancing for him, while others go so far as to have her actually drugging him). Commander and men alike were caught off guard when the Texians attacked, savagely defeating the Mexicans in minutes at what became known as the Battle of San Jacinto, bringing the war to an end and permitting the formation of an independent Republic of Texas. Santa Anna fled and was found hiding under a tree clad in a dressing gown and slippers (attire that sparked rumors among the rugged Texians that the Mexican commander had tried to escaped disguised as a woman).

“The Battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans owing to the influence of a mulatto girl belonging to Colonel Morgan, who was closeted in the tent with General Santa [Anna], at the time cry was made, ‘The enemy! They come! They come!’” wrote British diarist William Bollaert. “She delayed Santa [Anna] so long that order could not be restored readily again.”

Because of her reputed beauty and ostensible role in keeping the brutal and womanizing Santa Anna from paying due attention to his military responsibilities, Morgan also has been identified by many as the woman immortalized in “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” The song appears, in fact, to have been written in 1836 and the original version does indeed describe its subject as “the sweetest rose of color.”

Whatever role she might have played in the triumph of the Texian revolutionaries, Morgan wanted to leave Texas after the Battle of San Jacinto. She had, however, lost the documents indicating she was free when she was captured by the Mexicans, and in this era of slavery was therefore unable to obtain a passport so that she could travel back to the United States. Morgan was eventually able to overcome this when Major Isaac Moreland, commandant of the Texas military garrison at Galveston, vouched for her, and it appears that she took passage back to New York in March 1837.

Emily Morgan is, in any event, an appropriate namesake for a grand and mysterious hotel that is, by all accounts, haunted and where people have experienced many profound paranormal phenomena.

“The building has 13 floors, but because 13 is considered to be unlucky, the numbering on the floors goes from 12 to 14,” Allison Schiess told me (a practice common in many tall buildings). “The 12th floor was the operating level. People will see nurses appear in the hallways pushing gurneys and then disappear. They also say that they get touched by something when no one is there. The swimming pool is constructed out of stainless steel taken from the old hospital operating tables, and the 14th floor still smells exactly like a hospital to this day.”

Olfactory phenomena, for some reason more often reported in hotels than anywhere else, are indeed one of the characteristics of the Emily Morgan.

“A morgue and a crematory were in the basement, and people will hear voices and footsteps and can still smell the scent of the bodies being burned,” Schiess said. She added that she has personally experienced going from floor to floor of the hotel and discovering that each had a completely different odor to it. Furthermore, she told me, she has found that individuals within the same group will each smell different things on various floors. When friends visit from out of town, she said, she likes to bring them to the Emily Morgan so that they can experience this.