HAUNTED HOTEL
Seguin woman claims she solved murder with help from ghosts
SEGUIN — For almost 150 years, the murder of Emma Voelcker was a closed case: While sleeping in her New Braunfels home in the early hours hours of July 23, 1874, the 12-year-old was axed to death by William Faust, a family friend. Faust was tried and found guilty of the attack, during which he also mutilated his wife, Helene, who, although she survived, was blinded for life.
Most people at the time believed Faust had intended to murder his wife and that Emma was simply an innocent victim, killed to remove a potential eyewitness.
Recently, and with what she claims was help from the spirits of both Emma and Helene, author Erin O. Wallace-Ghedi, a self-proclaimed medium, says the verdict was wrong and that she has revealed the actual murderer.
Wallace-Ghedi and her husband say that Emma and Helene — as well as other spirits — inhabit the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Seguin, which they purchased in 2013 and have been rehabbing ever since. It’s currently not open to overnight guests.
Ghosts can be good for business. A reputation for being haunted can attract customers who want to commune with “real” otherworldly spirits or who simply enjoy the thrill of the thought of being near a ghost.
Area hotels said to be inhabited by spirits include Victoria’s Black Swan Inn, where about 75 percent of guests come for the ghost tours and investigations and other spooky events, according to owner Jo Ann Rivera.
“Even when we have corporate events, they get higher attendance because people are interested (in the ghosts),” she said.
San Antonio’s OnLive Hall of Fame Cafe owner April Ward embraced the opportunity when a ghost showed up in a surveillance video. When a paranormal investigator found other spirits, several of them children, Ward added several new menu items, including a Haunted Drink series with a punch made with dry ice.
“We get lots of customers coming in who want to sit by the ghosts,” said Ward, who already is gearing up for Halloween.
To fund the Magnolia’s rehab, the Ghedis host ghost tours about once a month for $25 a person with a 20-person limit, which would bring in $500 per event. They also arrange for occasional paranormal investigations for $100 a person, also with a 20-person limit, or $2,000 for a sold-out tour. The original 1850 dining room downstairs is available as an event venue for groups of up to 30, and there’s also a small gift shop.
The couple opens the building for free tours during city holidays, such as the Pecan Fest in October, according to Kyle Kramm, director of the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Main Street Program.
“When they do, the line runs around the block,” he said. “The hotel brings in a different type of tourist, people with an interest in the paranormal and in history.”
Wallace-Ghedi also has written several books of ghost stories. Her latest, “Mysteries of the Magnolia Hotel” (The History Press, $23.99) tells the story of how she believes she discovered the real murderer of Emma Voelcker.
The story begins in 2012, when Wallace-Ghedi was researching a book of ghost stories that eventually became “Haunted New Braunfels: A True Wild West Ghost Town.” While doing research in the New Braunfels Public Library, she heard the story of the Comal Town Traveling Ghost, said to be the spirit of a young girl who walked the streets of New Braunfels.
Not long after, she came across the translation of a German-language newspaper article about Emma’s murder. As soon as she began reading, she became convinced the spirit known as the traveling ghost was Emma, partly because the path the ghost was said to walk was the same route one would take to go from Emma’s home on Castell Street to the Comal Cemetery, where she is buried.
“It was like she was heading back home,” Wallace-Ghedi said.
Convinced she’d uncovered the traveling ghost’s identity, she included the accepted narrative of Emma’s murder in her “Haunted New Braunfels” book, which was published in 2013. She wrote that Faust was in Seguin on business — staying at the Magnolia Hotel — and that Helene, who didn’t like spending the night alone in their New Braunfels home, was at the Voelckers’, sleeping in young Emma’s room.
She explained how Faust was believed to have filched a horse from the Magnolia’s stable across the street and ridden an hour to New Braunfels where he committed the murder, and then returned to Seguin, all without attracting notice. The only eyewitness to the attack was Emma’s younger brother Emil, who told the police he woke up between 1 and 2 in the morning when he heard noises from his sister’s room. Entering the room, he saw a man hitting Emma with “an ax or a club” and that Helene had already been struck a fatal blow.
The attack caused a sensation. A story in the Express newspaper, a forerunner to the San Antonio Express-News, described the gruesome scene: “Miss Voelcker’s head was split ear to ear, and Mrs. Faust was cut once across the eyes, when she raised and cried out aloud, and was pressed down again by the murderer and then received another cut in the forehead.”
Faust was later tried and found guilty for the crimes. Sentenced to prison, he was moved several times, purportedly for his own safety. But when he was placed in the basement of the Comal County courthouse in New Braunfels, and despite being under heavy guard, an unknown assailant was able to shoot him through a window, killing him. No one was ever charged with the shooting.
During the Ghedis’ renovation, which continues to this day, the couple quickly grew inured to hearing doors slamming or furniture being dragged across the floor, footsteps and strange knockings at all hours.
“You get used to it,” said Wallace-Ghedi. “They’ve almost become like family.”
Of all the spirits she claims inhabit the building, one in particular caught her attention.
“It was a young girl; we’d hear her laughing,” she said. “Then one day I saw her standing in the doorway and recognized her from a photo I’d found. It was vague, but I could tell by the shape of her face, the dress she wore, her ringlets. I just knew it was Emma.”
But if it was, Emma had lived — and died — in New Braunfels, so why would her ghost be in Seguin?
Wallace-Ghedi says the answer came when she and her husband visited Helene Faust’s grave in Selma. She felt an unmistakable warmth emanating from the site, a feeling both “joyous” and “kind.” Then she heard a voice she claims was Helene’s telling her, “Turn the pages.”
Taking this to mean she needed to research what happened after William Faust was shot and killed, Wallace-Ghedi returned to her computer and discovered an Express article dated June 26, 1879, five years after the murder. The article told of the deathbed confession to the killing by a man named M.P. Deavers, an itinerant music teacher who was staying at the Magnolia Hotel in Seguin at the same time as Faust.
Although the article didn’t explain why Deavers was in the Voelckers’ home that night, Wallace-Ghedi theorizes that he may have overheard Faust talk about the relatively wealthy family and decided to ride to New Braunfels to rob them, and then attacked them both so he couldn’t be identified.
If Faust is innocent, the New Braunfels Police Department has no plans to do anything about it. There’s no obvious process to reopen the case or to reverse Faust’s conviction should it be merited.
“The NBPD wasn’t founded until 1930,” NBPD spokesman David Ferguson explained. “Before then, the city operated under a city marshal system.”
Wallace-Ghedi, however, was convinced she needed to right a longterm wrong. “Everything I’d thought about who killed Emma, everything I’d written about it was wrong,” she said. “We’d been running ghost tours where we identified William Faust as the killer.”
So she wrote a new account of the murder in “Mysteries of the Magnolia Hotel.”
Emma Voelcker isn’t the only spirit the Ghedis say they have in the hotel. There’s the distressed traveling salesman who committed suicide by cutting his own throat; the Weeping Lady, brokenhearted because her sweetheart never arrived by stagecoach; Itsy, the young girl whose single mother locked her in their room while she went to work so she calmed herself by singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and more.
Billy Driver and Mark Morrow are Austin-based paranormal investigators who’ve explored the Magnolia several times, including a two-part investigation for their TV show “Strange Town” available on YouTube and PBS.org.
“It’s a pretty amazing building, probably in the top five of the 20 or so places we’ve investigated,” said Morrow. “Every time we’ve done investigative tours something unusual happens.