History is a haunting presence at restored historic Seguin hotel

SEGUIN — When guests begin checking in next month at Erin and Jim Ghedi’s beautifully restored Magnolia Hotel, chances are they’ll be sharing a room with a guest or two who checked in years ago, decades ago, more than a century ago. And never checked out.

And chances are the presentday guests won’t really mind. In fact, reservation requests are pouring in from around the country, mainly from folks who’ve never heard of this prosperous, pleasant town on the green Guadalupe east of San Antonio. They’re hankering for the opportunity to spend a night or two in what may be the most haunted hotel in Texas.

Hoteliers to the haunted is not exactly the role the Ghedis had in mind in 2013, when they bought the ramshackle, two-story building a block off green and leafy Central Park downtown. They’re not complaining, mind you; it’s just not what they were expecting.

San Antonio natives — and high school sweethearts who got back together after 25 years — they live in Austin, where Jim is an export/import broker, a preservationist and a collector of antiques and muscle cars. Erin is a retired museum curator, a genealogist and an amateur historian. A descendant of one of the founding families of New Braunfels, she grew up hearing Texas tales from her grandmother.

With their yen for Texas history, the couple thought they might enjoy buying and restoring a historic house or building and were about to make an offer on a small building in Gonzales when they happened to see a YouTube video produced by Seguin’s Main Street Program. The video was a desperate plea for someone to save the town’s first hotel. The Ghedis took a look and had a feeling they had to have the old place — despite the shape it was in and despite the money it would take to bring it back to life.

“We didn’t buy it with the idea of making it into a business,” Erin told me a couple days ago. “Just to have fun.”

The building they found probably would have been razed had they not bought it. Vacant for more than 20 years, the place was an eyesore, its fetid, awful rooms home to sad and desperate crack addicts. “It was demolition by neglect,” Jim said. “The roof was caving in, the walls were falling apart.”

Few knew about the 90-foot cypress beams holding the place up, the basement fortress dug by hand out of the caliche as a protection against Indian raids. Seguin is proud of its colorful past, but most locals had pretty much forgotten the old building’s amazing history.

It was a simple two-room log cabin with dogtrot in the beginning. Its builder was James Campbell, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, a Texas Ranger and one of the founders of the town originally called Walnut Springs

and then Seguin, after Tejano patriot Juan Seguin.

The wood Campbell used for his cabin was originally intended for a fort, but when locals decided they no longer needed protection from the Indians, they sold it to Campbell. He lived in the cabin a short while before being killed by Comanches.

Long way back

The new owner, Jeremiah Strother Calvert, expanded the cabin, which became Seguin’s first stagecoach stop and eventually a hotel. In 1847, the legendary Ranger, Capt. Jack Hays, married the owner’s daughter, Susan Calvert, in the parlor. (A Hays mannequin sits in a chair by the parlor fireplace.)

Slaves dug out the basement shelter. Women and children would lock themselves in the dark, lowceiling room when the men rode out to engage the Comanches. The Ghedis regularly uncover shards of pottery, dishes and pieces of sulfur, presumably used to make bullets. The room later became Seguin’s jail; what’s left of bars on the windows and latches for the cells are still visible.

In 1850, three buildings on the site were joined together to become the Magnolia Hotel, one of the finest hostelries in Texas.

Seguin resident and future governor John “Oxcart” Ireland — the governor who decreed that the Capitol be pink Texas granite, not white Indiana limestone — was a frequent visitor to the Magnolia. His daughter, Matilda Ireland, married the son of the hotel’s owner, and the couple ran the hotel. When the railroad finally came to Seguin, thanks in large part to Ireland’s efforts, he made a speech on the hotel’s front balcony before joining a grand celebration inside.

During Reconstruction, Union soldiers camped across the street. Ulysses S. Grant, on a tour of Reconstruction efforts across the South, was a hotel guest.

The Magnolia flourished until 1910, when it became a boarding house. The Lannom family bought it in 1927, turned the rooms into apartments and lived on site. Although the building was abandoned around 2000, it remained in the family until the Ghedis rescued the derelict property.

As the Ghedis tell the story, the ghosts began to appear almost immediately. Both Jim and Erin are receptive to their presence, although Erin seems to be the one most in touch. Her mother, she told me, was a well-known psychic who occasionally helped the San Antonio Police Department with missing-persons cases.

“I thought that everybody saw ghosts,” she said. “I’m not a psychic myself. I’m what they call a medium, an empath.”

Among the first to appear was Idella Lumpkin, an African American woman and lifelong Seguin resident who died in 1965 at age 90. Known as the town fortune-teller, “she was, without a doubt,” Erin has written, “the guardian of the building and regulated who and when a spirit could come forward to communicate with me.”

More than a dozen ghosts have introduced themselves to the Ghedis, and in some cases allowed themselves to be photographed. Among them is a personage they call “The Cowboy,” who rode in on the stagecoach from San Antonio and shot himself in the head just as he arrived at the hotel. There’s an African American youngster named Lil’ John who enjoys tossing pebbles at unsuspecting guests near the backdoor. His photograph was captured in a large mirror in the room where he likes to hang out.

Every room seems to have a spirit in residence, including the gentleman’s smoke room where Campbell, the Texas Ranger and original owner, liked to hang out. The sound of his boots walking across the floor, the smell of cigar smoke and his rocking chair moving on its own are commonplace.

The most famous of the ghostly guests is 12-year-old Emma Voelcker, a sweetfaced girl whose head was bashed in by a nighttime killer at the Voelcker family home in nearby New Braunfels in 1874. Both the alleged killer and the real killer (who confessed years later) — it’s a long, fascinating story — stayed at the Magnolia that night. Emma has become a favorite of those who’ve taken the Ghedis’ weekend ghost tours.

Ghosts welcome

So, what to make of the ghosts? Not being a medium or an empath, I have no idea.

I suppose I’m an agnostic, of sorts, but as the friendly couple showed me around the rambling, old building, both the restored rooms and the unrestored, I caught myself glancing over shoulders as we talked. Erin showed me the photos — ghostly yet recognizable presences hovering behind real-life people, Emma’s confessed killer peering from an upstairs window — but as best I could tell, just we three were in the building on Wednesday afternoon.

“Most are here because they’re happy,” Erin told me. “They want to be here.”

The Ghedis are happy to have them.

“They’re helping pay for all this,” Jim said with a grin.

The Magnolia Hotel will begin receiving guests on Aug. 12.