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IS THE ALAMO THE MOST HAUNTED PLACE IN THE WEST?We have all heard the tragic story of the early morning of march 6, 1836; how the brave defenders fought to the last man and inspired the world.
And since the battle there have been many stories of ghostly encounters in and around the old mission, stories which are attributed to the heros; but possibly the Alamo was a haunted place before those men died there.
The Alamo was never intended to be a fort; that was not the purpose of the builders instead it was intended to shelter the priests who operated the mission and any local natives who accepted the civilizing influence of the church. The Mission San Antonio de Valero, named for St. Anthony of Padua, on the banks of the San Antonio River around 1718. because of the constant threat of attacks by Comanche and Apache war parties; They also established the nearby military garrison of San Antonio de Béxar, which soon became the center of a settlement known as San Fernando de Béxar (later renamed San Antonio). The Mission San Antonio de Valero housed missionaries and their Native American converts for some 70 years until 1793.
What remains today is very little of the actual fort; but looking at old diagrams one can see how the situation probably changed the structure and inhibited it`s intended purpose. One would think that the stables or the blacksmith would be outbuildings but what one finds is one wall of the “fort” (long vanished) is a long row of adobe shacks with the spaces between filled with earth and rocks, and walls were placed to provide some protection at either end. This coupled with the fact that the chapel roof was never completed until fairly modern times, long after the battle would lead one to surmise that the early residents of Bexar may have had a stressful exsistenc
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That people were killed violently on the site before the Texas Revolution is certainly easy to assume. The actual fort was quite large and rumors have circulated that the courtyard was a graveyard; probably because it was safer to dig inside of the walls than out at times. And not only violent deaths but others as well; accidents, sickness childbirth, and if there was no time to bury outside the courtyard would hold them. Or the spaces between the shacks? Some estimate that possibly a thousand people all told have died on the grounds of the Alamo-before the famous battle.
It is often claimed that places where violence has occurred retain some element of the events, the ghosts if you will. I would think that if one wanted to learn to believe in ghosts, the Alamo would be the church to attend
