The Menger Hotel
A hotel that opened beside the Alamo on January 31, 1859, where cattleman Richard King died on April 14, 1885, and where Rough Rider recruits and organizers stayed in May 1898. Its ghost stories center on King and on Sallie White, a chambermaid whose death in 1876 rests on the hotel's own account.
Field Guide Entry
The hotel on Alamo Plaza
William and Mary Menger, both German immigrants, opened the hotel beside Alamo Plaza on January 31, 1859. Its bar dates from 1887 and was built as a replica of the taproom of the House of Lords Club in London. The hotel moved the bar to its Crockett Street side in 1949.
Richard King
On April 15, 1885, the New-York Tribune reported that "Captain Richard King, known throughout Texas as the Cattle King of the Nueces, died at the Menger Hotel to-night of cancer in the stomach." According to the Handbook of Texas, King left his lawyer a last instruction "not to let a foot of dear old Santa Gertrudis get away." He was buried in San Antonio, and in 1925 his body was moved to Kingsville to lie beside his wife's.
The hotel sells a King Ranch Signature Suite. Its public relations director told the San Antonio Express-News in 2010 that King died in that room and that his funeral was held in the front parlor, although the hotel's own website says neither.
The Rough Riders
In May 1898, the regiment that became Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders gathered in San Antonio. On May 19, the San Antonio Daily Light reported that one enlistee "is now at the Menger," and the next day it interviewed John R. Thomas, who was organizing the Indian Territory troops, "in his apartments at the Menger hotel." A state marker placed in 1965 says the Rough Riders "were recruited here," and the hotel's bar page says more than 1,250 men enlisted there. Roosevelt's own book about the regiment never mentions the Menger and puts its full strength at 1,000.
Sallie White
The hotel's ghost stories have long included Sallie White, a chambermaid. On a page it published from at least 2005 to 2011, the hotel said she was "murdered by her husband and buried at hotel expense by the Menger," and that she is seen in the corridors carrying towels. Later tellings, mostly from ghost tours, date her shooting to March 1876, name her husband, and quote a hotel receipt for her coffin and grave, but they disagree on where she was shot and on what each amount paid for. A 2021 newspaper account drawn from a ghost tour describes her as a Black woman who had spent a night at the police station out of fear before she was shot. No 1876 newspaper available online mentions her, and the San Antonio papers for that month have not been digitized.
What is reported
In 2011, the hotel's website counted "at least 32 different apparitions," among them King walking through a walled-over door into his suite, a man in a buckskin jacket asking a guest "Are you gonna stay or are you gonna go?", and a woman knitting in the original lobby. Staff and bartenders tell of Roosevelt or a Rough Rider at the bar. In 1997, the hotel's public relations director told Texas Highways writer Randy Mallory, "Sometimes guests ask for rooms with a ghost. Well, we don't know of any exactly, but nothing bad has happened." The hotel's website now carries no ghost stories at all.
Visiting Information
The Menger Bar is open to non-guests, and the King Ranch Signature Suite can be booked by name. The hotel runs no ghost tour of its own, and the dinner-and-ghost tour it lists, run by Sisters Grimm, was closed until further notice in October 2026. The Alamo church is about 480 feet away across the plaza.
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