The Haunted Alamodome

Halloween is just not that scary these days. The workaday world brings horrors beyond anything we could have imagined in our youth. Having lived through the second half of the 20^th century, ghost and goblins seem passé.

In fact when you think of it, movies and even books manage to frighten us by an unspoken contract. We will pay money if the author or producer provides the scares. It works until, as Stephen King noted, “we see the zipper down the back of the man in the monster suit.”

But the theme of this issue is ghosts of San Antonio, and I will contribute my share. Years ago I told the story of my brush with the ghost in the Alamodome in a column for this magazine. However, after two separate computer catastrophes reduced my gleaming hard drives to smoking shambles, I no longer have a copy of the original piece, and must reconstruct.

It began back when I was doing investigative work for a local attorney. He had a client who had problems at his concession in the Alamodome. I was to hang around for a few days and assess the layout, possible security problems and backgrounds of the employees.

In those days I smoked, and after three quarters of roaring basketball cacophony I stepped out a back entrance for a cigarette. There were a few maintenance guys out there waiting for the game to end. I have always found maintenance workers an interesting source of information, mainly because no one pays attention to them.

We were talking about the challenges of caring for something as big as the Dome. I remarked it must get kind of spooky at times. “Not at all,” they said explaining they could ride bicycles from task to task, which was fun. “Not at all, except for the 5^th floor,” one of them added.

I am always up for a good story, true or not; so I asked what was wrong on the 5^th floor. “It is haunted,” he replied.  I laughed in a friendly manner, pointing out that this is a brand new building. How on earth could it be haunted, other than by contaminated earth? (You will recall the big “Dome dirt” stories.)

The other workers joined in with solemn assurances that regardless of how new the dome might be, the 5th floor was haunted. In fact, it was downright scary. They told me of doors opening and closing by themselves, along with unexplained bangs and noises.  One profoundly disconcerting sound was knocking on the windows, as if someone were asking to be let in. Remember—this happens five stories up, with sealed windows that do not rattle in the wind. But most frightening of all was the sound of a woman weeping and sobbing deeply.

They got very hushed and respectful. It was La Llorona, they said. Now, being an Anglo Protestant, I had no idea who La Llorona was, but I could tell these folks were serious, and they were awed.

So the next day I hit the internet to do the research. La Llorona (pronounced “yo-ró-na”) is a famous ghost of Hispanic legend. As the story goes, she drowned her children to be free to take up with her beau. She is usually heard mourning her babies near riverbanks, and she is very frightening—in the cold, chill, hair-standing-up sense.

In most versions of the story her name is  “Maria,” and if seen, she is garbed in white clothing. She is doomed to mourn her murdered babes. It struck me that she is rather like an anti-Madonna.

Oddly enough, a few days later I was watching one of those “ghosts of…” documentaries, this one about the revenants haunting the Gettysburg battlefield. About half way through, the producers included an interview with two women. They had stopped by a stream running alongside the battlefield and, you guessed it, encountered a weeping woman in white.

I asked myself, what was she doing in Pennsylvania? The more I looked, the more amazing La Llorona’s legend grew. She is found all over the world, from South America to Russia. She is even found as an omen of ill fortune in Scotland.

Even so, I had to check on the workers’ story. Since the Dome management was catching hell over contaminated soil at the time, I figured they would not like to add a ghost story to the list of problems. So I called the former manager of the Alamodome, who had moved on to a job in Seattle.

She confirmed that the maintenance crews were definitely afraid of the 5^th floor. “I finally told them to go in groups of ten if necessary, as long as they got the job done,” she said.

That was enough for me, so I wrote a story about it for The Current. It was a big hit, although the editor at the time made me go back to the Dome with two “psychics.” The less said about that the better.

I forgot all about it. You know, once you have done a story you tend to move on to the next. But La Llorona was not finished with me. About a year or so later I told some friends about it. One of them asked, “Don’t you know what happened to that story?”

“Uh, no,” I replied.

He proceeded to explain that it had been picked up by a number of Mexican TV stations and broadcast all over Mexico! I was dumbfounded; in part, because I had gotten neither credit nor money. But it gets better. Sometime after that, while browsing in a bookstore, I came across a new book about San Antonio ghosts.

“I wonder…” I thought. And, yep, there she was, ensconced in the Alamodome.

Of course the question remains, why is she on the 5^th floor of the Dome, miles from a riverbank? In the end I have decided to go along. I want: “He created a genuine urban legend,” carved on my tombstone. If not cash, then glory, is what I say.