Evidence Scrutinized: The Haunting of Fort Sam Houston

 

 SAN ANTONIO – Strange things keep happening at San Antonio’s oldest military installation.  Since News 4 WOAI brought you the “the Haunting at Fort Sam Houston” earlier this month, emails with more spooky stories have flooded in.

Multiple sites around the post are reported to be haunted – including the old Infantry Post. 

By day, building 615 is filled with the sounds of the Medical Command Band.  But by night, some say its halls are filled with different sounds: chains rattling, men talking, and women laughing.

John Martinez, an instructor at Fort Sam Houston’s Academy of Health Sciences walked us through the building that used to be a surgery training facility.  It dates back to the late 1880s.  Martinez didn’t believe the rumors until he began to experience it for himself: creepy sounds, like doors slamming shut.

“I got up and walked around, went downstairs,” said Martinez.  “And when I came back up, the doors were closed.  And I’m thinking, wait a minute.  I didn’t close these doors.”

There seems to be no earthly explanation for what he and his co-workers have seen and felt.  “[A co-worker] was walking down this stairwell, and he stopped halfway because he had an eerie sensation,” explained Martinez.  “And then, all of a sudden, a cold chill came over his entire body.”

Sergeant First Class Jesse Bolanos was alone in the building doing a late-night security check, and left an interior door near the exit slightly ajar.  But when he came back through to leave the building, the door was shut and locked – a near impossibility.

“You couldn’t shut this door,” Bolanos explained.  “It was slightly off, so [when you tried to shut it], it would always open back up.  So you couldn’t even slam it shut.  You would have to shut it and lift it, so it would catch the lock.”

Since then, Bolanos says the weird incidents haven’t stopped.  He caught an audio recording of a woman’s laugh.  “It’s a little laugh in the upper register.  It just creeped us all out and we left really quickly after that,” said Bolanos.

What’s creepier – that may be the same laugh that Martinez heard years earlier. 

“It was a lilting laugh,” commented Martinez.  “It’s another world and they haven’t crossed over.  They’re still here.”

News 4 WOAI showed you strong evidence in our original “Haunting at Fort Sam Houston” story.  World-renowned paranormal investigators Brad & Barry Klinge captured a picture of a little girl in a mirror, a snapshot of a mysterious bartender, and an eerie EVP recording of a voice.  We’ve been asked who those people are, and if they could be proof that ghosts are real? 

It’s some of the most compelling evidence the paranormal brother duo have caught in their careers.  In pitch black darkness, they snapped a photo that showed a mysterious man. 

“We call him the bartender because he looks like one,” commented Barry Klinge, Co-founder of Everyday Paranormal.  “He’s wearing a tuxedo, and he looks like he has a towel over his arm.”

The photo was taken in the bar of what is now the Harlequin Dinner Theatre.  The building dates back to World War II, and used to be an N.C.O. club, where non-commissioned officers would go to get their minds of the battles at hand.

The Klinge brothers say it’s possible that the “bartender” is still tending the bar to this day.

“A lot of people think hauntings only occur when people die,” said Barry.  “But a lot of hauntings occur because that’s where they liked to hang out.  That’s where they cherished life the most.  And so maybe that bartender enjoyed that.”

Upstairs in the prop room, their camera also caught a little girl in a blue dress.

“There’s no telling where she comes from,” commented Brad Klinge, Founder of Everyday Paranormal.  “We can only speculate.”

“But there’s no documentation of a little girl dying there, or a bartender dying there,” Barry added.  “We don’t know who those people are.  We just know we got a picture of them.”

Workers at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre, like Nikki Folsom, have their own theories for what (or who) could be haunting the place.

“The story is, there was a waitress who was killed in here,” said Folsom, pointing to the band room.

News 4 WOAI checked with the post historian but couldn’t find any documentation of a murder onsite.

“The place is haunted,” said Brad.  “But whether it’s from people dying there, that’s probably not the case.  It could be.  We just can’t find it.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but sometimes those records are hard to get to.”

It’s hard to deny the existence of a supernatural presence, when you see the video the Klinge brothers caught with an infrared camera.  Back behind the stage, a chair moved back by itself.  The video has gotten its share of skeptics.

“The thing we get a lot is, people say, well how did you know to focus your camera right on that chair?” Brad explained.  “What happened was, there was a walkie-talkie on the desk next to it.  I was sitting on the side, Barry was standing next to me, and it looked like that walkie-talkie was kind of moving on its own a little bit.”

Thus, Brad says the camera happened to be pointing in the right place, at the right time.  “People ask, did you kick that [chair]?  No, we didn’t kick it.”

The brothers even tried to re-enact what they had seen, and couldn’t physically duplicate the same motion of the chair moving back.

“We’ve never seen object manipulation like this,” said Brad.

Also astounding is their electronic voice phenomenon, also known as EVP.  It seems to say, “sometimes we’re fighting.”  The Klinge brothers caught the low-frequency sound in the Quadrangle clock tower – the oldest standing structure on-post.  Inside, old carvings cover nearly every inch of the rock walls.

“It’s a living history from bottom to top, with names and initials of Soldiers who have gone through Fort Sam,” said Barry. 

“So our theory is that, just like the graffiti of those names, EVP is like graffiti of a conversation,” said Brad.