Haunted hotel guide · Seguin, Texas

The Haunted Magnolia Hotel, Seguin: A Frontier Inn With 17 Spirits

One of the oldest buildings in Seguin, a log-cabin stagecoach stop turned hotel, where the owners say at least 17 spirits shake doors and knock on walls, and you can book their rooms for the night.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate hotels

3.8/5Haunted Rooms Score

c. 1840Log cabin built on the site

17Spirits the owner has counted

Book directMeet the ghosts

Few haunted hotels in Texas lean into their ghosts like the Magnolia. The building began around 1840 as a two-room log cabin built by Texas Ranger and Seguin founder James Campbell, became a hotel and stagecoach stop in the 1840s, and spent much of the 20th century as apartments before sitting empty for about two decades. Since 2013 it has belonged to Jim Ghedi and Erin Wallace Ghedi, who restored it, revived the Magnolia Hotel name and opened it to ghost hunters.

Erin Ghedi told Texas Highways she has counted at least 17 spirits in nearly every room. The owners describe them as pleasant, kind and willing to communicate. Today the Magnolia runs day and night ghost tours and rents its upstairs suite to overnight guests, and it has been featured on Travel Channel, PBS and Ghost Adventures. It is the most ghost-friendly stay in our guide to haunted hotels in and around San Antonio, about 35 miles east of downtown.

The ghosts of the Haunted Magnolia Hotel

Mr. Deavors, the music teacher

The owners’ own website introduces Mr. Deavors as a music teacher and notorious murderer who never leaves his room. They do not give the details of his story, and we could not find an independent record of it, so treat him as part of the hotel’s lore.

He is one of the spirits the Ghedis name, and one of the reasons they say the upstairs never feels empty.

Wilhelm Faust and the murder of Emma Voelcker

The Magnolia’s darkest story comes from 1874. According to KSAT, Wilhelm Faust set out to kill his wife while she was staying with the Voelcker family in New Braunfels, but in the dark he killed young Emma Voelcker, who had swapped places with her in the bed; Houstonia and Texas Highways give her age as 12, and some sources spell the name Voeckler. Faust then rode back to Seguin and spent the night at the Magnolia. He was arrested and charged with murder and was later killed inside the New Braunfels jail. Texas Highways reports that he slept in a dark corner room, now the Faust Room.

The owners tell the story differently on their website, calling William Faust an innocent man murdered by mob rule. Both versions agree that he passed through the hotel and met a violent end, and both explain why guests in his room report feeling watched.

The Children's Room and Emma

Texas Highways reports that the Children’s Room is linked to children who lived in the building in the 1870s, and that the ghost of 12-year-old Emma sometimes plays there, even though she died in New Braunfels. Her killer’s night at the Magnolia is the thread that ties her to the house.

As with every story here, the hotel’s accounts come from the owners and their visitors. Nobody can prove who, if anyone, is in the room.

Amelia, Sara and the suicide cowboy

Amelia has her own room on the hotel’s website. In a 2019 Houstonia Magazine feature, the owners described her as a woman who died in her sleep in that bedroom and whose children later owned the Magnolia and turned it into a boarding house. The same piece names Sara, a ballroom ghost said to have died of a broken heart waiting for a lover who never came, and a “suicide cowboy” who, Erin Ghedi said, jumped off a stagecoach and shot himself right outside.

Erin Ghedi told KSAT in 2021 that at times you can hear glasses clinking in the old tavern, smell beer and hear spurs on the floor. She told the station in 2016 that when people say if these walls could talk, she answers that they do. None of these stories has a record behind it beyond the owners’ research, so take them as the house’s lore.

A famous guest list

The hotel’s website lists Sam Houston, Robert E. Lee, Governor John Ireland and the Texas Rangers Jack Hays and William Big Foot Wallace among its visitors, and repeats legends that Ulysses S. Grant stayed during Reconstruction and that Bonnie and Clyde visited family nearby. Some of these claims are hard to document. Jack Hays at least has a firm link: Wikipedia records that he married Susan Calvert in the building in 1847.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The Faust Room: The dark corner room where Wilhelm Faust is said to have slept after the 1874 murder. Ask whether it is part of your overnight stay.
• Amelia's Room: Named for a woman the owners say died in her sleep here and whose children later ran the house as a boarding house.
• The Second Floor Suite: The overnight option the hotel books through Airbnb, upstairs where many of the reports come from.
• The Children's Room: Linked to children of the 1870s and to Emma Voelcker. A highlight of the night tours.
• The basement: Once Seguin’s first jail and a shelter during Comanche raids, according to the owners.

History of The Haunted Magnolia Hotel

Around 1840, James Campbell, one of the early Texas Rangers and a founder of Seguin, built a two-room log cabin on this lot using logs gathered for a stockade. Campbell was later ambushed and killed on a trip to San Antonio. By 1844 the building was sheltering travelers as a hotel, and KSAT says the Johnson family added a stagecoach station that year; Col. Thomas Dickey Johnson’s family owned it until 1900.

In the early 1850s a two-story frame building replaced the log cabin, set over a large basement and finished with Greek Revival symmetry around the door. Next to it stands an earlier concrete section built in 1846 and 1847 by Dr. John Park, a doctor and chemist who experimented with the local limecrete, and the Texas Ranger Jack Hays married Susan Calvert in that part of the building in 1847. From about 1848 to 1880 the hotel was Seguin’s stagecoach stop and social center, with dances in its ballroom and a bell said to be from the Alamo, found in the San Antonio River in 1845 and used at the hotel until about 1900, when it went to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Frederick Law Olmsted passed through in 1854 and wrote that the hotel was large and good.

Brick hotels eventually took its trade. The building was recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934, and from the 1930s until about 2005 Inez and Edgar Lannom owned it and let apartments. According to Texas Highways, the previous owner, who was born and raised in the building, reported no paranormal experiences at all. The house then stood empty, and in 2012 Preservation Texas named it one of the state’s most endangered historic places. It is a contributing building in the Seguin Commercial Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1983.

Jim and Erin Ghedi bought it on March 1, 2013. Their first Halloween tour drew around 300 people instead of the couple of dozen they expected, and regular ghost tours followed. Restoration is ongoing, and the Magnolia now works as a bed and breakfast, museum and tour venue.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Book the Second Floor Suite for the night and a Saturday night tour together, so you see the whole building with the owners before you sleep there.
• Night tours run only on selected Saturdays, so check Eventbrite early, especially in October. The owners’ first Halloween tour drew about 300 people.
• Tours use K2 meters and dowsing rods, with no actors or fake cobwebs. Bring your own equipment if you have it.
• Ask the owners about Mr. Deavors and the Children’s Room; they are happy to share what they have found in their research.
• Pair the Magnolia with the Faust Hotel in New Braunfels, 15 miles away, where the 1874 story began.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Faust Hotel, New Braunfels: a 1929 hotel with a gentleman in the elevator
• The Menger Hotel, San Antonio: Texas’s most famous haunted hotel
• Victoria's Black Swan Inn, San Antonio: another historic house known for its ghosts
• Haunted places in Texas: more of the state’s ghost stories
• Haunted hotels in Texas
• Haunted hotels in San Antonio

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• The Haunted Magnolia Hotel (official site)
• Texas Highways: Hauntings and history at the Magnolia Hotel
• KSAT: History of the Haunted Magnolia Hotel (2016)
• KSAT: History Untold, the Haunted Magnolia Hotel (2021)
• Houstonia Magazine: Haunted Texas, the Magnolia Hotel (2019)
• Mental Floss: Haunted Magnolia Hotel opens to guests
• Wikipedia: Magnolia Hotel (Seguin, Texas)

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