The Ghost of the Prince Solms Inn
The
Comal Hotel (later renamed the Prince Solms Inn) was built in 1898. It
was known to be the most romantic and most luxurious hotel in this
area, as it is still today. In the early 1900’s, a young woman and her
family came to the hotel to celebrate a special occasion. It was to be
the young woman’s wedding day.
On her wedding day, the young woman got dressed into her beautiful
wedding dress, draped with layers of lace. She waited for her groom to
come so they may be wed in the hotel. She waited and waited, he did not
arrive. The young woman began to cry. Her two over-protective brothers
decided to ride on horseback in search of their sister’s husband-to-be.
They were not going to allow this man to run out on their sister.
As the two brothers followed his trail from town to town, they reached
a town to discover he never arrived there and that no one had seen him.
The two brothers proceeded back to the hotel to tell their sister they
could not locate him and suspect something devastating had happened to
him. The young woman went into denial. She told her family that she was
not going to leave the hotel and that she was going to wait for him to
come so they could be married.
The owners of the hotel offered the young woman a job to stay at the
hotel as long as she did chores for her room and board. The young woman
agreed to this and stayed at the hotel and later became the innkeeper
of the hotel. Sometime in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s, the young
woman passed away due to natural causes. This was a terrible tragedy as
she had waited over 20 years for her true love to arrive so they could
get married and he never came.
In 1935, a young gentleman came through the front doors and proceeded
through the hallway of the hotel toward the staircase to the second
floor. The new innkeeper, sitting in the parlor, heard the man come in
and approached him. As he started to go upstairs, she asked him if she
could assist him. He continued up the staircase and said that he was
here to see someone.
The innkeeper looked upstairs and, to her amazement, saw a young woman
in a wedding dress at the top of the staircase. As the young man
reached the top of the stairs, he embraced the young woman, kissed her,
and then they both disappeared.
To her astonishment, the innkeeper realized that the woman at the top
of the stairs was the young woman who worked here and was the woman
waiting for her true love to come all these years. Was this man her
true love she was waiting for?...
The innkeeper did not believe what she had seen, so she went out the
front door to ask if anyone else saw anything. On the front porch,
there were three gentlemen, who were guests of the hotel, talking with
each other. She asked them if they saw the young man enter the hotel.
One of them said, “Sure, his horse is over by the hitching post.” He
pointed to the side of the building and sure enough there was a horse
tied to the post.
The innkeeper told the men what she saw. They did not believe her, so
they went into the hotel to look for the young man and the young woman
in a wedding dress. The men searched every room, every closet, in the
basement, and in the attic. There was no sign of either one of them.
Where did they go? Who was it? The horse that was tied to the hitching
post remained at the hotel for three months. No one ever claimed it…
After this sighting, the ghost of the young woman in a wedding dress
has been seen several times since 1935. She has been seen in Sophie’s
Suite lying in bed with her wedding dress on. Also, she has been seen
upstairs walking around in the hallway. Again, in her wedding dress and
smiling in happiness. She has been seen downstairs in the cellar, as
recent as 1960.
Some folks ask the question:
“If she was waiting for her true love to come so they could get married, then when he came, why does her spirit still appear?
Some folks answer:
“Maybe the man who came into the hotel and walked upstairs and embraced
her was not her true love. Maybe the man who came was another man she
met during her tenure at the hotel and that she is still waiting for
her real true love to come…
