Roosters and phantoms and salsa, oh my.
A postcard from San Miguel de Allende where things went off the rails.
You can listen to an audio voiceover of this story using the above link. It appears my ghost wouldn’t let me record using Substack’s superior tools so forgive the budget sound quality.
Hello and happy Wednesday.
***A heads up that I’ll be discussing wraiths in this post. If ghosts are not your thing, you might want to skip this one. I’ve recorded this as audio if you want the option to listen to it as a podcast using the link above. If you prefer to read it and view the photographs accompanying the piece, by all means, please read on.***
As of yesterday, I’m back from a full week of teaching at the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference. It was my first time teaching at this conference, and also my first time in San Miguel—a city filled to bursting with American retirees who flock to the Mexican highlands for the colorful colonial architecture, dreamy temps and slower pace of life. This is neither here nor there, but San Miguel is not where I’ll be retiring. If you’ve read my chapbook “Notes from Mexico” or my historical novel “Costalegre” or simply paid attention to the background of my Zoom classes, you might have noticed that I’m obsessed with Mexico. The thing is, I like to go to Mexico to go to Mexico, you know? I’m a pueblito type of gal. I like six-horse towns with a population under 1,400; hole-in-the-wall taquería stands; stray dogs a-go-go; the fermented sap mead known as pulque and tumbling tumbleweeds. A Mexican city that offers bubble tea and yoga on every block—while very nice for many—is not my cup of tea, bubble or otherwise.
Chapter 1: The Bird
But back to the start of my week, and the ghost, which is what we’re here for. It’s a conference tradition to house visiting faculty with locals which is how I found myself paired with a lovely American ex-pat who I’m going to call “Rune.” Attentive, gracious, thoughtful, Rune went out of his way to provide the lay of the land so I’d be set up for a successful week in SMA.
Early on, I communicated that I have chronic insomnia and that I didn’t want to be a jerk or anything, but I’ve traveled widely throughout Mexico, and was curious whether Rune’s home was exposed to the two Mexican things that I can’t sleep through—the little carts that come by at weird hours with an extremely spooky, pre-recorded voice offering to buy your microwave (run to this marvelous post entitled “What the hell is that: A guide to the sounds of Mexico City” where you can watch a video of this chilling experience) and roosters who ruin life from pre-dawn, on.
“Do you have any of those microwave cart guys or roosters?” I emailed Rune to ask. He answered that his road was a one-way street, so no microwave buyers. As for roosters, his neighbor used to have one but it was far off in the distance and wouldn’t be a problem. I try to err on the side of optimism when I’m traveling, especially when a stranger is putting me up for free. I might, however, be less optimistic going forward given what occurred.
After a long, long day of travel, I arrived at Rune’s after nine p.m. He kindly gave me soup and salad, and while we were cleaning up, he mentioned that the rooster situation had changed in the past weeks. Apparently, Rune’s neighbor had either purchased or come into possession of a second rooster, and the roosters had tried to kill each other, so now rooster number one lived in Rune’s tree. I looked at the tree in question; it was the lone tree in Rune’s courtyard, a gorgeous jacaranda whose branches rubbed against the windows of the guest bedroom where I’d be in residence all week. “When I come down for my four a.m. snack,” Rune added, “I turn on the lights and the rooster thinks it’s morning.”
So don’t turn on the lights!! is not the thing one says to someone who has just ladeled a out a delicious, homemade soup for their weary guest. You’ve had all these nasal surgeries to sleep better, I pep-talked to myself. Maybe you can sleep through it?
Reader, I could not sleep through it. This motherf***ing rooster started crowing at 4am right against my window, and crowed every other minute until 5am at which point the other rooster started crowing back, which went on and on without a single break until 8am, by which point I had already texted my husband that I was in my own personal version of hell and could he please find me the quietest hotel in all of San Miguel—that I was not going to survive this dueling rooster situation in Rune’s jacaranda tree.
Here is the rooster in question: this video was taking at nearly 8am so he’d settled down a bit:
I waited until Rune woke (how the hell does he sleep through this, was a question I was carrying) to let him know how much I valued his hospitality and premature generosity, but that I could not with the rooster in his jacaranda tree. In the hours that followed, as I repacked and booked transport to my new location, I wondered how I could have phrased my initial email differently to communicate just how grave my insomnia is. Far too often when you tell someone that you have insomnia, they take it as an exaggeration, or a whiny complaint. But I have a chronic condition. I have a real problem. My insomnia has come close to killing me, as I outline in my memoir “The Year of the Horses.” Going forward, I think I’ll say that I have a “sleep disorder” so that people understand that my insomnia isn’t just a vibe.
Chapter 2: My Ghost.
My dear husband—who was awake early and freezing in Connecticut—booked me into a former monastery with eight-feet thick stone that everyone on Travel Advisor assured was “very quiet.” I would like to state at the beginning of this chapter that the Hotel Posada de la Aldea is my dream hotel. A cross between a ranch and a convent, the simple, clean aesthetic is one that I adore, and the ample grounds were charming, tranquil, and terribly romantic. Plus, it was well-priced, which was welcome, because I wasn’t supposed to pay for my conference lodging in the first place. Here are some photos of this dream hotel before I introduce my ghost:
My first night in the beautiful if empty Hotel Posada, I was so elated to know there would be no 4am rooster wake-up that when I had a pretty scary nightmare, I equated it to stress. I was teaching many classes, meeting lots of new people, dealing with some novel-related developments back home and applications to my writing workshop Turning Points—I had a lot of motion in my head, is what I’m saying. A nightmare was better than a set of dueling roosters killing me at 4 am.
The next day, I told my conference wife
(who was also at the festival and became my ride or die compatriot) about the dream in question. “This lanky dude in weathered clothing came into my room drunk and disorientated and ended up getting in the bed opposite mine where he tried to fall asleep,” I said. I explained how I got up, reluctantly, to usher him out in the hallway back from whence he came. The nightmare man wasn’t belligerent, just inebriated and confused. I laughed it off, as I try to do with nightmares, so they don’t linger and/or reoccur.Except it wasn’t a dream? Night two, the same tall man returned, but this time, he was sober and full of a deep sorrow. He had on a straw hat and dusty, linen clothing, and sat on my bed facing the door. The door is kind of a whole thing because my room has a disappearing arch that made everything more surreal. Hold on, here’s the arch:
The time of the nightmare and the ghostly visit were the same: 2:10 a.m local time. Mind you, I was still running on empty at this point and I’m used to hallucinations from insomnia-related sleep deprivation, so I didn’t jump to conclusions yet. But when this dude came back the third night at exactly the same hour, I did form a conclusion, and it wasn’t anything good. I kept teaching and consulting and searching for the perfect rooftop bar, as one is wont to do in San Miguel, but I was getting progressively tired and disturbed.
The morning of my fourth day, I had a private meeting with a writer who is deeply spiritual and has been coming to the conference from Washington state for years. We were talking about the afterlife—the theme of her memoir—thus I felt comfortable mentioning the apparition that kept messing up my sleep. “Oh,” she said calmly. “San Miguel is known for having a very thin veil between the living and the dead. It’s definitely a ghost.”
“I didn’t want to tell you because of the whole thing about the rooster?” said another writer, a local who is renovating a historic home on the other side of town. “But your hotel is notoriously haunted.” Another woman confirmed that my inn was so possessed that the Day of the Dead procession stopped in the hotel’s courtyard to commemorate the spirits that lived there, floating between one world—the one I wanted to sleep and teach in—and the next.
***
By this point, I had brought my conference wife M.L. fully up to speed on this whole situation. She wondered what the ghost wanted, as did I. Each time the visitor sat on my bed, he was filled with such deep sadness—it seemed that he was coming to the room to mourn, to grieve, regret. He never touched me, but I felt the depression of where he sat on my mattress each night, and he was so tall, and what with the straw hat and the old clothing, it wasn’t a pleasant visit. M.L. mentioned that she’d gone to see the murals at the Instituto de Allende and that they were filled with devils and phantoms, so it must, indeed, be a pretty spooked out town. She showed me photos of the murals and I stopped her. There he was. My ghost.
In my room, the ghost’s hair was dirty blond, not black—but this was him, my phantom. The hat, the height, the outfit. In the interim, I had named him Salvador, not because I wanted to name him that, but because I felt this was his name. (Except for the first night when he mumbled drunkenly in Spanish, he never spoke to me.)
Because I didn’t want to get freaked out irreparably, I asked M.L. to research whether there was information online about my hotel being haunted. Bizarrely, given how many locals swore the hotel was up to its septic system in phantoms, M.L. turned up nothing. By that point, I was sort of desperate to have my nighttime visitations confirmed. I started talking to more local students about the issue, which I now regret. In hindsight, I think that Salvador wanted to keep our whole thing private. On my final night in San Miguel, enough locals had confirmed that my hotel was haunted that I was scared to sleep alone. On the way back from the conference hotel to mine, I ran into a local woman named Pilar who counseled me to make an offering for my ghost if I wanted peace. We happened to be in front of an artisanal gift shop, open late, so I ran inside and bought a tiny terracotta dish to lay my offering on. Once back in my room, I had a horrible feeling of dread—probably, I told myself, because I’d talked too much about my ghost. I put on a comforting podcast and packed my bags, before deciding to shower because I was leaving early the next day. That’s when things got rough. (Stop reading here if you don’t do well with scary stories.)
It’s worth mentioning that my room had one window (you can see that small window in the photo above) and that it was firmly closed. There weren’t any outdoor spaces on the second floor of my hotel, nor were there any windows that opened—just one wall of stained glass. For this part of the story, you will need to see my shower:
Nice bathroom, right? Note that this bathroom does not have a window and is at the far end of my hotel room— you walk through the disappearing arch and turn left through another door to get to it. Now that we’ve established the lay of this particular land, back to the narrative present.
I get into the shower. Quite quickly, I was gripped with terror. Like such-violent-turbulence-you’re-sure-your-airplane-is-gonna-crash level of terror. Absolute, abject horror is what I’m talking about, here. The shower curtain (which is tied back in this photo, but was extended while I was showering because that is how one showers) whipped toward me with the power of gale force winds behind it. Not once, as would have been appropriate if there had been a draft from somewhere else. It just kept blowing and writhing and then it wrapped around my body—violently, incessantly—and basically attacked me. The feeling of terror intensified. I had this visceral realization that I was experiencing the wrath of Salvador, who did not appreciate me making his whole thing public, or maybe he was upset that I was leaving, honestly, I don’t know—but he took things to a physical level and I was ready to go home. If you’re wondering how I got out of this situation, I had to attach the shower curtain to the outside of the tiled shower using towels and my dob kit so I could at least get the shampoo out of my damn hair. I was pretty done with San Miguel at that point, let me tell you. I was super done with Salvador.
I am nothing if not well raised so I proceeded to make Salvador an offering of beef jerky, dried pears and chocolate-covered almonds along with a hand-written note in which I had the balls to request a special gift from him (a vaquero bridle I’ve been searching high and low for) because frankly Salvador had ruined what should have been a really restful and rewarding week. I did not get the gift in question, but he didn’t return that evening—I guess the energy put into his shower visit sufficed. I didn’t notice any nibbles on the food in the morning, probably a good thing, because if there had been, I would have had a heart attack? I brought my bags to the lobby and checked out, tempted to ask the receptionist if he knew what in the Hades was going on in room 211, but he wasn’t the regular guy I’d been chummy with and he seemed like he was having a hard day, so I didn’t say anything about my ghost. But I did, however mention this experience on Facebook (I apologize for still being on a Meta-owned social media site but my whole existence as a horse girl is made possible via Facebook marketplace, so I just can’t quit it yet), and guess what came through in my DMs:
Perhaps there’ll be a part two to this experience because I’m speaking with this friend of a friend tomorrow about her San Miguel ghost to compare notes, but for the moment, I must leave you. I’ve still had insomnia since I got home and yesterday, I was woken by extremely strong winds at…2:10 a.m. No small feat because there is a time change between Connecticut and San Miguel de Allende. So I’m not quite recovered yet, and maybe I’m still haunted? Only time will tell.
Chapter 3: The epilogue
I don’t want this post to discourage you from visiting a Mexican city that most Americans adore. Nor do I want to discourage you from participating in the SMA writers’ festival, which was well organized and vibrant with wildly impressive keynotes. But much like the city of Kathmandu, where I contracted a year and a half’s worth of giardia when I went on an exchange program in high school to try and free Tibet, I don’t think I will be returning to San Miguel anytime soon.
If you have had specific experiences with ghosts in San Miguel de Allende, let’s hear them. Rooster nightmares? Put them in the comments. If you think that I am crazy, you don’t need to tell me that—most artists already exist on a spectrum of insanity, so I’m comfortable with mine.
If you want to visit Salvador and bring him more beef jerky, again, my room in the Hotel Posada de la Aldea was # 211. Have at it. But maybe shower somewhere else?
xoxo
Courtney
P.S: if you are not a paid subscriber but you want to make a donation toward the vaquero bridle that Salvador didn’t gift me with even though he haunted me for a straight week, this is my Venmo:
Thank you in advance for any contributions toward cleansing me of this extremely bizarre week.
P.P.S.: I’ve never had this problem in all my years of using the Substack VoiceOver tool but I read this story out loud three times and it got mysteriously erased each time. I re-recorded it into my phone. Salvador, I’m sorry. I respect your wish for privacy but I have to get this off my shoulders and my heart. Please leave me in peace.
I will sit up telling ghost stories with you any night 👻
So, a friend sent me your initial instagram mention of a ghost and said, "Perhaps you can be of use here?" and I said, "Oh, it sounds like a ghost that is very much attached to that place, not an entity she is carrying home with her." But, after reading this post and hearing that Salvador is deleting recordings, I just want to either offer to talk with you about ways to make sure you are fully separated from that energy, or to encourage you to use the woo folks who already seem to be in your life to have a cleanse done. Maybe Salvador is only interested in keeping his story private and that will be the extent of his interferences, but as someone whose life has very much been impacted by picking up gnarly energies and entities at various points in various places, it feels important to make sure that you have not carried something of him home that will darken your days.
Thanks for writing this story-- we don't talk enough seriously about spirits. FWIW, as soon as I saw the picture of the shower-- before you wrote about what happened there-- I literally said out loud in the coffee shop, "OH HELL NO," just feeling its energy.