Author's note: This document continues our investigation into paranormal research, and was submitted to the producers of It Feels Evil as a comparison piece for/against the website currently maintained by the owner and on her website prior to the investigation. Sorry it's a little late--holidays and all that.
A few things to remember when looking at this website—many paranormal groups (including Ghost Adventures) have taken that website as gospel and reproduced it word for word. Never accept a “history” on a website as fact. Also, if there are paranormal instances cited throughout a history article, up to and including the names of alleged spirits and even what they say/do, that usually means someone doesn’t want you looking at the real history for whatever reason and want to distract you with a “look at what our ghosts do!!!” moment. But if the history is wrong, chances are that one or more of the alleged spirits is either what a psychic claimed to have sensed or imagination, providing a false validation of what’s really going on. So let’s take a look at what the o want us to think and what we know:
Website--From before 5000 B.C. to around 1000 A.D the area was the site of Native American encampments. Artifacts from this time can still be found here. Archeologists (sic) have provided evidence showing that Native Americans once lived in the area where the house currently sits. There have also been signs of a sweat lodge where Native Americans performed rituals. An ancient Indian burial ground is thought to be under the house.
Fact—okay anything from 5000 BC to 1000 AD isn’t Native American. It’s prehistoric. We’re talking about predating the Incan and Mayan peoples, and the dates cited cover both the archaic and the late Prehistoric period. HOWEVER, the period after 1000 AD is and should be the points of reference here. There’s no record of archaeologists (correct spelling) ever documenting evidence that proves Native Americans lived on/near the land where the house sits. There’s certainly not any record I can find of a dig conducted there. There’s no record of a sweat lodge. There’s no record of an Indian burial ground either, and if there WAS one under the house we should be able to record that by getting into the crawl space. (If there’s no crawl space, then there’s no way whatsoever that anyone knows what’s under the house for the simple reason that no one can get there.) All that being said, the area around San Antonio was occupied relatively continuously by indigenous people until the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Native American tribes were continuously forced west by the encroachment of European settlers and it would be odd if they hadn’t camped near a water source, especially during the summer when these tribes migrating for hunting.
According to the San Antonio Office of Historical Preservation, there were hundreds of Native American tribes in central Texas during the historic period from 1700 AD on, but these tribes are the worst documented in the historical and archaeological records.
Website: On September 18, 1842 General Adrian Woll, Sam Houston and his men massacred more than 60 Mexican soldiers during the bloody Battle of Salado. Their bodies were left to rot where they fell. Only one Texan lost his life, Steven Jett, during the battle.
Fact: That the battle took place there is apparently close to the truth, but General Adrien Woll was the French-Mexican general of the Mexican troops, while the Texans were led by Colonel Matthew Caldwell of the Texas Rangers. Woll commanded over 1600 Mexican and Cherokee troops against Caldwell’s militia of right around 200. There’s no mention of Sam Houston being anywhere close to this battle, since in 1842 he was serving his second non-consecutive term as President of Texas and was in, appropriately enough, Houston. Caldwell’s militia defeated Woll, who retreated back to Mexico, leaving his 60 dead behind. And yes—only one Texan lost his life and was interred properly while the Mexicans were left to rot.
Website: The Prescott House was built on the property after the civil war.Sebastian L Rippstein (2/4/1824 - 7/14/1896), born in Switzerland, and his wife, Hemrieke "Betsy" Ackermann Rippstien (6/1/1834 - 9/15/1911), born in Germany, settled the land in 1867. The San Antonio Conservation Society shows that they built a stone house barn and milking barn on the property. Their children were Gustav Juilan (1851-1920), Henriettta Rippstein Seay (1854-1932), Bertha "Betty" Dorthea Rippstein Schaefer (1858-1920), Ida Rippstein Benfer (1870-1951), and Albert Rippstein (1874-1941).
Fact: You can see on this map the layout of the battle. About a third of the way down, you see the dark square that represents the Prescott house on top of a hill overlooking the river. What I find interesting about this is that there’s no mention of the Prescotts ever owning that property. (more on this confusion later) The first structures built on the property were built in 1867 by the Rippstein family, German immigrants who started a dairy business. The barn and dairy barn are purported to have been built by them. But the house that’s there now is NOT the house of the Rippsteins as best I can tell and definitely isn’t the Prescotts’ house either.
Now in this next shot, you can get a glimpse of the Black Swan Inn with the huge barns behind it, a cemetery in front of it, and across what appears to be a major road is Salado Creek. The historical marker for the Battle of Salado Creek is just outside and to the west of the gates to the BSI on Holbrook Road, which is the thoroughfare between the BSI and the Salado River…
Wait a second. I have to wonder where in the heck is the Salado River on BSI’s side of the river? Because of the claims of a natural spring on the property, you’d logically think they’d be on/near the river. Also, topographically, it’s obvious that the battle itself was fought with the Texan militia blocking the Mexican army’s advance from positions tight up against the river and behind the Prescott house which is right about where the road is today.
But that’s not all. As you can see, the big barns are behind the BSI, but on the map of the battle the barns the website claimed were part of the Prescott property are not there. There’s one outbuilding shown on the property, and it’s tight up against the big house. So the barns currently on the BSI property can’t have anything to do with the Prescotts, and were probably built in/after 1867 when the Rippsteins bought the property.
There’s a reason for that (and subsequently a reason that the big house wasn’t built until 1901-02). Many European farmers built two story barns with the animals on the ground floor and the people on an upper floor. They do that in Europe for the extra heat the animals give off. Obviously in Texas, this would suck profusely 7 months of the year. My guess is the “stone house barn” referenced on the website is what the owner’s talking about. That means the Rippsteins and the Mahlers, who bought the property twenty years later in 1887, lived in a residence inside/above the cows in the barn below until having the first house built on the property—but that house wasn’t the house that’s currently there.
Website: German immigrants, Heinrich "Henry" Mahler (9/2/1840 - 4/18/1925) and Marie Biermann Mahler (7/15/1850 - 7/25/1923), bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built). Their children were Samuel George Mahler (1/21/1876 - 4/21/1937), Louisa Catherine Mahler Prange (11/1/1879 - 1/10/1918), Sara "Suzie" Mahler Schlegel (2/27/1882 - 3/23/1958), Daniel Henry Mahler (11/11/1884 - 5/27/1950). They also built a milking barn and named the farm Bluebonnet Dairy. Henry and Sam were known as the Cotton Kings. The Mahlers ran the dairy farm here until the mid-1930s.
Fact: What makes this odd is that the website claims the Mahlers built the house in 1887 BUT the San Antonio Conservation Society AND the Bexar County Appraisal District don’t show a house (that didn’t involve cow storage) built on the property until 1902/1901 respectively. Also, why were Henry and son, Sam, known as the “Cotton Kings” when they were running a 200-acre dairy farm? Shouldn’t they be known as the Cow Kings or the Cream Kings instead? So there are multiple red flags here that lead me to believe substantial parts of this section of the history have been manufactured instead of researched.
Website: After Mahler’s wife passed away, he followed suit two years later from lovesick grief. Heinrich also haunts the Milking Barn and roams the property, including inside the main house. His daughter, Sara "Suzie" pulls pranks in a building located behind the Black Swan.
Facts: Case in point. First off, there’s no way anyone dies of grief. That’s BS until and unless a proper medical association assigns “lovesick grief” as an actual diagnosis. I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Second off, again with stating anything paranormal-related as an actual fact. This continues to deteriorate as the "history" continues. Note that Suzie is Henry's daughter. This becomes important.
Website: Carl Mahler from Germany had a daughter named Sophia Louise Mahler Meyers, a spinster who lived in the house until she was 82, but haunts the house as an 8-year-old girl singing and laughing and known for playing tricks on people.
Fact: There’s no context for this. We don’t know who Carl is, or why he lived there. This is the first time he's mentioned. Same thing for his daughter, who is apparently stuck there as an 8-year-old girl. But here's the most telling clue that something about this "history" stinks to high heaven. Just one paragraph ABOVE this claim, it's stated that a sweet little Suzie was the daughter of Henry Mahler. There's no Carl mentioned, or a Sophia despite them purportedly both living in the house as part of the same family. Now there are TWO mischievous girl ghosts that are the SAME AGE. This is the result of either historical confusion--possible--or haunted house myth-making--probable. The website can't even keep its own story straight, but still presents this all as "fact" or "history" when it's patently a fiction. To me, this is a strong indication that someone hopped onto a free genealogical website, where date/name confusion is pretty much the order of the day on any family tree, without double-checking through vital records.
All this does is create a scenario where a paranormal investigator or—even worse and more dangerous—a paranormal tourist takes a cheap voice recorder into the location to talk to “Sara (Suzie)” or "Sophia" the sweet little girl prankster ghost and accidentally summons an entity to interact with her/him. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you're part of an investigation team that does not perform legitimate historical research on a property and instead relies upon an owner's website or a previous paranormal group's findings, your team can be sent blind into a dangerous paranormal event without the proper preparation or protection. That's why research is legitimately the most important segment of an investigation and cannot be skimped.
See, anytime you use a voice recorder or call out a spirit, that’s conjuration and an amateur isn’t aware of that. There’s no telling what can and will respond…and follow you home. This is irresponsible on the owner’s part—first, by putting what psychics or an EVP or an odd feeling someone translates into “little girl ghost Suzie” down on the HISTORY page as FACT. Second, by attributing paranormal or supernatural events as being the actions of a specific named entity, the owner is creating a false narrative or mythology for the location. There isn’t really any way to prove the claim on any front.
An investigator can, perhaps, after a LOT of investigation, feel fairly confident in a hypothesis about a historical figure being part of a haunting. Usually, that’s in residual hauntings—like Lincoln’s ghost in the White House, for example. A person who witnesses a full-bodied apparition and later is shown a group of pictures of people who lived on the property and recognizes one of the photos as being the ghost he saw can create a reasonable assumption the entity is that historical resident. But either of these types of confirmation is extremely rare.
In this case, these definitive identification of entities as the historical residents on the property is just creating a reckless and ultimately reckless mythology for the site, making it more dangerous for investigators, paranormal tourists, and residents alike. (Author's note post-investigation: this also generates an interesting factor when the subsequent investigation led the team to a doll as the apex of the haunting. You'll note that the owner of the BSI states in an interview that someone goes into that room every couple of weeks to "talk to the dolls". That's a conjuration, and may be the entire reason the inn has any intelligent haunting at all. Chances are correspondingly greater that this is a dark or demonic entity, lured in under the guise of sweet little Suzie, and may have taken up residence in the doll. Annabelle, anyone?)
Website: Henry and Sam Mahler were known as the Cotton Kings. They lived on the property with 200 acres after Marie died.
Henry and Marie's son, Dan, and his wife, Mary Mahler, lived on the property with 237 acres. They sold the house and surrounding land to two sisters and their husbands in 1941.
Katherine S. Joline Holbrook (9/17/1883 - 1/27/1950) and Joseph "John" Younger Holbrook (4/6/1879 - 9/3/1960), along with Mary Blanche Joline Woods (7/8/1887 - 1/17/1976) and Claude B. Woods (10/31/1882 - 1/17/1935) purchased the property. The sisters called the house White Gables. They conducted extensive remodeling, adding two wings to enlarge the mansion to accommodate the two families. The house was then called "White Gables". After purchasing more land a second house was built in 1901 but it later burnt down.
Fact: Here’s where the ‘history’ contradicts itself directly. Earlier on the page, the website states that: Henry and Marie Mahler bought the property on January 10, 1887. They built the first house on the property in 1887 (Bexar County Appraisal District shows 1902 and San Antonio Conservation Society shows 1901 for the year built).Then the Holbrooks/Woods family purchase the property and evidently adds the two wings to the house, and then a second house was built in 1901 but it ultimately burned down. But this narrative doesn’t match up precisely.
At first, the website claims the “Prescott House” was built AFTER the Civil War. But—in 1867, the property was purchased by the Rippsteins, who I’m assuming lived over the dairy barn as would be normal for them as German/Swiss immigrants. So what happened to the Prescott House, that the website claims was built after the Civil War?
In 1887, then, the Mahlers bought the location “and built the first house” on the property, a fact that’s disputed by two different agencies in the Appraisal Department and the Conservation Department, which have the dates for this house as 1901 or 1902. Now we have the Holbrook/Woods family adding two wings and building a second house that burns down. What we DON’T have anywhere on this website is an undisputed and definitive date when the house that exists on the property was built.
In the book Battles and Men of the Republic of Texas by Arthur Wylie, however, the author states that:
After forming 140 Texian volunteers Caldwell marched for Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from San Antonio. A little later Caldwell moved his camp thirteen miles closer to the city along Salado Creek near the Prescot (sic) House. Altogether, about 220 Texians had been assembled to fight the Mexicans…
This version of events is backed up by the Texas State Historical Association. So there was a house close to the Black Swan Inn called the Prescott house that pre-dates the battle, and as was pointed out earlier the current building is not in the proper location on the map to have been the Prescott house.
So my best guess without actually going in person to the County Clerk’s office and digging out plat books is that the Prescott house was not on the property now associated with the Black Swan Inn, that the first two families lived over the barn in an old-country ‘house barn’, and that the first possible date for the current residence to have been built is the 1901/1902 date that the Appraiser’s Department and the San Antonio Conservation Department have listed on official San Antonio documents.
Therefore the house currently known as the Black Swan Inn wasn’t erected until 60 years after the battle, and has nothing to do with the battle save for the fact that the Mexicans rode over it on their way to be shot to pieces by the Texians holed up in the creek bottom.
That would also discount any possibility of a Rittspein/Mahler historical figure haunting the current house, because they would never have lived there. This would be an easy mistake to make for any amateur researcher, who wouldn’t be able to untangle the “house barn” mystery and subsequently ended up with multiple “first house” possibilities on the property.
Website: Attorney Hall Park Street, Jr. (11/10/1909 - 8/4/1965) and Joline Woods Street (12/15/1912 - 12/22/1959). They inherited the house in 1952 from Joline's mother, Claude Woods. After the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Holbrook and Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods lived in the house with her son-in-law, Park, and her daughter, Joline. During this time a second story was added to the main house. While Park and Joline owned the property Earle Stanley Gardner visited the house and wrote some of his famed Perry Mason television series scripts here. Joline died of breast cancer in 1959. Park, Jr. was later found dead in 1965 hung by a neck tie with his hands tied behind his back...the death was ruled a suicide. They were survived by their daughter, Joline "Jingles", who was only 19 at the time and their son, Hall Park Street III. (no vital records found). Park Street supposedly committed suicide by hanging himself in the house, though this has been a highly controversial subject. A psychic consultant with Syfy's television program Sightings communicated with former resident, Hall Park Street, whom he believed was murdered in a south wing closet, then moved to another location, where the murderer made the death look like a suicide. They believe Street was killed because of a treasure he still guards in the south wing. Others believe that Heinrich ghost drove Park to commit suicide. The most unnerving spectral presence at the property is that of a man who has been spotted stalking angrily all over the house. Rumor has it that he is the ghost of Hall Park Street. Is he perhaps looking for his beloved wife Joline, whose spirit is also said to haunt the Inn after tragedy struck her at the tender age of thirty-eight when she died of cancer. Dressed in a luxurious white gown with a beaded jeweled medallion in from of headband with a feather at the back over her dark hair, this is a very beautiful female spirit roams the property aimlessly, especially around the gazebo, but Park and Joline never seem to meet.
Fact: Okay here’s where things get egregiously wrong. Thanks to the August 7, 1965 edition of the San Antonio Express and News, the fact-checking for this section of the website was easy. HALL PARK STREET JR DID NOT KILL HIMSELF AT WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE BLACK SWAN INN OR ANYWHERE ON THE PROPERTY AT ALL. Street committed suicide at his home in the affluent Oak Park neighborhood, 401 Northridge Drive, which is 2.9 miles away. He also didn’t bother to mourn his first wife, Joline, all that much because he was already remarried at the time of his death in 1965. So there is no treasure in the south wing that Street was killed over and the murdered/moved. There is no chance that the vengeful ghost of Heinrich Rittspein drove him to suicide when Street was a nine-minute drive away from the property in his new house when he killed himself, and absolutely zero possibility that’s he’s stalking the house because he’s heartbroken over Joline’s death.
So no, they aren’t trying to find each other in vain.
What this IS representative of, however, is the worst kind of mythology creation that is perpetrated by someone needing to exploit the paranormal for reasons other than research/investigation. As for Street’s son, Hall Park Street III—while the owner claimed to find no vital records for him, I did find him—still living, in Austin, TX after a 30 second Google search. He can be found at https://www.parkstreets.com/ where he has this to say:
A native Texan born in San Antonio, I am the son of a noted lawyer and my godfather was the world's bestselling author of his time, Erle Stanley Gardner, of Perry Mason fame. My father was a member of the Court of Last Resort, a group of lawyers and forensic experts who worked to get prisoners they felt unjustly convicted new trials. Some of my fondest memories of my father was us driving from one state prison to another where he interviewed prisoners. I always got a kick out of seeing my dad in the opening credits of the TV show they made about the Court of Last Resort which showed for two seasons. I grew up in what is now one of the most haunted houses in Texas. It was spooky but not as spooky as it has been made out to be.
Bolding mine, for emphasis. He’s now a renowned photographer based out of Austin after careers in the law and foreign importing, and can be reached via his website. Might be a worthwhile on camera interview depending on how the investigation goes. I assume that Hall Park Street III, therefore, has vital records for anyone who cares to look.
The remainder of the “history” section on the website is modern, taking us through the Mehrens’ ownership, who bought the house in 1973. I would assume that either Joline the younger lived in the house between 1965 and 1973—she was 19 and evidently a recent bride in Wisconsin when her father committed suicide--or that the house was rented out after Joline the elder passed away in 1959. The Mehrens sold the house to Werner Schmidt in 1980. The house went into what appears to be some form of seizure, ending up as the property of Sunbelt Self-Storage in 1987 before being ultimately sold to Jo Ann Marks Andrews Rivera in 1991. She named the property the Victoria's Black Swan Inn, and built up a paranormal tourism site/B&B/Events business while living with her family on the site.
Other information on the location: Recent reviews of the Black Swan Inn have included growing accounts that the property is not just run down, but falling apart and filthy. There are reports of insect and rodent infestation—highlighted by the Ghost Adventures episode where they left a static cam rolling on the owner’s children all night due to her claim that something was ‘pinching’ them as they slept. Turned out to be a fat, juicy rat instead.
There have also been negative reports left on the quality of the food at catered events, at the rudeness of the owner and the staff, and on a few occasions “absolutely ruining” weddings held there. Refusing to turn on the air conditioning for a summer wedding in Central Texas is a recurring theme, as is the owner taking drinks out of people’s hands and pouring them out. Take that FWIW.
The Rivera family appears to live on the second floor of the main house, and the house didn’t have a second story until the Street family added it between 1952 and 1965. So any paranormal phenomena up there should be surprising.
Conclusion: There’s a long provenance of modern paranormal teams gathering evidence at the Black Swan Inn, but there are no contemporary reports of paranormal events prior to Ms. Rivera’s ownership of the property. The ties to the Battle of Salado are tenuous, the stated history of the house is so unreliable that there’s not even a solid date of when the building was even built. And the suicide or murder/suicide the website wants prospective clients to believe happened in the house actually occurred in a different house almost 3 miles away.
The overall purpose of the website is to push the paranormal agenda to the exclusion of anything else in my opinion. The “history” in the history/about section of the website is peppered with references to spirits that are allegedly the former residents of the house despite the house not even being built yet. So this isn’t a history. It’s a mythology, comprised of historical half-truths and what psychics have said about the property despite the constant contradiction or even downright falsehoods (like the Street suicide) in order to make this house appear more haunted than it evidently was when Hall Park Street III grew up.
All this being said, though, considering the uses to which the house is put, the weekly ghost tours and ghost hunts, the scrying closet’s constant use and the seances in the room outside it, what you have here is a paranormal time bomb. IF there’s a haunting at this location, I’d find it almost impossible to attribute activity to the former residents on the property. I’m more inclined to think that whatever is contributing to the ‘escalating’ negative activity on the location is the result of the constant conjuration going on there, opening doors without knowing how to shut them again. That would strand human entities there, probably pissing them off. However, that open door leaves the house and ground vulnerable to demonic infestation, which much be strongly suspected headed in.
Author's note, post-investigation: It's my opinion now that the investigation is completed that the paragraph above this one was the correct prognosis for the paranormal activity in Victoria's Black Swan Inn. The team, therefore, caught no evidence to support the owner/website claims save with a doll most likely empowered through regular and ritual conjuration.
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