Luxury magazine Condé Nast Traveler is used to cozying up in the high-thread-count linens of luxury San Antonio hotels, but this month it’s hiding underneath the blankets. The revered travel magazine recently took a jaunt through the most haunted places in the United States — and got goosebumps at downtown’s San Fernando Cathedral.

The cathedral is almost as old as the city itself. The church traces its history back to a group of 16 Canary Island settlers who built the church in 1731. Traveler, however, says the spooky sightings are a much more recent phenomenon.

The publication says the trouble started when workers began renovating the church in 1936. Among the nails and other leftover construction materials were some more macabre finds: long-buried bones and timeworn military uniforms believed to have once belonged to three Alamo soldiers.

“Since the disturbing incident, visitors have reported shadowy figures and orbs in their photographs, as well as ghosts in the back of the church itself,” wrote contributor Caitlin Morton. “Such otherworldly inhabitants include a man dressed in black and figures in hooded, monk-like clothing.”

One Halloween visitor purportedly captured an even more harrowing sight in 2007. San Antonio’s Ghost City Tours claims a man was snapping shots of a marble sarcophagus at the cathedral when he unexpectedly documented an apparition kissing the head of a skull. The loving moment does not appear to have been loaded to the internet for posterity.

The August survey of haunted locations is not the first time Condé Nast Traveler has dabbled in the supernatural. In 2019, it named San Antonio as one of the eight most haunted places in America. In addition to the San Fernando Cathedral, it gave the Menger and Emily Morgan Hotels a spectral shout-out. It did not report venturing out to the infamous Ghost Tracks nor braving Yorktown Hospital.

On a ghost hunting mission or not, the magazine reminded visitors to be respectful of mass times and confession hours at the still operational church. Visitors who are too chicken to explore the grounds can be dazzled by French artist Xavier de Richemont’s “light painting” The Saga outside, which began resuming showings in early August after an extended hiatus.

San Fernando Cathedral was the only Texas property to make the eerie list.