Sainte Claire Hotel

Before becoming this opulent downtown San Jose hotel, the site housed Santa Clara County's first beer brewery, The Eagle Brewery. Though successful, the building witnessed numerous workplace accidents and deaths due to terrible working conditions. The hotel that replaced it has accumulated its own tragic tales over the decades.

The Sainte Claire Hotel, now The Westin San Jose, opened in September 1926 after exactly one year of construction on the former site of the Eagle Brewery, Santa Clara County's first brewery which closed during Prohibition in 1918. With construction and furnishing costs totaling one million dollars, it became known as San Jose's "Million Dollar Hotel" and quickly attracted luminaries including Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Hope. The Spanish Revival Renaissance building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, but its elegant halls harbor tragedies from both the brewery era and its glamorous heyday.

The hotel's most famous ghost is Julia, a young woman who was to be married in the Palm Room in the early 1930s. When her fiancé abandoned her at the altar, the heartbroken bride took her own life in the hotel's basement that very night. Since then, her restless spirit has become the building's most prominent presence. Guests report hearing the distinctive click-clack of high heels walking angrily down the hallways—despite the fact that all the hotel's hardwood floors have long been covered with thick carpeting. Staff members have encountered her apparition in hotel offices, and one photographer captured images near the Palm Room fireplace that revealed the train of a wedding gown in the background, invisible to the naked eye at the time.

Julia isn't alone. The "Smoking Ghost," a shadowy figure, appears frequently on the second and sixth floors, startling guests with its sudden materialization. The first floor experiences the most violent disturbances: poltergeist activity is a regular occurrence in the lobby, where objects move and unexplained sounds erupt without warning. These lower-floor hauntings may be connected to the Eagle Brewery workers who perished in workplace accidents during the brewery's operation—victims of what historical accounts describe as "heinous working conditions" that resulted in numerous deaths.

The Sainte Claire is featured in Elizabeth Kile's book *Haunted San Jose* and remains a regular stop on San Jose ghost tours, where guides share the tragic tale of Julia's wedding that never was. Though the hotel has changed names over the decades, the spirits of its dastardly past continue to call it home, walking the same corridors where Hollywood stars and presidents once stayed.