Confronting the ghosts of old San Juan

Several years ago, when I traveled to Iceland, the most common question posed to me was … “Why?”

Instead of the most obvious answer – “Because it’s there” – I explained the real reason: My wife and I were heading out on an explanatory trek in advance of a women’s delegation that she would be co-leading a few months later.

The same question could be asked of our recent trip to Puerto Rico. Asking why, however, would be something only a West Coast resident would tend to ask. If you’re from the East, any place in the Caribbean is a prospective destination.

And Puerto Rico, being a U.S. territory, is unique in that it’s like visiting a foreign country while never really leaving our home country. No visa needed, no passport necessary. Just make sure to carry your Real ID – and a Spanish phrasebook.

(Actually, though I have some elementary Spanish skills, I never cracked my phrasebook once. Most people I encountered, even in the smallest of villages, either said “yes” or just nodded when I asked them, “¿Habla ingles?”)

As to why we went there, it’s because my wife – Mary Pat Treuthart – used to live on the East Coast. As such, she has a lingering affection for the Caribbean. And though in the past she’d visited several islands, from Saint Kitts and Nevis to Cuba, she’d never made it to Puerto Rico. So to avoid her inherent FOMO, we went.

It’s a long trek from Spokane, which requires a connection in Atlanta, so we started the trip with a week-long stay visiting friends in Florida. From Fort Myers we flew to Atlanta and then on to San Juan, the territory’s capital and largest city.

Arriving around midnight, we took a cab to the hotel where Mary Pat had booked a room. Just as the name indicates, the CasaBlanca Hotel embraces a theme based on the famous 1942 movie. Three large TV screens sit in the lobby, two of which play the film on a loop.

While Mary Pat checked in, I watched Victor and Ilsa (Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman) walk into Rick’s Café and sit at a table. Just as Victor pulls out a cigarette, café owner Rick (the great Humphrey Bogart) – immaculately dressed in a white dinner jacket – strides in, and whispers something to the piano player Sam (Dooley Wilson) and …

I would have gone on watching, but just then the young man working the desk – and who, unfortunately, was one of the few Puerto Ricans who spoke no English – pointed us in the direction of the elevator that would take us to our third-floor room. It took a few minutes, and some scrambled finger-wagging, but we finally got there.

I was ready to climb directly into bed. But Mary Pat noted that the place smelled strongly of bleach. So we discussed that a bit, even though I knew what was going to happen the next morning.

That was when, after being shown another room that also reeked of bleach, we changed hotels. To one person, the scent of bleach might mean the hotel is making sure its rooms are clean. To another, it’s simply something they’d rather not breathe in as they sleep.

Anyhow, that’s how we arrived at a hotel called El Convento – and so began our date with Puerto Rican history. Dating back to the year 1646, when the building was originally designed as a Carmelite convent, El Convento has seen a number of changes over the centuries.

It was inaugurated as Monastery of Our Lady Carmen of San José in 1651, which was fitting because it sits right across the street from San Juan Cathedral, said to be the oldest cathedral in the whole Western Hemisphere (and where you can see the actual tomb of Juan Ponce de Leon).

El Convento is a magnificent structure, being what one website describes as “as a brilliant example of the island’s colonial architectural aesthetics.”

The convent closed in 1903, reportedly because the then-Bishop of Puerto Rico – one James Herbert Blank – decided that the building was too expensive to maintain. And while over the next several decades it served various functions, one being a flophouse without power, everything changed in 1959 when Robert Frederic Woolworth, heir to the Woolworth fortune, entered the picture.

After three years of labor, the renovated building opened as the boutique hotel El Convento. And over the following decades, further renovations have taken place, making it into a full-service hotel with a scenic lobby and restaurant/courtyard and a pool-equipped terrace with views of greater Old San Juan.

Oh, and one other thing: The place is said to be haunted by the ghost of the original convent’s mother superior. Of course, I paid no attention to the story, said to affect only those rooms on the hotel’s first two floors.

And I continued to discount any sense of the paranormal, even though the room we were given was, yeah, on the ground floor.

But then, during the night – just after 3 a.m. – I awoke for some reason. And I realized that a weird light was flashing a blue beam across the ceiling. I rose from bed to see what the source was … and I discovered that the room’s espresso machine not only had turned itself on but was signaling me that it was ready to brew some coffee.

Annoyed rather than frightened, I pulled the machine’s plug from the wall. “Nice try,” I whispered. “Now go and get your Starbucks hit somewhere else, lady.”

If the mother superior responded, I couldn’t tell. I likely wouldn’t have understood her anyway.

My Spanish just isn’t that good.