By Tim Binnall
Paranormal enthusiasts in Texas are mourning the loss of a famed haunted hotel that was gutted by a massive fire that left the beloved site a smoldering shell of itself. Located in the downtown of El Paso, the De Soto Hotel opened in 1905 and, over the ensuing decades, developed a reputation for being home to a variety of spirits that once walked its halls when they were among the living. A wildly popular destination for ghost tours, urban explorers, and paranormal television shows in recent years, the four-story building was engulfed by an inferno that reportedly began on Friday afternoon and lasted for hours as a whopping 70 firefighters from 24 units fought the enormous blaze.
By the time that the inferno was largely extinguished that evening, the De Soto's roof had completely collapsed and its four floors were either totally destroyed or, on the lower levels, badly damaged by the blaze. An inspection and investigation of the gutted building is now underway and it will undoubtedly be quite some time before it hosts another ghost tour or television documentary, which is understandably heartbreaking to local fans of high strangeness who are now left with only spooky memories of the historic building that one area investigator mused to a local television station that the site was the "crown jewel of paranormal in Texas."
That profound sadness was echoed by Paula Overstreet, who has hosted ghost tours at the site for the last four years and said that "I just wanted to cry. I felt like I was punched in the gut" when she heard the news. "Cool things that we have experienced as a team we haven't ever encountered anywhere else," she recalled, "and it's just gone, it's devastating." While the De Soto may ultimately wind up being rebuilt, it remains to be seen if the spirits will still be there when the building opens its doors again. To that end, some observers watching the television coverage of the blaze couldn't help but notice a few rather eerie 'faces' in the smoke and flames tearing through the building and suggested that perhaps they were the spirits finally crossing over to the 'other side.'