The San Juan watch tower disappearances

Eastern Cuba. 1860. The island is a Spanish colony, and Manzanillo is a garrison town. Somewhere near it, at a place called San Juan, stands an old watch tower. The legend says it rises high above the cliffs.

Its history began badly. In 1859, government engineers had an old temple pulled down so its stones could build the new tower. When the builders learned where the stones came from, they refused to go on. They feared the desecration would bring bad luck.

February 1860. The first guard took up his post. Then the disappearances began. A shot in the night. A guard gone. Over the following weeks it happened again and again, always after the sentry had fired his rifle. One morning a rifle lay near the door. Its owner was never seen again.

Another guard was found a few hours into his watch. He was crouching under a bush outside the tower, half mad with fear. After that, the troops would hardly stand guard at all.

March 1860. Manolo Herez, an officer from Manzanillo, arrived to investigate. At first he found only a faint smell of gunpowder. So he set a watch. One soldier stood guard in the tower. Herez and some sergeants waited in a nearby forest. Four observers would later say they kept the guard in sight the whole time.

For six nights, nothing happened. On the seventh night, the guard stepped outside for a short break. A dark shape appeared. It followed him back into the tower. Then a bright light filled the inside, and by it the watchers could see the guard. A bang. The light went out.

The guard was never found. There was only one entrance to the tower, and the window was not wide enough for a man to pass through.

Every telling traces back to one undated German ghost site, GeisterNet. English Wikipedia lists the tower among haunted places in Cuba, and Spanish Wikipedia added the legend to its article on Bartolomé Masó in April 2025, both citing GeisterNet alone. The Spanish article's coordinates put the tower inland, in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, far from any cliffs, and GeisterNet itself reportedly admits it is unclear which San Juan is meant. No newspaper from 1860, no Spanish military record and no first-hand account has surfaced, and no source names the missing soldiers. Even the details drift: six men or seven, an officer or a captain, some sergeants or four observers.

In Puerto Rico, the Garita del Diablo at Castillo San Cristóbal in San Juan has its own legend of night sentries who vanished one after another. An old American newspaper item speaks of six men apparently swallowed up by that tower. A National Park Service brochure records a plainer ending there: the missing soldier had deserted, and was later found on a farm near Caguas. A San Juan watch tower, six vanished sentries, the nineteenth century. One possibility, and it remains only a hypothesis, is that the Cuban tale is the Puerto Rico legend, moved and retold.

Eight years later, the Ten Years' War against Spain began at La Demajagua, near Manzanillo. History remembers that. It does not remember the tower. Yet the legend endures on its own terms. GeisterNet says that for over a hundred years nobody has dared pass through the tower's narrow entrance, and rumours persist of strange lights, mysterious movements and dull explosions. The soldiers of San Juan remain unnamed. And unexplained.