A caretaker at the 1859 Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas woke to piano music and found a woman in 19th-century dress at the Gold Room keyboard. Everyone calls her Miss Bettie Brown. The foundation's own history says Bettie never learned to play.
Piano music woke the caretaker at the 1859 Ashton Villa one night. He lived out back in the carriage house, and the sound was coming from the Gold Room, the big formal parlor on the first floor, so he went in expecting to catch a burglar. What he found was the faint image of a woman in 19th-century dress seated at the keyboard. She faded as the music did. He turned on every light in the house and stayed awake until morning.
Everyone who tells that story names the same woman. Miss Bettie Brown is reported in the Gold Room and at the top of the winding staircase, in a turquoise gown. Turquoise was her favorite color. One tour guide described her on the second-floor landing, holding one of Bettie's own ornate fans.
She was born Rebecca Ashton Brown in 1855, eldest daughter of the Galveston hardware merchant who built the villa, and she died in it on September 13, 1920, at 65. In between she did roughly as she pleased. She never married. She smoked in public, a scandal for an unmarried Victorian woman. She studied painting in Vienna from 1881 to 1883, and her canvases still hang on the walls here. She traveled alone to Japan, Greece, Mexico and South America, kept apartments in New York and London, and rode a camel out to the pyramids.
The house keeps smaller habits. An upstairs coverlet will not stay smooth. "The docents would run around and tidy things before a tour group would come in," the Galveston historian Kathleen Shanahan Maca told the Houston Chronicle. "They would straighten the bedding on Miss Bettie's bed, and when they would come up the stairs with the tour, it would look like there had been somebody sitting there." A chest Bettie bought in the Middle East is found locked some days and unlocked others. Its key has been missing for decades, and nobody living has one.
A Galveston Historical Foundation publication says plainly that Miss Bettie never learned to play the piano. The musician in that family was her only sister, Mathilda, called Tillie, who played piano and violin and entertained guests in the Gold Room. By the Houston Chronicle's account, Tillie married at 19 to a violent alcoholic, moved back into Ashton Villa after their father died in 1895, and obtained a divorce with Bettie's help, almost unheard of in Texas then.
People walking Broadway still report recitals coming out of the empty house. They call the woman at the keyboard Bettie. The sister who could actually play is the one nobody asks for.
