The Bishop's Palace in Galveston, Texas is said to keep Walter Gresham, who opened his stone house to 200 storm refugees in 1900 and is still reported pacing the curved front porch when weather builds over the Gulf. Inside, his wife's card box won't stay put.
The Bishop's Palace in Galveston, Texas has a man who only comes out when the weather does. Witnesses describe him in Victorian dress, walking the length of the curved front porch and back again, looking the building over, then stepping into the heavy wood front doors and not coming out the other side. He turns up during storms, or in the hours just before one. The people who tell it say he is Walter Gresham, and that he is checking his house.
Gresham was a lawyer, a railroad man and a Texas legislator, and in 1887 he started building at 1402 Broadway with the Galveston architect Nicholas Clayton drawing it for him: limestone with granite and sandstone trim, and what the district's landmark nomination calls "a profusion of towers, dormers, and gables each separately roofed." He and his wife Josephine raised nine children in it. She painted, and the third-floor room where she worked is still called Mrs. Gresham's studio on the tour route.
Then September 1900. The hurricane that came over the island killed somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people in Galveston. That same landmark nomination records what it did to the Greshams' own block: Clayton's Sacred Heart Church, next door at 1400 Broadway, was so badly damaged it had to be completely rebuilt in 1903-04, and the apartment house directly across the street, reported to be the first one ever built in the city, was destroyed outright. The Gresham house stood. More than 200 Galvestonians whose homes were gone came through its doors and stayed.
Josephine rode the storm out inside. One account of that night has her helping pull survivors from the water outside her own door. Staff afterward described her as "totally wrecked," and she left for New York to recover.
Her card box is still in the house, the one that held the small things the couple brought back from their travels. The ghost tour guides say it does not stay put. It is never where you left it. Guests have reported hearing both Greshams pacing the halls indoors as well.
And people out front report being shoved. Scratched, tripped, punched by something they cannot see, while they stand at or walk past the front of the house. The guides who repeat that one note in the same breath that no tragedy is recorded as ever having happened inside the Palace. Nobody is documented dying in it. Walter died in Washington, D.C., 20 years after the storm. The worst night in the building's history happened outside its walls, to the people at the door, and outside is where they keep seeing him: on the porch, walking its length, going over the building again.
