Photographs taken at Moody Mansion in Galveston, Texas keep coming back with extra people in them: blurred guests at the edge of the frame, faces in upstairs windows that were empty. The odd part is that nobody here can name the ghost.
Photographs taken at Moody Mansion in Galveston, Texas keep coming back with more people in them than were standing there. Visitors report blurred extra guests at the edge of the frame, and faces looking out of windows that were empty when the shutter fired. "Spirit photography is particularly popular at the Moody Mansion," Ghost City Tours writes. "Visitors have even sworn to see faces appear in their pictures."
What the house doesn't have is a ghost anyone can name. Ghost City Tours opens its haunting section by admitting "there have been no specific hauntings." Haunted Rooms says stories of specific hauntings there "are few and far between." Nobody names a room, a staircase, or a floor. Galveston's official tourism site goes only as far as a belief that some of the Moody family never truly left.
Where the lore does settle on a person, it settles on the woman who built the place. Narcissa Willis spent her marriage asking the cotton broker Richard Willis for a grand home, and the Galveston ghost-history pages tell it that he refused every time, preferring his money liquid for their ten children to inherit. He died in 1892. Within about a year his widow was spending it. She had the house they had shared pulled down, authorized a new one on the same lot in 1893, and in 1895 moved into 28,000 square feet of pressed brick and rough limestone.
She lived in it for four years. Her children never came. When she died in 1899, the only other person in the house was a housekeeper drawing $1,000 a year.
Then the water. On September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane crossed the island under a surge of more than 15 feet and killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people, roughly a fifth of Galveston. The mansion came through it standing, and it went cheap: Clio's history of the house says the other bidders backed off, afraid a second storm would take whatever they bought. W. L. Moody Jr. took it that same month for $20,000 cash, furniture and pictures included. His family spent Christmas in it three months after the flood.
Ghost City Tours offers that as the second explanation for what turns up in the pictures, that the storm's dead wandered to the mansion and stayed.
The firsthand accounts are almost all camera accounts. On New Year's Day 2017, a visitor named Loida Semblante submitted a report of "two smoky images" standing beside her in photographs taken at the back of the house.
The museum sells none of it. Its events calendar lists a holiday tour and a wedding tour. No ghost walk, no investigation, nothing in October. Just a $15 audio tour, and whatever people find later in their own photographs.
