Bishop’s Palace

Gresham was a Virginia lawyer who came to Galveston after the Civil War, helped found the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad, and served in the Texas Legislature. He commissioned Nicholas J. Clayton — the island's premier architect — and construction ran from 1887 to 1892 or 1893 at an estimated cost of a quarter of a million dollars. Clayton condensed an improbable amount of design onto the lot: medieval and Renaissance detail alternating across the towers, carved woodwork inside, and painted walls by Josephine Gresham herself, an amateur painter whose basement 'grotto' survives.

The couple raised nine children in the house. When the diocese moved in, the architecture filed its second name: the Catholic Diocese of Galveston bought the property in 1923, and it served as the bishop's residence — facing Sacred Heart Church across the street — for four decades.

The diocese opened the house to tours in 1963 after its offices moved to Houston. The designations came in sequence: Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967, National Register in 1970, a contributing piece of the East End Historic District from 1975. The Galveston Historical Foundation acquired it outright in 2013 and keeps it open — Mrs. Gresham's studio and the third-floor view of the Gulf included.

Galveston's flat twentieth century — the storm having ended the island's bid to outgrow Houston — froze Clayton's 1890s work in place. The Palace is the densest surviving example of it.

The Historical Foundation now runs basement-to-attic tours that take in Mrs. Gresham's studio and the third-floor parapet with its line of sight to the Gulf — the one vantage in the file where the approach of a storm can be watched from inside the house that beat the worst one on record. The National Register lists it at the national level of significance for architecture, a category the island's other survivors generally share rather than hold alone.

The haunting file belongs, predictably, to Gresham. Local rumor holds that the protective former owner still walks the place and appears most reliably during freak weather — witnesses describe an agitated figure pacing the front porch when storms threaten. Other reports catalog a candle moving behind the porch windows at one in the morning, photographs of a figure in period dress taken through the gift-shop door.

The register notes the timing of the legend with some sympathy: a man whose house sheltered hundreds through the deadliest storm on record is exactly the kind of ghost a storm-city would keep. Whether the colonel still paces is left, as the file leaves everything unverifiable, to the porch on the next bad night.