Located at 2901 Broadway Ave J., cross street is 29th. This lovely Victorian home holds dark secrets...
From Haunted Rooms - 8 MOST HAUNTED PLACES IN GALVESTON, TX
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#4.
Van Alstyne House was built in 1891 and it is nicknamed ‘The Gingerbread House’ because of its distinctive appearance.
For many years the building housed an antique store, but the owners eventually had to abandon it because of an onslaught of paranormal activity.
Just some of the activity that they reported over the years included the alarms going off in the night for no apparent reason, tables being completely flipped over, a toy truck rolling towards a visiting police officer and a disembodied voice threatening a visitor that he was going to die if he did not leave immediately!
From The Islander Galveston Magazine
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The Van Alstyne House
The Most Haunted House on the Island?
Story By Amy Matsumoto
“I didn’t believe in ghosts,” Scottie Ketner, owner of upscale resale and antique shop Le Chat Noir said matter of factly. “But then I opened an antique business in an old Victorian house on Broadway I named Annabelle’s, and let’s just say my beliefs changed, before I opened the business I had to make more space so I contacted A&J Tree Service.”
Annabelle’s occupied the three-story Victorian mansion on 29th and Broadway in the mid-90s, a thriving co-op for several antique vendors. Ketner ignored the stories at first, despite the quality and quantity of them, until “…things started to happen.”
“Alarms went off in the middle of the night, when no one was there. There was absolutely no reason for them to sound, but every time we redid a room in the house, they would go off repeatedly, to the point the officers coming to the scene knew with confidence they would find nothing and no one on the property.”
“One time, two police officers arrived after being alerted by our system. One officer was a veteran – he had been out here before – but the other officer was new to the force. Or at least, that’s how he seemed. They went up to the second floor and heard a noise. It was dead silent elsewhere in the house, so every little noise was noticeable. A toy truck suddenly came from one of the rooms and glided across the hall, which spooked the young officer. He drew his gun, but the other officer told him not to bother. ‘We’re not going to find anyone up here,’ he told him.
And then we walked into a room and found one of my vendor’s tables overturned. I followed the men, and was at first confused, when the young officer tried to hand me a $5 bill. Then I noticed the crucifix in his other hand, with a price tag of $4.95. He had put his gun away and replaced it with a cross from the shop. I guess he felt he needed a different kind of protection. I looked in his eyes and saw fear. He swore he could see someone behind one of the counters. I told him he could have the crucifix for free.”
While the happenings on the second floor might have been enough to spook a police officer, it was what happened in the attic and the door leading up to it which made Ketner a believer. “The third floor was walled off when we moved in. Which was strange?” Though Ketner removed the wall she says all of “us experienced that door to the attic slamming shut at one point or another.”
“There was something about the attic,” she said. “I used to go up there when I needed a moment to myself. One time I experienced something truly bizarre. I was taking a rest when I heard this strange collection of voices of different European accents, and most definitely from another time.”
“That place may be a portal,” suggests Dash Beardsley, originator of Ghost Tours of Galveston, who lists The Van Alstyne House as number nine on his top ten most-haunted list. “Twice I saw a young man I believe was waiting for a lady. He might have been from a family who lived in the house. But he was very much there.”
Ketner remembers the chilling anecdotes of former inhabitants of the house, who lived there when it was a youth shelter. With a certain wondrous glaze coming over them like a rescinding shadow, they inevitably asked her the same cryptic question, “Have you seen the man?”
One former inhabitant of the youth shelter told her a particularly hair-raising story. “He said he had gone to the third floor to find a game when he had the feeling he was being watched. He looked up to see a man in a dark, Victorian-era suit with a tall collar peering at him from the landing outside. Instinctively, the boy ran back downstairs, having recognized the fact that there was no landing outside on which the man could have been standing.”
Not only was the house a 1900 Storm survivor, but according to the 1900 Storm map, which marks the areas of the island according to level of damage, the house received comparatively little damage; a remarkable fact, considering the utter devastation of the neighborhood immediately surrounding it.
Among the clutter of old papers on the third floor of the house, Ketner found a letter written by one of the original dwellers who had been in the house during the 1900 Storm, a Van Alstyne, who wrote: “Can you imagine 50 of us crammed underneath the stairs?” The letter also commented on the day’s passing. The water was still too high for them to exit the house, and so, stuck inside, they “had nowhere else to look but through the window and count their blessings, as wagons of bodies passed by.”
The Van Alstyne family was prominent in Galveston’s beginnings. Patriarch of the family William Van Alstyne was featured on the front page of “The Galveston Daily News” in 1951 of a story entitled: “99 Years Since Invasion of Iron Horse in Texas,” detailing Van Alstyne’s participation in the building of Texas’s first railroad. The article also mentions other important members of his family. “Perhaps the best authority on that railroad reputed to be the first west of the Mississippi, is Mrs. A.V. Harvey of 2901 Broadway, granddaughter of William Van Alstyne and daughter of the railroad pioneer’s son Albert A. Van Alstyne who settled in Galveston…”
Albert managed of The National Cotton Oil Company, his wife Catherine, a world-renowned singer, was also featured on the front page of “The Galveston Daily News” in the 1930s. But being featured in the newspaper was nothing new for the family; the Van Alstynes were socialites, attending any event worth mentioning. They built the house in 1891 on Broadway, where grand Victorian mansions of upper crust Galvestonians lined the street with the audacious consistency of gas-lit lamp posts.
“The 1900 Storm, and the fact that the house was amongst so much rubble, could be the reason it is haunted to this day,” Richard L. Smith, of Paranormal Investigations of Texas and author of “Everywhere I Go is Haunted,” stated. “You have to understand – there were thousands of bodies around Galveston for weeks after the storm. This could have been when the spirits of these people who died so tragically and unexpectantly, found a home at 2901 Broadway.”
Smith, who studied the house for two months when it was the antique store The Gingerbread House, knows not only the unusual happenings at the house, but also the unusual people who haunted it. With a background in military intelligence, Smith is an expert in Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP, the method paranormal investigators use in order to analyze the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ of alleged haunted spaces. A video of Smith contacting and recording a particularly diabolical male spirit who happened to be bothering the owner of the house can be seen on Youtube. The video comes with parental caution.
But Ketner never knew of any evil spirit and said she never felt in danger. “I felt very protected. In fact, [one time] a man I knew walked into the store while I was upstairs. I remember feeling inexplicably compelled to call out his name, as if to discover his whereabouts. Later, I realized he had been stealing from us. Had I not been overwhelmed with the need to call his name, we might not have caught him. And that was the one and only time we were vandalized. We never had any trouble from the neighborhood because people living around us were so afraid of the house that they stayed away!”
The house is no longer home to any business and remains under construction. The traffic on Broadway whizzes passed in an apathetic rush, but when you watch the house, the watching becomes a reflection, a portal to memory. That impossibly large, and slightly broken down, house on the end of the street. You know the one – it dares you to enter its gate, walk up to the stoop and peer in. It is surreal and alive, like a pop-up book, this house teeming with life, accessible to everyone, yet somehow able to remain incognito; much like Galveston itself.
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VAN ALSTYNE HOUSE
2901 BROADWAY
Galveston, TX 77550 · Retail For Sale
DESCRIPTION
Enjoy living on the coast in the historic Van Alstyne House! Recent improvements to the main house include a new roof, gutter system, 10-ton A/C units, kitchen with granite countertops, and replaced timbers under the house. The back building has been completely redone, including new walls, kitchen, gutters, plumbing, central air/heat, electrical wiring, and double pane windows. Separate 2 bed/1 bath garage apartment. Become the next chapter of this home's rich, vibrant history! Call today!
Van Alstyne House was built in 1891 and it is nicknamed ‘The Gingerbread House’ because of its distinctive appearance.