Haunted hotel guide · Galveston, Texas

The Mansard House, Galveston: The Old Normandy Inn and Its Dark Legends

For years ghost tours stopped outside this boarded-up house on 23rd Street and called it Galveston’s demon house. Now it is a restored boutique inn, and you can sleep inside.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate hotels

2.8/5Haunted Rooms Score

1912Year built

Third floorWhere the stories gather

Visit hotel websiteMeet the ghosts

The Mansard House began in 1912 as the Smith and Perry boarding house in Galveston’s East End. In the 1990s an owner renamed it the Normandy Inn and planned a bed and breakfast, but the inn never really got going, and the house then sat empty for years. In that time it collected some of the darkest stories on the island: screams from empty rooms, objects thrown at walls, a boy who leapt from a window and, later, signs of occult rituals found by police.

In 2023 Michael and Ashley Cordray’s preservation company Save 1900 restored the house for their TV series Restoring Galveston, and in March 2024 it opened as The Mansard House, a 12-room boutique inn for guests 25 and over, with a heated pool. The owners say the house is not haunted. The ghost tours still tell its story. Here is what is documented, what is legend and what local historians have debunked, as part of our guide to haunted hotels in Galveston.

The ghosts of The Mansard House

The 1989 tapping, laughter and music

The oldest firsthand account comes from a Halloween 1989 article in the Galveston Daily News by Sonya Garza, as summarized by Hauntbound. A resident of the building, a Mrs. Stanford, described tapping from the floor above every night around midnight all summer, “almost like people tap dancing.”

She and her daughter, Linda Groh, both said they heard distant laughter and faint music when they were alone, and both felt an oppressive unease on the third floor. A medium told Stanford that two spirits were attached to her. She stayed anyway.

Screams, voices and thrown objects

Houstonia’s 2025 roundup of Galveston ghost stories says later owners reported disembodied screams, voices coming from empty rooms and objects smashed against walls. These stories made the house a regular stop for Historic Galveston Ghost Tours long before it reopened.

The boy at the window

The most disturbing legend is about a child. In one version told on the tours, a mother heard her son scream, then a crash of glass, and found he had jumped through a window, saying a voice had told him to. Houstonia also reports a second story, set in 2002 while the house was closed for repairs, of a boy who went up to the third floor alone and jumped, then woke from a coma with no memory of being inside.

Galveston historian Kathleen Maca, as summarized by Hauntbound, looked for contemporary newspaper records of a child jumping from a third-floor window and found none, and traced the story to teenage dares. Galveston Monthly’s history of the house agrees: it links the legend to an incident about twenty years before its article in which a teenager dared a friend to jump, and says the boy was unharmed. Treat it as legend, not history.

The tour guide's ear

Historic Galveston Ghost Tours tell a story from one of their own guides, Tyler. Sent back into the boarded-up building to fetch a forgotten wallet, he says something unseen grabbed his ear on the stairs and pulled his head back. He says he went in a skeptic and came out a believer.

How it became the demon house

The house’s darkest reputation dates from its empty years. Houstonia reports that about a decade ago police, called out over a foul smell, found animal remains and a painted pentagram with an altar and candles, with symbols and verses on the walls. That discovery, more than any ghost sighting, is why the tours called it a demon house.

Some versions add a buried Egyptian mummy on the grounds. Maca found no record of that either. Today’s owners deny any haunting and have given the house a bright, cheerful restoration.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The third floor: Where the 1989 residents felt uneasy, where the tapping came from and where the window legends are set. Ask for a third-floor room when you book.
• The main staircase: Where tour guide Tyler says something grabbed his ear.
• The lounge: The common room where light breakfast is served each morning, a good place to ask staff what they have heard.
• The pool and cabanas: The heated pool is open year-round. At night it is the best spot to look up at the house’s mansard roof and third-floor windows.

History of The Mansard House

George C. Smith, a telephone operator at the Galveston Daily News, built the house in 1912 and 1913 to a design by his wife, Louise Dowling Smith, and it opened as a boarding house on February 1, 1913, according to Galveston Monthly. It had 27 rooms, 20 of them for rent, under its distinctive mansard roof. In 1926 Jessie Belle Perry bought it. She briefly called it the Paramount, but boarders knew it as Perry’s Place, and she ran it until her death in 1951. That is why it is often called the Smith and Perry, or Smith-Perry, boarding house.

The Perry’s Place name lasted into the early 1970s, after which the building housed an antique shop and changed hands several times. Around 1996 a new owner, Norman Jones, renovated it and renamed it the Normandy Inn while seeking a bed and breakfast permit, but the Galveston Daily News later reported that the inn never opened. After a 2007 sale and a dispute between its new owners, the house stood empty for years, boarded up and decaying, which is when vandals, police calls and ghost tours turned it into Galveston’s best-known haunted house.

Michael and Ashley Cordray of Save 1900 bought it and restored it, filming the work for their Magnolia Network series Restoring Galveston. The inn says the restoration was completed in 2023, and the house opened in March 2024 as The Mansard House, a 12-room boutique hotel. The name is a nod to its roofline.

Today the inn has a heated pool with cabanas, gated parking, a lounge with light breakfast from 8 to 10 a.m. and a small shop, and it offers cruise parking. It is for guests 25 and over and books through its own website.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Take the Historic Galveston Ghost Tour first. The house has been a stop for years, and the guides tell its story best.
• Ask for a room on the third floor, where most of the stories are set.
• Guests must be 25 or older, so check the rule before booking a group trip.
• The house is in the East End, an easy walk or short ride from the Strand, Ashton Villa and the Moody Mansion.
• Respect the owners’ view. They do not promote the house as haunted, so keep ghost talk light with other guests.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Hotel Galvez & Spa: the island’s grand 1911 seafront hotel and the ghost of Audra in Room 505
• The Tremont House: a historic downtown hotel near the Strand with its own ghost stories
• Haunted hotels in Texas
• Haunted hotels in Galveston

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• The Mansard House (official site)
• Smith-Perry boarding house history (Galveston Monthly)
• Biz Buzz: celebrity couple transforms derelict Galveston property into boutique hotel (Galveston Daily News, 2024)
• Haunted Hours: Galveston ghost tours and stories (Houstonia, Oct 2025)
• The Mansard House, former Normandy Inn (Hauntbound)
• The Mansard House (Visit Galveston)

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