Born in 1864, John Leisk Tait, Jr. was the son of a Scottish
emigrant from the Shetland Islands. When his father first came to the United
States (at a very young age), his family settled in Joliet, Illinois, where
they were farmers. At age 19, John L., Sr. went to California, as many young
men did at the time, to find his fortune in the gold fields and was a miner for
six years. After returning to Illinois for several years, he relocated to
Oregon and established a prosperous, 400-acre farm near Creswell (right). It was here
that the “hardy Scotch-Norseman” raised his four children, including his oldest
son, John L., Jr. Unlike his father, however, John apparently did want to become
a farmer. Instead, he pursued a career as a writer, where he achieved some
success. By his early thirties, John Leisk Tait had been published in a number
of magazines and periodicals, including the Pacific Monthly, the New Age
Magazine, the American Freemason, Bob Taylor’s Magazine and the World To-Day.
His contributions included poetry, works of fiction, treatises on Freemasonry
and the Great War (he was apparently an active Mason), and a historical piece on
the burning of the steamboat Sultana. He was also a newspaperman. His longest
stint in the newspaper business was in Memphis, where for fourteen years he was
a reporter, assistant editor and Sunday feature editor for the Commercial
Appeal, after which he became a copy and service manager for the Ruebel-Brown
advertising agency in St. Louis. 
In 1907, Tait (left) published a ghost story set in Biloxi in the
San Francisco Chronicle. Five years later, on April 6, 1912, the story was
reprinted in the Gulfport Daily Herald. The newspaper, as a lead to the story,
reported that "the story of the haunted villa of Biloxi is one that holds the interest of the most casual reader, whether he believes in haunted houses or not. The villa is situated a few miles west of Biloxi and has in recent years been purchased and remodeled and extensively repaired and is today one of the handsomest residences on the Coast. It is occupied and needless to say, no one loses much sleep these days about the haunts. However, in the old days the story was quite generally credited and there was a genuine fear among the less educated contingent of the occupants of the house." In closing, the Herald praised the author, saying that Tait related the story of the haunted villa with "picturesque language, which reminds one somewhat of the style of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher." Although the paper seemed familiar with the house, there are no other clues in the story about its location other than being known as the
“Brownwell” house. A cursory look at genealogical information from the period
doesn’t reveal any “Brownwell” families in the Biloxi area and there’s no
record (as yet at least) for a “Col. Bienville Brownwell.” However, there was a
prominent lumberman by the name of Horace Brownell who apparently owned a
summer home on the Coast at the time (he was the manager of the Berwick Lumber
Company in New Orleans). Whether Tait simply borrowed and then altered the
Brownell name for his story or if there is any factual basis for the house is
unknown. In the San Francisco Chronicle
story, there is a photo of a house as an inset of a larger illustration.
Whether this is a photo of an actual house on the Coast or is a generic “old
house” image is also unknown. Regardless, I hope you’ll find the story
entertaining…
THE HAUNTED VILLA OF BILOXI
Weird in its Southern beauty, the little town of Biloxi lies
sleeping upon the edge of the great gulf at the southmost reach of the State of
Mississippi.
Biloxi is an aristocratic old place, whose ancestral
mansions, placed in wide gardens along narrow, shadelined trees, have each a
history in itself. It was settled first of all the Gulf towns, so long ago that
the date has blended into the personality of the old, cuirassed and helmeted
cavalier of Spain and France who were led thither under Sauville, a kinsman of
Bienville and Iberville, and who were impelled by the quaint and quiet beauty
of the spot to found there a settlement. And it has ever since been a favored
abiding place, for its waters teem with wild fowl and fish, and its shores
luxuriate in subtropic fruits and vegetables. Moreover, it has always been the
delight of mankind to dwell beside the sea, and in all lands, soon or late, the
wealthier classes have utilized the power which their wealth conferred upon
them to appropriate the more comely sea views for residence sites and this was
true of the wealthier families of South Mississippi. They flocked to Biloxi
first as a winter resort and then as a place of perpetual residence and the streets
of the quaint old town are lined with substantial mansions the architecture of
a century ago. It was here at Beauvoir, that Jefferson Davis retired after the
close of the Civil War.
Less than three miles distant from Beauvoir, about seven
miles from Biloxi, lies the haunted villa known in olden days as the Brownwell
place. It must have been a stately building. Ruined and desolated as it stands
today, its long, low galleries and extensive wings bear mute witness to its
first estate. It lies deep within a thick wood well back from the road and not
visible until one has penetrated a hundred yards within the encircling forest
of gloomy live oaks which shroud it day and night. No bird sings within those
trees; no rabbit darts from the hedge and frisks across your pathway as you
approach; and however noisy the sea birds' clamor, not even the untamed courier
of the deep dare hover over its gloomy recesses. Noises are there indeed, but
they are noises from which the living shrink and in which no living creature
has a lot or part.
The Brownwell place was built before the revolution by a
family of that name. It was in its day the handsomest villa for miles along the
Coast. It was the home of hospitality and the scene of unbounded gayety. The
Brownwells were a cultured people, with a fortune adequate to the gratification
of their tastes and their friendship was irrefutable evidence of social worth.
So they lived for years and then, as so often happens this
proud house found its numbers reduced almost to the point of extinction. There
remained only two, father and daughter. The last of the Brownwells in the male
line was Bienville Brownwell. He had married when quite young, and his wife
died almost immediately after the birth of their only child, whom the sorrowing
father christened Dolores. With this child he took up his permanent abode at
the Brownwell place and there devoted himself to her with an utter abandonment
of all other interests in life.
Dolores, as she grew up, developed wonderful musical talent.
Her skill as a pianist became the marvel and delight of all who knew her, but
it was for her father that she played her best--on the moonlight evenings when
the two sat alone in their beautiful home the motherless girl poured out in
music the fullness of her heart to the saddened man who had been both father
and mother to her and passers-by paused to listen and to wonder at the
sweetness of the music and the indefinable thing of the eerie that pervaded it.
Bienville Brownville raised a regiment and let it to the field, its first
colonel. One of his captains was a young fellow who the night before they
marched, stood with the tremulous Dolores within the piano room and told her
father of their plighted love; and he fell, pierced through the heart, with a
bullet in their first engagement. Less than a month later a fragment of a shell
carried away Colonel Brownwell's right arm, and he returned wan and maimed to
spend the remainder of his days comforting his stricken child.
The two were inseparable. If they had been devoted to each
other before, they were doubly so now. The girl devoted herself to her father
with an attachment which was redoubled because of her grief for the gallant
lover who had fallen at his side; and the father, grieving for her grief, lost
all interest in life, saving that which clung about his motherless daughter. I
said they were inseparable. But there was one thing which sometimes drove the
father fairly panting with pain out of her sight to wrestle alone with his God
for hours. There were spells, nights when the moon was fitfully veiled and
revealed though flying clouds and when the wind made mournful music in the
pines, when she flew to her piano and poured out the anguish of her heart in
such strains as mortal scarcely ever hears in this world. All her heartbreak,
all her loneliness, all her grief and bitter anguish wailed through its
measures and sobbed out upon the night and he who loved her would arise and
flee to the beach, where the beauty, and not the pain, came to him; and there
he would wander for hours, until the music ceased and he returned to the house
to find her weeping in wild abandonment of sometimes lying in a dead faint
beside her silent instrument. All the next day she would go about silently,
with great dark eyes staring straight ahead of her and her face white and
deathlike. Gradually she would yield to her father's tenderness, and once more
take up, with a wan smile, the burden of her duties toward him.
One night there came an electrical storm of unusual
violence, lashing trees and whipping the surf until the coast was strewn with
destruction. In the midst of it there came upon the girl the spirit of longing
for the dead lover, and she flew to her piano for consolation.
Never before had she played as she played that night.
Forgotten was the war of the elements in the mad frenzy of the music as the
woman's soul poured its anguish out on the wings of the wind, over the raging
sea and up into the face of the black sky. Her father stood transfixed at her
matchless, pallid beauty and the unspeakable pathos of her playing. Then,
wrapping his coat about him, he left the house and sought the beach, unable to
endure the sight of her suffering.
For an hour she played. Then the spell passed and she arose
and went out upon the verandah, looking with unseeing eyes to seaward, her
white robe fluttering in the storm, waiting longing for her father's return.
There was a crash, the heavens were blinded with an intense flash of living
fire and blackness and rolling thunders filled the earth and the heavens. But
above it all she had seen her father’s form and for one instant had heard his
voice. She saw his one arm flung wildly aloft and heard him calling her name.
She plunged out into the night, calling him as she ran. She made her way through
the storm to the beach calling incessantly. He was not to be found. She
returned to the house and ran wildly from room to room calling his name and
imploring him to return to her. The crash of the thunder was her only answer.
Next morning they found him. The sea had washed him ashore
at the foot of the little pier which they used as a boat landing. There was no
mark of violence upon him. The manner of his death remained a mystery. Probably
he stepped too near the beach in the darkness and slipped into the angry waters
and was unable, because of the loss of his arm, to regain the shore, and so
perished.
The daughter's grief was indescribable. They buried him
under the big magnolia in the family cemetery, and her waking hours were spent
beside his grave. She continued to dwell alone in the desolated villa, the old
Negro servants her only guardians.
Five days after the funeral her old nurse ran wildly down
the shell road one night to the nearest neighbor, imploring him to come at
once. He found her mistress dead upon the floor beside her piano, lying in a
pool of blood. She had been stabbed in the back as she sat playing. Death had
been instantaneous. Her murderer escaped, leaving no clue to his identity.
After her burial the property passed to a distant branchy of the family, to
people who had other interests binding them to a distant section. The villa was
at once advertised for rent.
It was eagerly taken by one of the leading merchants of
Jacksonville, Florida, who was spending a season with his family in the
neighborhood of Biloxi. They remained three days and nights before moving out
and offering the place for rent once more. Another tenant jumped at the
bargain, and relinquished it as quickly. Repeated efforts were made to find a
permanent tenant, but without success. Some left without explanation or excuse.
Others assigned various and elaborate reasons for their sudden departure. A few
boldly declared that the house was haunted and that they could not live there
on that account.
Gradually these stories assumed definite form. A sound of
piano playing, infinitely sad and infinitely sweet was heard during the nights
emanating from the piano room. The voice of a woman weeping rang through the
house and occasionally the words, "Father Oh, Father!" were heard by
the horror stricken tenants. On stormy nights even when there was no electrical
disturbances outside, the house would be filled with the glare of lightning and
the crashing of thunder, and through the unlighted rooms the form of a frantic
woman, clad in white, rushed with wild calls. Anon came the sound of a blow as
if against a human form, the crash of a player's hands upon the keys of the
piano, a heavy fall and silence.
Meanwhile the beautiful villa and its grounds were suffering
decay. The fences were out of repair; the shrubbery was no longer trimmed; the
marks of age and weathering upon the house were no longer removed, and the
place passed rapidly into a stage of dilapidation, which made it shunner on
that account, no less than because of its gruesome reputation. About this time
there came a tenant who, to the surprise of everybody about the place, not only
took up residence in the haunted villa, but remained there. This was a widow
with two children, a boy of 12 and a girl of a year or two younger. She was
attended by two Negro servants an old man of all work and his wife. They lived
quite alone, entertained no one and made no calls.
Mrs. Hitchcock, for that was the name of which the widow
gave to the agent from whom she rented the place, devoted herself to her
children. The boy was manifestly an invalid. At first he was seen about the
place by casual passers, his great, dark eyes and wistful bearing seeming to
yearn for the companionship which he fled if it were offered. Later he was
observed in an invalid's chair, wheeled about the walks by the old Negro man.
One day there was a quiet funeral and the boy's emaciated body was borne out
from the desolate villa to its last resting place beneath the magnolias.
Meanwhile there had been rumors, subdued at first but ugly
and increasing in volume, about Mrs. Hitchcock and her household. There are
some words in the English language at which the hearer starts to back against,
and one of these had been mentioned in connection with them. It was the word
"leprosy." The morning following the burial of the boy the mother
received a call from authorities. She met them at the door. She had observed
their approach through the live oak bordered avenue. Had she not watched for
them through weary months with eyes that grew dim with watching?
"We come to search your place for a case of
leprosy" said the leader of the posse. The woman went white to the lips, but she answered evenly.
"Let me see your warrant." The officers fell back discomfited. "By George! We
never looked after that. We didn't think you'd object," answered the
leader. "Nor will I, if you are properly authorized to make such a search," answered the widow. "We'll have to come again," said
the officer, and led his posse back to town.
Next morning they did come again, but there was no one about
the villa to object to their search. Its late inmates had disappeared
completely. Nothing remained to prove that they have ever been there, except a
smoldering heap of ashes in the yard, where some papers and refuse had been
burned, and a newly made grave under the magnolias. Yes, there was another bit
of evidence--a note was found upon the piano in the front room. It was from the
widow, and contained her pathetic story, and confirmation, if confirmation were
needed, of the tales that clustered about the haunted villa. It was brief, but
it was convincing. It read:
"You need make no search for me or mine, for before you
see this we will be beyond reach and no effort will enable you to trace us. My
two children contracted the leprosy, presumably from a Chinese servant. It
manifested itself in them two years after their father died. I have fled and
hidden with them from one place to another, fighting to prevent their being taken
from me and sent to the leper colony. We have remained quiet here longer than
elsewhere, owing to the fearful character which has been attributed to this
house; and, believe me, it is all and worse than popular belief has painted it.
I am convinced that the terror they inspired in my son hastened his
death."
It is needless to state that the most determined search was
instituted for the fugitives, but they were never traced. Where they went will
probably never be known. But from that day a new and more terrible fear infused
itself into the popular villa, which remains today, utterly neglected and
shunner of all mankind.
Photo and Image Sources:
From The Illustrated History of Lane County, Oregon (1884)
http://trees.ancestry.com
From the Gulfport Herald, April 6, 1912
From the San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1907
Ghost piano: http://terrorofyouth.blogspot.com
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