The 1900 Storm's Restless Dead

On September 8, 1900, a hurricane came over Galveston and killed somewhere between six thousand and twelve thousand people in a single night — the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, a fact we ask you to sit with soberly. This drive is first a remembrance. It visits the memorial, the seawall the survivors built, and the ground where the dead were laid, and it tells that documented history plainly and with respect, because the scale of the loss deserves nothing less. Galveston is also famous as a haunted island, and that reputation grows directly from this storm; where we pass along the ghost lore, we label it clearly as folklore, never as fact, and never at the expense of the real people who died. Drive it slowly, and treat every stop as the memorial ground it is.