You couldn't blame the house for bringing about Miranda's bad luck. Her long spell of tragedy began back in Smith County in the late 1880s. In fact, records indicate that Miranda Jane Moore didn't arrive in Galveston until after the Storm of 1900. And if it seems unclear how she would find herself in a city nearly 300 miles away from her hometown, a city, no less, that had just been devastated by the "storm of the century," three tombstones in the Hopewell Cemetery in Woodsboro offer possible explanations.

In 1881, she married a farmer, James A. Vickers. He was 22 and she was 21. But the young pair were only given seven years together before James succumbed to unknown causes in 1888. He was 29 years old at the time, the father to two sons, Claude and John Edgar Vickers, and a daughter, Lottie B., who was born just one month before he died.

Six years after the death of her first husband, Miranda found herself a 33-year-old widow caring for three young children. Though she married that same year, in 1894, to James Richard Gorman, a painter by trade, he too suffered an untimely death at the age of 40 and only two years after their nuptials. Their son, also named James Gorman, was only a year old when his father died.

Miranda wed for the third and final time four years later to Joseph Thomas Wise. As fate would have it, this union, the shortest of all her marriages, was only to last four months before Joe Wise died at age 39 on April 2, 1900. Their son, Joe Wise Jr., was born eight months later on December 15, 1900. It was likely that Miranda didn't even know she was pregnant at the time of her husband's passing.

Despite extensive research, no documents could be found relating to the deaths of all three husbands.

Evidence of these tragedies can be glimpsed via a census taken in June 1900 of Wood County, Texas. Miranda's occupation, despite being three months pregnant, is listed as "farmer," and residing with her are the children of three dead husbands: Claude (17), John Edgar (15), Lottie (12), and James (4). Two boarders also resided at the same address—a farm laborer and a schoolteacher.

Perhaps this moment was a turning point for her—the next record of Miranda is in a 1909 Directory for Austin boarding houses: "Wise, Miranda J. (wid Joseph), furnished rooms." Just a few years later in 1913, Miranda is found residing in Galveston, though its unclear when exactly she left Austin. She might have even started to think the move to Galveston had given her some reprieve, but soon enough tragedy struck again in 1916 when her youngest son, Joe Wise Jr., died at age 15 of pneumonia.

Miranda can be traced to the Craftsman as early as 1928, although she may have moved in soon after it was constructed in 1924. It was at this property where Miranda, who sometimes went by "Randa" or "Randy," spent the last 20 years of her life, a thrice-widowed woman, living with her son, James Gorman, a clerk for the Santa Fe Railroad.

Miranda died in 1946 at her home. Records indicate that her final years were lost in the haze of dementia, although perhaps there was some silver lining to the forgetting of painful memories.

The area immediately surrounding Mrs. Wise's home is distinctive not for its grand Victorian homes, though some nearby did survive the storm, but rather for the glaring absence of them.

Compare two Sanborn Fire Insurance maps (pictured below), one from 1947 (right), and one created 35 years earlier, in 1912. The earlier map shows a neighborhood sparsely populated, and at first glance, you may guess that the absence of buildings is due to the fact that development simply hadn't reached this part of the island yet. But in truth, the barrenness of Ward 7 was a remnant of the destruction caused by the 1900 storm.