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My Recollection of the Pirate House by
John Cuevas
In 1962, Mr. and Mrs. Borjn Lister invited be to tour their home at 649 North Beach Boulevard in Waveland, Mississippi, known on the Coast as the Pirate House. Mr. Lister knew of my interest in Coast history, and took great delight in pointing to the evidence that the infamous pirate, Jean Lafitte and his men once resided there. I could feel the spirit of those old privateers as we made our way through every room. The special nooks and crannies seemed to suggest the possibility of once secret closets and hiding places, and while these architectural features had long been dismantled, I was assured they did at one time exist.
A door near the center of the house led to the infamous basement. The stairs were narrow with a very steep rise, and although there were electric lights in the ceiling, the darkness of the walls in this windowless room seemed to absorb almost all of the artificial light. Constructed of heavy cypress timbers, the walls were almost black not from paint, but from age. The room had the appearance more of a sub-basement than of a dungeon, but there were details that one would not find in a normal home. Iron spikes were driven into the thick cypress walls approximately 2-3 feet apart at a height suggesting that shackles could have at one time been attached. The spikes were not like railroad nails, but rather had an open ring on the head where ropes or chains could possibly have been threaded.