It is not as gigantic or ornate as the Carson-McKenna Big House, but ours is the old Family home that was built long ago and is plenty big enough and old enough to have some pretty strange stories attached to it. Here are a few:
1. When the Civil War was raging, Yankee troops came to the Big House twice. The Family silver was hidden, buried somewhere on the property, but when they went back to get it, it had been dug up and stolen. Later some was recovered, but much is still gone.
Or is there a hidden room somewhere in the house where it is still stashed?
2. Although the master of the Big House, his 3 sons and 2 nephews who fought in the war came home safe, his 16 year old daughter, Susie, fell ill right at the end of the war. All doctors were away on the front lines so the Family sent a rider to the nearest large town, some 50 miles away, for help. The messenger came back empty-handed and Susie died a few days later.
3. After the war, the Family started a boarding school for girls in the house and also farmed the land. Once, when a field was being burned over, a student's long skirts caught fire. Terribly burned, she died two weeks later at the house.
4. My great-grandmother, Loulie, was the baby of the Family and the youngest of 5. When she was about 12, she was out the back near the well-house where there was a big oak tree and the rabbits' hutch. A little black boy who had never been able to walk was sitting outside near the tree and Loulie was holding onto the chicken-wire fence talking to the rabbits when there was a sudden lightening strike nearby.
Loulie said that she thought her toe had come off in her shoe and, in fact, when she pulled her shoe off, her toe was black. But the most amazing thing is that the little boy who had never walked suddenly jumped up and ran in the house!
Crazy but true.
5. They kept butter and milk down the dry well to stay cool. Once when they pulled the bucket up, there was a huge rattlesnake coiled on top of the butter.
6. Loulie grew up, married and had 6 children. Her oldest daughter, named Susie for her lost sister, never married. She would come back to the Big House and stay for weeks at a time alone in the huge place. One letter I found recently states that: "I am fine staying here alone. It does not bother me as it does some people."
But my mother's younger cousin, John, began to hear footsteps on the stairs at night in the month of July. When he had a choice, as an adult, he wouldn't stay in the house after dark if he could help it.
7. All Loulie's grandchildren came to stay with her at the Big House for much of every summer. My mother remembered chasing up and down the big front hall. Once as she and her cousins were running, the big chandelier that hung near the front door fell with a crash just as they passed underneath. It was never replaced.
People always ask if our Big House is haunted. I don't believe that when folks die, they hang around down here; at least that's not what Scripture teaches. Have there been strange things heard and felt there? I have to say that there have. When there are lots of people within its walls, there is nothing but cool comfort and laughter and good times. When one walks through the long halls alone, that's a different story. I don't know why.
In the McKenna Big House, which stands much more ornate, taller, broader, richer, there have been strange things that have happened. The branch of the Family who lives there have been at odds with these odd things for generations. The newest generation, the post-WWII generation of which I am writing now, is getting quite fed up with them.
How will they contend with these strange things? What is the cause of them being there? Will they continue to tolerate them or try to evict them?
And how, exactly, will they do that? I'm not sure even I know. I'm waiting for the story to come to me.