We raised our children in a haunted house. It wasn’t the plan; we didn’t hear the stories until after we made an offer and the seller accepted it. And if that wasn’t traumatic enough, my husband found out at a church deacons’ meeting from two deaf old-timers that it had also once been a whorehouse. I had been in love with the house for over a decade, unaware of its notoriety, so we were surprised when its reputation began to hinder our ability to buy it and fix it up.
It started when the local savings and loan refused to give us a loan. Oh, they did not say that outright; they just kept “losing” the paperwork we turned in. After the third attempt, the secretary to the president whispered to my husband, “This is just going to keep happening. There is a board member of the association who doesn’t want to make the loan because he believes the rumors about it being a haunted house are true.” We were just two weeks from closing, so I called in a favor from an old boyfriend, and he sent out the appraiser, who reported back to their board, “I have no idea why she wants that house, but let her have it.”
The stonewalling from the people we contacted to do the work kept happening. The person who cleaned for us said she hadn’t slept a wink the night before; she had avoided getting close to the property all her life. The fourth plumber we contacted finally agreed to come. As Dan paid him for his work, he said, “Thank you for coming. We have had some trouble getting people to work on the house.” The plumber looked him in the eye and replied, “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.” (He remained our plumber until he retired.)
One morning, as I was getting the children ready for school, a work truck pulled up the driveway. Dan went out to talk to them, returned to the kitchen, and said, “You need to step out onto the porch and wave at the guy in the passenger seat.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Just do it, please,” he said with deep frustration.
So I stepped out onto the deck in my bathrobe and waved at a young mountain man peering at me from under his visor. I returned to the kitchen and said, “What was that about?”
“Those are the electricians,” Dan said. “The young guy told his boss as they pulled up that he was not working here.”
He only knew two things about this house: one, that it was haunted, and two, that a woman preacher lived there. I am not sure which issue frightened him more. Still, I would have thought the whole whorehouse thing would at least have received an honorable mention.
Retired campus minister, campus ministry coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, and Collegiate Specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.