The House of My Youth

Part 1 - The House



It’s gone now. Destroyed by fire back in ’71. But for a long time I called it home.



The house was built in the late 1800’s. I seem to remember someone saying 1888, but I don’t believe we really knew. We just knew it was old and much in need of repair when we moved into it in January of 1963. Still, considering the place we had just left, it was a mansion.



In 1962, my parents signed the papers to purchase a very nice western rambler, tucked into a nest of tall trees. It had a couple of barns and a pasture. It was a wonderful house. There was just one problem: my parents couldn’t afford it. At some point in the fall of the same year we were evicted. Desperate to find any place to live, my parents chose an old, decrepit farm house just outside of St. Francis, where I and my siblings went to school. That house had no indoor plumbing, and the outhouse was a long walk from the house. My brother was so embarrassed about living there he refused to ride the bus to and from school. He walked.



To my brother’s (and my sisters and my own) delight, we were only in the “poor house” three or four months. Then my parents found “The Old House”, as it was to become known to us. The people selling it had built a magnificent new house on the property next door, which had once belonged to The Old House. Only a few decades earlier there had been a huge farm here, own by the Edmunds. The corner which the house occupied was known as “Edmunds’ Corner”. That remained so until we left the area. Then it was “Delger’s Corner.” When the Edmunds passed away, the land was subdivided. The original house was allowed to keep just over five acres. The rest belonged to others.



I have a vague recollection of running through the house. It seemed huge after the “poor house”. The ceilings on the ground floor were twelve feet high. I don’t know why they did it like that, but they did. Even my dad and my brother (both over six feet tall) had to climb a ladder to touch them.



The original house was square, with doors at the north and the south. Just to the north was a small, two-car garage, with attached tool shed. Over the years someone connected the house to the garage, filling the space with a kitchen and bathroom. The original house did not have a bathroom. The garage had been nailed shut. We used it for storage. We called it the porch. The old “front” door on the north wall was locked. In all the years we lived there I do not believe this door was used much at all.



The new front door faced south. Entry to the house was made through the kitchen, either by the front door, or the porch. For years this was the only door access to the house. We locked the south door, off the living room. That door didn’t become used until the last few years. It was a good thing we unlocked it, too.



At some point during my years at The Old House, every room (except the kitchen and bath) became my bedroom – for at least a time. But mostly I slept upstairs. My brother, Mickey, got the northeast bedroom, “B2” (see diagram). My eldest sister, Lynahr, was given B4. Judayl, another sister, got B3. I shared B1 with my sisters, Gayanne and Helvie. That was the original placement. I don’t recall where my parents slept originally, but eventually they settled on the “P” room. We shifted rooms a lot. When the house finally met its end, I was in B4.



NOTE: This is more of a sketch than a floorplan, based on memory. It's hardly exact, but it demonstrates room relationships well enough. Note the HUGE living room. It was 15' x 28' with a 12' ceiling. We had some wonderful Christmas Trees in this room.
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The dining room, “D”, eventually was home to a large coal burning stove/furnace. A square hole in the ceiling allowed heat to float up to “B2”, making that the preferred room upstairs in the winter. Winters were hard in The Old House. Snow actually came into the house from places where the walls had cracked. The worst of these was at the foot of the stairs going up, in the dining room. I remember that snakes used to like to come in that way, too. (No big deal. Just little garden snakes.) When things got especially cold, we would block all heat from going upstairs or into the living room (easy enough as most of it seeped outside through windows and cracks anyway).



There was a basement – of sorts. The original basement hadn’t been much more than a vegetable cellar under most of the dining room. When the bathroom and kitchen were added the basement was expanded to account for the plumbing. The well was nearly directly beneath the kitchen sink. I remember having to go down with a propane torch (when I was older) to thaw out frozen pipes. My mother put an electric heater next to the pump and had it running constantly to prevent the pump itself from freezing. We put aluminum foil behind it to reflect the heat back. It was probably the warmest place in the house, but going to the basement was not a fun expedition. It was dark, gloomy, musty, dirty, dank, smelly and a host of other unpleasant adjectives. Further, the walls didn’t go all the way up to the floor above. You could see beneath the living room and my parents’ bedroom. That was just so creepy.



Which brings me to the Old House's last shortcoming. We didn’t know about it when we moved in. The previous owners had been careful about keeping it a secret. But, considering the situation we were coming from, I don’t expect it would have mattered had we known. My dad never would have believed it anyhow, although I suspect he changed his mind before the end. Everybody (with the possible exception of my dad) who ever spent more than twenty-four hours in The Old House came to the same, irrevocable conclusion: The Old House was haunted.