Empty farmhouse seemed to have its share of ghosts
By Mychal Wilmes
wilmes@agrinews.com
Date Modified: 03/11/2010 9:11 AM
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When my parents bought the Le Sueur County farm in 1958, they acquired two farmsteads.
One was where we lived and the other had a big abandoned house and a red barn with an attached lean-to that was constructed shortly after the turn of the 20th century.
The abandoned place seemed steeped in mystery to a grade-school student. I never explored alone in the old house because my mind had occupied the house with mysterious and spooky characters. There were good reasons for that. The wood floors were spongy and the heavy sink. The first floor was empty, except for a small cactus plant — probably a Christmas cactus — that had been left to die years before. The upstairs window provided a good view of the pasture.
The emptiness caused every sound in the house to echo loudly, which added to the sense it was a haunted. Proof was provided by an active imagination, which created an old farmer in long underwear and his wife who had lost their children to some terrible 19th century epidemic.
Ghosts and chores chased us out of the house. Young stock and dairy heifers were kept in the barn. Hogs were in the lean-to, as good a place he ever had to raise hogs in.
The farm didn't have electricity, so water was pumped via an old and smokey engine that wheezed but always seemed to start. We fed the livestock silage from a wagon pulled by the Allis Chalmers WC. The barn was about 1 mile — though it seemed much longer than that on cold winter days — from our farmstead. The tractor provided little protection and the biting winds turned us into popcicles despite and caps, gloves and coveralls.
We considered it a miserable place to be n winter, but in summer it took on new life.
My brothers, who knew I was scared of many things, suggested the house was inhabited by hobos who needed a place out of the rain. More then once, they cautioned that If a hobo was spotted, I should turn the tractor around and kick it into high gear.
A hobo as I imagined him to be would pretty much look like Red Skeleton's Clem Kadiddlehopper, a sad-sack sort who survived in a world he didn't quite fit into. Although no hobos were ever spotted, the neighbor boys scared scared me when they roamed through the place looking to shoot the pigeons who had the run of the hayloft.
Old barns and their hay bales were perfect roosting spots for the birds, which may explain why with fewer barns pigeons are seldomly seen today.
The old farmstead raised good heifers and good hogs, but by the mid-1960s it was hopelessly outdated. It was decided that the home place needed a garage. The old house would be torn down and its still-sturdy planks used to build a shed big enough for a shop to fix tractors. I didn't much like the idea that the house would be torn down. I had convinced myself that one day when I married, we would fix it up and live there. It took an entire summer to tear it down, pull out the nails and save would could be salvaged.
I took the dead cactus outside, dug a hole and planted it. A cactus, I thought, could live for years without rain, so it might come back to life.
I wondered about what happened to the ghosts who lived in my mind.
I eventually concluded that since their house was gone they were left to wonder the earth.
My sister and her husband eventually purchased the property and built a new home there.
The old barn eventually collapsed and was burned. I never saw the spirits again, at least not to my knowledge.