Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [72]
He never told me until years later, but that house was in a terrible state. We didn’t really inspect it until we owned it, but when I went on the road, Doo started checking it out. He told me one day he crawled under the house and found it was almost completely eaten by rats and termites. The roof was bad. Doo once told a friend of ours: “I hate to admit it, but I laid under there for an hour, big tears in my eyes. I had a book of matches in my hand and I thought, ‘Boy, the best thing I could do would be to set this old house on fire and build a new one.’ But then I thought how much it meant to Loretta, how hard she worked on the road. So I thought, ‘I’ll just fix this son-of-a-gun up, even if it takes ten years and busts every bone in my body.’ I put many a long day in that house. I guess if I’d ever burned down that house, I’d have never forgiven myself. Loretta has given so much of herself that I’m glad I fixed this place up.”
That was our dream house. Doo used to drive out and work on the house while I was traveling with the Wilburns. Finally we moved in, early in 1967. Then we began discovering things.
First, somebody told us there used to be a slave pit on that land. That made me feel bad because, coming from the mountains, I never liked the idea of blacks being used for slaves. Second, somebody told us there was a Civil War battle at Fort Donelson, not too far away, and that there were nineteen Rebel soldiers buried and killed right on the property. We’ve since found Civil War bullets and little cannon balls buried on the property. I’m real superstitious anyway, and I never liked the thought of them poor fellows lying under the ground.
It wasn’t but a few years later that Ernest, my second son, woke up in the middle of the night and saw the ghost of a Rebel soldier standing at the foot of the bed. Ernest said he got so scared, he just closed his eyes and didn’t look for a long time. When he opened his eyes, the soldier was gone.
That was enough for me. I made up my mind never to spend a minute alone in that house. Even today, I insist on Doo or Gloria being there whenever I’m home. It got worse a few years ago, when I got interested in holding séances to try to speak to people who’d died. We were holding one in the house one time, and we got the table to move clear across the room. Another time it would move a little to give answers to questions. We were trying to raise up a spirit and the table spelled out that we were reaching a man named Anderson. We tried to talk to him, but he got mad and started shaking the table. If you have ever sat in a dark room and watched a table jump right off the floor and then fall down, breaking its legs, then you know how scared we were. The next day I learned that the original owner of the house, James Anderson, was buried right near the house. We never tried talking to him again.
Doolittle never let any of that stuff worry him. He bought another thousand acres—the timber rights had already been sold to a big corporation which was messing up the land. He was busy setting up the thing as a working ranch named the Double L. He set out cornfields and cattle pastures for 300 head, fixed up the soil, and patched fences. It was a dream come true. He’s put in around $150,000 more, but we’ve been offered a near million dollars for the property, so it was a good investment. Now we’ve sunk more money into the dude ranch we opened in 1975. It has space for around 180 trailers with a five-day minimum stay, including a Saturday tour of Nashville. We’ve got square dances, fishing, games, a recreation room, tennis court, laundry, bathrooms, and over 150 miles of horseback trails. Up to now it’s taken up a lot of time and money, but we think it will be worth it in the long run. The only bad thing is, all that traffic is on the county road right below our ranch. We’ve hired a guard for our house, but it’s bound to be more crowded around Hurricane Mills than it was before we bought the town.
Doo really enjoys running the ranching end of it. He likes to work the land and restore things.