The House with the Green Gables
About halfway between the thriving, up-to-date, electrically lighted City of Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky, with its million-dollar steel mills, and Grayson, the county seat of Carter County, Kentucky, there stands on the hillside a few rods from the modern highway U. S. 60, a little white cottage with green gables.
Within a mile or so of the place unusual road signs catch your eye. White posts, each surmounted by a white open scroll. There are ten of them, put there, no doubt, by some devoted pilgrim. There is one for each of the Ten Commandments. You read carefully one after the other. The one nearest the point where you turn off on a dirt road that leads to the white house with the green gables reads
| Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother. |
You leave your car at the side of the dirt road near U. S. 60, and go on foot the rest of the way.
You wonder, as you look at the beauty of the well-kept lawn, the carefully planted hedge and cedars, the step stone walk that leads up the sloping hill to the door, at the silence of the place. As you draw nearer, you wonder at the uncurtained windows, neat, small-paned casements with neither shade nor frill.
You learn that the place has stood untenanted for years. Truth to tell it has never been occupied. Some call it the haunted house with the green gables.
Some will tell you there is a shattered romance behind the empty, green-gabled house. Others contend it is tenanted. They have seen a lovely woman, lamp in hand, move about from room to room through the quiet night and stand sometimes beside the window up under the green gable that looks toward the west. She seems to be watching and waiting, they say. But when the day dawns woman and lamp vanish into thin air.
Others will tell you that an eccentric old man built the house for his parents long since dead. He believes, so they say—this old eccentric man living somewhere in the Kentucky hills (they are not sure of the exact location)—that his parents will return. Not as an aged couple, feeble and bent as they died, but in youth, happy and healthful. This “eccentric” son himself now stooped with age, with silver hair and faltering step, built the pretty white house that his parents might have beauty in a dwelling such as they never knew in their former life on earth. The old fellow himself, so the story goes, makes many a nocturnal visit to the dream house, hoping to find his parents returned and happily living within its paneled walls.
There are all sorts of stories, varying in their nature according to the distance of their origin from the green-gabled house.
Curious people have come all the way from the Pacific Coast to see it, from New England and Maine, from Canada and Utah.
As the years go by the legend grows.
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen the haunted house with the green gables,” some will say, glowing with satisfaction. “And they do say the eccentric old man who built it for his parents has silent, trusty Negro servants dressed in spotless white who stand behind the high-backed chair of the master and mistress at the table laden with gleaming silver and a sumptuous feast. The old man firmly believes his parents will return!”
What with the increasing stories you decide to take a look for yourself. I did, accompanied by a newsman and a photographer.
Nothing like getting proof of the pudding.
Out you go, under cover of darkness, equipped with flashlights and flash bulbs. A haunted house, you calculate, will be much more intriguing by night. Stealthily you draw near. You peer into the windows, the uncurtained windows, in breathless awe prepared to see the lady with the lamp floating from room to room, hoping to glimpse the spectral couple seated at table in the high-paneled dining hall of which you have heard so many tales. Tales of gleaming silver, white-clad Negro servants bowing with deference before the master and mistress of the green-gabled house.
Through the uncurtained windows you gape wide-eyed. Instead of the scene you expected, there looms before your eyes plunder of all sorts tossed about helter-skelter: sections of broken bookcases, old tables, musty books, broken-down chairs.
You are about to retreat in utter disgust when you hear the sound of footsteps on the cobblestone walk that leads around the house. The sound draws nearer.
The wary photographer pulls his flashlight. Its bright beam plays upon the stone walk, catching first in its lighted circle the feet of a man. The light plays upward quickly. It holds now in its bright orb the smiling face of a man. A middle-aged man with pleasant blue eyes.
“—could—we see—the owner of this place?” stammers the reporter.
“You’re looking at him, sir!” the fellow replies courteously. “What can I do for you?” It is a pleasant voice with an accent that is almost Harvard.
“Who—who—are you?” the reporter stammers.
“Hedrick’s my name. Ray Hedrick! What’s yours?”
When the uninvited visitors have identified themselves the owner invites you most graciously to take a seat on the doorstep.
You learn that this “eccentric old man,” of whom you have heard such ridiculously fantastic tales, is and has been for a number of years telegraph operator for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad at their little wayside station, Kilgore. It is within a few miles of the mill town of thriving Ashland, Boyd County, Kentucky, and the county seat of Carter County. The little railroad station is within a stone’s throw, as the crow flies, of “the haunted house.”
“Pleasant weather we are having,” the owner observes casually.
“Yes,” the reporter replies reluctantly, “but this house—here”—the reporter is obviously peeved for having been snipe-hunting—“what about this house?”
“Well,” drawls the owner tolerantly, “a house can’t help what’s been told about it, can it?”
“But how did the story get started—about it being haunted?” the reporter is persistent.
The owner jerks a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of U. S. 60. “Is that your car parked over there?”
There is in his tone that which impels you to stand not on the order of your going. You go at once—annoyed at being no nearer the answer than when you came.
And still the curious continue to motor miles and miles to see the haunted house with the green gables.
8. Singing on the Mountain Side
Though there were and are people in the Blue Ridge Country who, like Jilson Setters, the Singin’ Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow, can neither read nor write, such obstacles have meant no bar to their poetic bent. They sing with joy and sorrow, with pride and pleasure, of the scene about them, matching their skill with that of old or young who boast of book learning.