The Many Thoughts of Wanda Kidd

Two years ago this week, I posted a farewell to our home of thirty-six years in the mountains of North Carolina. At the time, I promised to write some of the stories that made the house an interesting topic of conversation, but it was too painful to talk about then. The lodge was always more than a house or a place to raise our children; it had mystery and legends attached to it. I always felt I was a keeper of the tales, and it felt like a sacred trust. Through the years, I had the opportunity to meet people who validated or gave background to the lore that surrounded the old Rest-A-Bit Lodge, making the legacy even more accurate and entertaining.

The first time I saw the mountain lodge it had faded yellow siding and dark green shakes, and I was drawn to its charm. It was nestled in an overgrown cove overlooking the Tuckasegee River on the two-lane mountain road I traveled daily. I was an impoverished college student living in a rustic rental house further down the road.  As I rode by, I tried to envision what it was like inside and the secrets it held. Little did I know that it would come on the market a decade later, and depending on who you listened to, we courageously or foolishly bought it and moved in.

That might sound like a simple life choice, but it was anything but.  We got the most respected builder in the county to come over and help us determine if it was a good investment. He went up to the second floor, jumped up and down a couple of times, and determined that it was solid. He said the hemlock posts that it was built with were insect and termite-resistant, and it should be fine; he did NOT tell us that the furnace was straight wired into the panel, the gravity water tank was too small for the current drought conditions, or that the roof needed to be replaced a decade before. As he was leaving, he did mention that he had lived across the river from “the house” all his life, and he always wanted to come into the “haunted house” and see it for himself.  That was the first hint that the house might have more history than its actual age.

It became even more apparent when we began the loan process for the house.  We turned in everything requested, set a closing date, and waited. And waited… and waited to hear. I would call, and they would say we needed to resubmit a part of the application.  That happened multiple times, so I filled out the whole form again and resubmitted it.  The closing date was less than a week away when someone from the board of the savings and loan gave Dan a clandestine call and, in a conspiratorial voice, told him that he should not wait on the loan because there was someone on the board who grew up with all of the stories about the haunting of the house and did not think it was a good investment for the bank and he continued to blackball the vote. If there is one thing you should know about mountain culture, it is that if they give you a heads-up about an issue, you would be foolish to try and fight it with logic.

I called a friend who was the president of another Savings and Loan, and his response was, “Well, I wondered when you would finally ask.” The word was out about the haunted house theory in the local banking community.  When his assessor guy came over, we were attacked by a wild dog that the owners left behind. We had to step over dried-up paint cans that still had paint brushes in them as if the painter had just stepped away, and we had to wind our way through discarded furniture and a pile of deck lumber that the neighbor’s goat butted down. It seems the owner kept his nanny goat up on the said deck, which motivated the neighbor’s daddy goat’s persistence. It was a mess, but I really wanted it, so he told the board, “I don’t know why she wants it, but if she does, let her have it.

A lot was going on in our family. Our daughter Bethany was five, I was six months pregnant with our son when we moved in that August, and Dan opened his CPA practice in a caretaker’s house on the property. We felt a sense of urgency to address several of the house’s issues. However, when we began to look for people to work on everything from plumbing to electrical to roofing, we kept hitting walls.  People would not return our calls and gave vague excuses about their unavailability. Fortunately, some of Dan’s new clients were tradespeople, and he got a plumber to commit to working on our house.  He was a quiet, taciturn man with efficient movements, and within the day, he presented Dan with a fair bill for work.  Dan quickly took out his checkbook and wrote Bobby a check, and as he slid it across the desk to him, he thanked him profusely for doing the work.  He told him of our trouble finding people to work on the house.  Bobby picked up the check, looked him in the eye, and said, “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.”  Then he turned and walked out the door. Bobby was our plumber until the day he retired, but he also provided us with the answer to the reluctance of others to return our calls.

A person who helped clean our house told me she had not slept at all the night before she came for the first time because she had heard so many ghost stories through the years. The guy who fixed our water system almost had a breakdown when his worker hid and kept turning off and on the porch light while he was manning the backhoe. Dan’s favorite story was of an electrician and his helper who drove up in our driveway early one morning and just sat there. He went out to see what the problem was. He returned to the kitchen and asked me to step out onto the porch and wave at the truck.  When I asked him why, he said, “Just do it, please.”  So I did, then asked what that was about.  He explained that the helper refused to get out of the truck because he only knew two things about the house. One, it was haunted; two, a woman preacher lived there, and he did not know which was worse. I was never sure what my waving at the boy accomplished in his mind, but he did get out of the truck and go to work.  I took it as a win.

So you may ask, what stories make the house notorious, and did we ever experience anything ourselves?

Here is a recap:

 A couple of years after we moved in, I went on staff at the Methodist Church. Ironically several of the older members had direct stories about the house. They were a treasure trove of information about the old Rest-A-Bit Lodge.

One story:

Supposedly, the Zeller family, alleged to be German spies, disappeared in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again, leaving everything behind, including dishes on the table.

A church member, Ms. Norton, told me, once she knew I lived in the house, that she had been in elementary school with little Dicky Zeller, and he had indeed abruptly stopped coming to school. She said, “One day, he was there, and then he wasn’t.” She said she had heard the rumors about the family for sixty years.

A ninety-five-year-old church member, Mrs. McKee, told me that her husband bought the house as a hunting lodge after years of it standing empty. However, she liked it so much that they made it into their home. She asked if she could visit because she had not been there in fifty years. As we walked through she told me how it used to be. She said when they moved in the house looked as if the occupants had departed in a hurry, with many things left behind, but there was no evidence of food left on the table. She said she knew the house’s reputation, but she had never let it bother her.

Others told me before the McKees moved into the lodge, the house stood empty for so long that a tree grew in the driveway. The tree was large enough that it had to be cut down before a Model T Ford left in the garage could be removed. Who would leave a car behind in the 1920’s, I  asked.

Another rumor that might have added to that story was that the lodge was first built as a boarding house for people working at the Blackwood Lumberyard. It was located in the then thriving community of East LaPorte, which boasted a company store and train service for transporting lumber and people. The story goes that Al Capone came through and stayed at the Lodge. The legend is that he stashed money in the walls while he was there and haunted it because he could not get back to claim it. It was also speculated that he swapped another car with the Model A in the garage. I know this timeline doesn’t add up.  It is like blindfolded people putting a hand on an elephant and describing it.  It’s just a part of the story. A myth that never produced hidden money that I know of.

So, what did we experience?  It depends on which member of the family you ask. Me, not so much. Dan liked to refer to the house as enchanted.  Things were inexplicably moved in the house and in the cars, especially around a piano that came with the house. Others reported hearing the piano playing at random times. People who stayed in the room above our daughter’s room sometimes heard a crying young woman. More than once, they knocked on Bethany’s door downstairs to check on her because they thought she was in distress. When asked, our son believes he saw a reflection of someone in the bathroom mirror while he was getting ready for bed. It was enough to make some people jumpy.  

Mostly, they are just good stories.  However, no one ever came trick or treating to our house in all the years that we lived there, and more than one child called their mom in the middle of the night to pick them up from a sleepover. Dan would report that people came by his office through the years and told him stories of living in the caretaker’s house and things they experienced while living there. I like to point out to him that he was the only one who ever met them, and we have no proof that those people actually came by.  Life at the old Rest-A-Bit Lodge was a mystery and for me a privilege to carry on the stories. However, the next story of the lodge is a bit more colorful.