The Haunted House of Ririe

I grew up in the haunted house of Ririe.  No, my home wasn’t haunted.  It was just very old and had been given that nickname by the community.  I was about 3 or 4 years old when my parents bought the small farm and we moved to Ririe, Idaho.

There was an ancient two-story farm house on the property.  It was all made of wood and had never been painted.  At one point there must have been a little balcony upstairs on the front of the house, but it had long since been torn off and boarded up.  It was so old and decrepitated that the old house came free with the farm.  I’m not sure if it had running water or electricity when we moved in.  I know we had to bath in the canal behind our house for a while, until they got the water up and going.  I was told that my parents waited until after dark to bath.  Did I mention this place was old!

There was an old root cellar behind the house that we used to store potatoes and all of the bottles of food we had canned.  It was a scary place, you were underground with all the creepy crawlies that go with it.  I don’t remember there being any light, so you had to take a flashlight with you.  There was a big heavy door covering the stairs down into the cellar.  I never wanted to be trapped down there.

Living there was an adventure.  One of my earliest memories was our nightly ritual of sitting down on the couch so mom could pull out the slivers that of our small feet had we had collected from the old wood floors.  The upstairs had been used as a chicken coop by the previous owner, so we didn’t use it when we first moved in.  I am sure that it had to be thoroughly cleaned first.

My younger brother, Peter and I shared a bed in our parent’s bedroom at first.  He slept on one end of the bed and I slept on the other.  When more children came we eventually were moved into the two bedrooms that were upstairs.

The house was designed so that all the rooms were connected in a circle.  You could walk through the living room into the kitchen; the kitchen into the bathroom; the bathroom into my parent’s bedroom; from my parent’s bedroom into the living room again. We would run that circle, chasing each other.  It was awesome.

The stairs leading to the upstairs were very steep.  There was a great hiding place above the stairs where shelves had been built in for storage.  Our little bodies fit perfectly and we could hide there.

I remember coming home from school one day to a glorious surprise.  My mom had wallpapered my room with the loveliest yellow floral wallpaper.  It was beautiful.

We were not the only creatures living in this house.  There were holes in the outside wall of my bedroom.  Birds would build their nests in the space between the outer and inner walls.  Sometimes the chirping of the birds became very annoying and I would get out of bed and pound on the wall to make them shut up!

We had mice.  Not the kind on Cinderella – real mice.  I could hear them scurrying up and down inside the walls of my bedroom.  There was no way on earth to keep them out.  My mom would hammer jar lids over the mouse holes to try to prevent their entry, but they would find other ways in.  Once I found a perfectly preserved mouse skeleton way back under the bread drawer in the kitchen cupboards.  I thought it was so cool, I wanted to take it to school for show and tell.  Mom wouldn’t let me because she was embarrassed.  She kept the house as clean as possible.  There was just no way to keep the critters out.

Skunks often lived beneath our home.  There was a big hole in the ground leading under the house outside of our back porch.  I think it had been dug there so that there was access to the bathroom plumbing.  He would set a skunk trap to catch them and then drag them by a long chain to the river to drown them.  I didn’t like those episodes very much.

The skunks could be very stinky, but they were not all.  One horrible smell that I still remember is when one of my younger siblings, who were being potty trained, hid beside the refrigerator and peed on the electric cord that plugged the refrigerator into the wall.  When the urine hit the plug it created a horrible odor!  It is a wonder they didn’t get an electrical shock.

One of the most interesting facts about this old house was that it was heated by an old coal furnace.  We had a coal pile outside in the driveway near our home where we would shovel a five-gallon bucket full of coal, haul it in and pour it into the side-feeder of the furnace.  The coal would then fall into the fire compartment of the furnace where it would burn.  We would have to clean the clinkers out regularly.  It was all very messy, but I learned to love the smell of coal.  There was a blower in the furnace that would send the hot air out into the living room.  Those of us sleeping upstairs would hurry down in the morning to stand by the heat because our bedrooms were cold.  The only heat we had upstairs was a stove pipe that came up through the floor in my bedroom.  The pipe would get very hot from the fire in the furnace and warm the air around it. I accidentally brushed against the pipe with my bare arm once and had a 4-inch blister that left a scar in seconds.

My parents were worried that the house would burn down so dad nailed a big wooden ladder up the side of the house near Peter’s bedroom window so that we could all climb down in case of a fire.

It was tight living quarters.  There were now 6 kids in our family.  We all shared rooms.  We lived in this house until I was 13 years old, when we built a new house in the apple orchard close to the old house.

We were allowed to stay home from school the day the big equipment came in to dig the hole for the new house.  We were thrilled.  My parents hired contractors to build the house, but mom and dad did all the painting and staining.  While they were finishing the house I did all the cooking and cleaning, and cared for my younger siblings.  I would even serve my mom her meals in the new house while she worked.

I still remember the day that we moved in the new house.  It felt like a palace, but strangely enough I missed the old house and even had a dream once that we had to move back into the old house.  I was happy because it felt more like home to me.  They used the old house to store things until dad had it torn down in 1982.  I sifted through the rubble until I found the board with a hole in it where the birds had nested in my bedroom walls.  I still have the little piece of wood to this day nestled in an arrangement on the hutch in my dining room.

Who would have thought that memories of living in the haunted house of Ririe can bring a smile to my face and warm my heart to this very day?

(Here is an image of our farm in the 1970’s.)