HGB Ep. 531 - The Haunting of Loretta Lynn

Moment in Oddity - The Eschif in Perigueux (Suggested by: Karen Miller)

In the country of France, there is a very unique building that dates back to 1347 called the Eschif in Perigueux. It is located in the city of Perigueux (pear-hee-GOO) and consists of an oak timber framed building with wattle and daub infill. Wattle and daub is a composite building method used for making buildings where a wattle, or woven lattice of wood strips, is daubed with a sticky material which was typically a mix of wet soil, sand, animal dung and straw. The unusual building is balanced on the narrow ramparts of Puy-Saint-Front (poo-wee-sant-fron) which was the medieval center of Périgueux, and is supported on oak struts along its length. At nearly 700 years old the fact that this building is still intact is amazing. During the middle ages the building was used as a method of surveillance of the Tournepiche (TOR-na-peesh) bridge, which was a toll bridge. The building, which is shaped like a house, sits atop a wall. The rampart looks to be approximately 20 feet high. Aside from the angled support beams, the width of the supporting rampart looks to only be about a third of the building's footprint if it were sitting on the earth. Structural engineering today can produce all sorts of amazing feats, but a nearly 700 year old building still accomplishing this in modern times, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - The Three Mile Island Accident

In the month of March, on the 28th, in 1979, the Three Mile Island accident occurred. Three Mile Island was a nuclear generating station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The accident started at 4 a.m. and began releasing radioactive gases and iodine into the surrounding areas. There was a failure in the non-nuclear secondary system which then was compounded by a valve in the primary system which became stuck in the open position. There were further mechanical failures that arose. The Three Mile Island incident is considered one of the worst accidents in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. It brought about new regulations to the nuclear industry. This also stimulated the anti-nuclear movement activists who fought for the ceasing of nuclear production due to worries of regional health effects. The cleanup of three mile island began in August of 1979, officially ending in December of 1993. The nuclear plant was restarted in 1985 but then was officially retired in 2019. The decommissioning is predicted to be finished in 2079 at an expected cost of $1.2 billion.

The Haunting of Loretta Lynn (Suggested by: Ivy Johnson) 

Hurricane Mills Rural Historic District is the name of Loretta Lynn's ranch in Tennessee. This is a large 3500-acre property that is basically its own little village. Loretta Lynn wasn't shy about telling people that her ranch was haunted. Loretta embraced the paranormal and even claimed to have her own psychic abilities. The world lost an amazingly talented singer and songwriter when she passed in October of 2022. On this episode, we will explore the life of this coalminer's daughter and the hauntings that surrounded her.

Loretta Lynn once said, "To make it in this business, you either have to be first, great or different. And I was the first to ever go into Nashville, singin' it like the women lived it." We think she was being modest as she proved to be both great and different. While many might think of her as a classic country and bluegrass singer, she wasn't afraid to twist things up as she did in 2004 when she recorded the duet "Portland Oregon" with rocker Jack White of the group White Stripes. She was only the second country music singer to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And with three Grammy Awards, seven American Music Awards, eight Broadcast Music Incorporated awards, 13 Academy of Country Music awards and eight Country Music Association awards, she remains the most awarded woman in country music history. Although she rose to these great heights, she started from very modest means.

She started as Loretta Webb in April of 1932, named for film star Loretta Young. Loretta was born to Clara and Theodore Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Ted was a coal miner who battled black lung disease for many years before dying of a stroke at the age of 52. She had seven siblings, one of whom is country music star Crystal Gayle. Butcher Hollow was a remote Appalachian hamlet and the family lived in dire poverty in a mountain cabin with Ted Webb providing much of the family's food from what he raised on their property. The family clearly had music though, based on the musical success that has come from this family, right up to Loretta's granddaughter Emmy Russell who tried out for the recent season of American Idol and got her ticket to go to Hollywood. But becoming a music legend wasn't initially in the stars for Loretta. Getting married and raising a family seemed to be her destiny and it came early. She was only fifteen when she met 21-year-old war veteran Oliver "Doolittle" Mooney Lynn. The couple were married a month after meeting and Doo, as Loretta called him, moved her to northwest Washington to live in a logging community.

The marriage would last nearly fifty years until Doo died in 1996. It wasn't a happy marriage. Doo was a hellraiser and a serial philanderer. Loretta had four children by the time she was twenty. The couple would add twins in 1964 after Loretta got started on her music career. And it was that music that saved her sanity. Imagine being moved away from your country roots and everyone you knew at such a young age and then being responsible for a home and children when still a teenager. Loretta wrote in an autobiography, "I married Doo when I wasn't but a child, and he was my life from that day on. But as important as my youth and upbringing was, there's something else that made me stick to Doo. He thought I was something special, more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget it. That belief would be hard to shove out the door. Doo was my security, my safety net. And just remember, I'm explainin', not excusin'... Doo was a good man and a hard worker. But he was an alcoholic, and it affected our marriage all the way through." That something special was definitely her voice. Loretta would sing while doing her chores of hand laundry, gardening, canning, cleaning and cooking and Doo would listen and tell her over and over that she was better than anyone he heard on the radio. 

Doo was so impressed with Loretta's singing that he bought her a guitar and told her she needed to learn how to play it and write songs. Lynn said, “After he got me the guitar, I went out and bought a Country Song Roundup. I looked at the songs in there and thought, ‘Well, this ain’t nothing. Anybody can do this.’ I just wrote about things that happened. I was writing about things that nobody talked about in public, and I didn’t realize that they didn’t. I was having babies and staying at home. I was writing about life. That’s why I had songs banned.” She started performing at nightclubs in the area and one night when she was at a club in Vancouver, Canada, executives from Zero Records heard her sing and they offered her a contract. She debuted her first single "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" in March 1960. The song was based off a woman Loretta met while performing at a club who was very intoxicated and told her about how terrible her life was and was recorded in the Bakersfield Sound style, which meant it had a west coast shuffle. Doo and Loretta hopped in their Mercury and drove around the country self-promoting the song to radio stations.

Nashville loved the song and she was invited to sing at the Grand Ole Opry on October 15, 1960. The Wilburn Brothers befriended her and helped her polish her style and got her signed by Decca Records. That contract came because Decca producer Owen Bradley loved Loretta's song "Fool #1," but he didn't want to sign another female country singer. Teddy Wilburn said he could only have the song if he signed Loretta. Brenda Lee went on to make "Fool #1" a pop hit. Owen eventually came to adore Loretta and he dubbed her "the female Hank Williams." Loretta's first song with Decca was 1962's "Success." This made the top ten and would just be the first of 50 top-10 hits for Lynn. The Grand Ole Opry invited her to be a regular member of the cast in 1962 and it would be during this time that she would become friends with another subject of one of our haunted people episodes, Patsy Cline. Cline taught her how to dress and style her hair and make-up and the friendship was so enduring that Loretta named one of her twins after Patsy.

In 1966, Lynn's song "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" hit No. 1, making her the first country female recording artists to write a No. 1 hit. Controversy was a part of many of the songs that Lynn penned. Her most controversial was 1973's "Rated X." The song was about the stigma women faced in the early 1970s after getting divorced. It reached No. 1 and spent a week there. The White Stripes often included the song in their play list at concerts in the late 1990s. Loretta teamed up with Conway Twitty in 1971 to record a duet and it was the beginning of a long and beautiful professional relationship. They would have five No. 1 consecutive hits from 1971 to 1975 together. *Fun Fact: Shel Silverstein who wrote the beloved classics "The Giving Tree" and "Where The Sidewalk Ends," wrote Lynn's No. 1 hit "One's on the Way."

The 1970s were a huge peak for Loretta. She made many appearances on TV talk shows, was featured on the cover of Redbook and Newsweek, was the first woman to win "Entertainer of the Year" at the CMA Awards and she was named "Artist of the Decade" by the Academy of Country Music. She's the only female to have that honor. The film "Coal Miner's Daughter" debuted in 1980 starring Tommy Lee Jones as Doo and Sissy Spacek as Loretta. Spacek won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. The movie was based on her first autobiography. Lynn would write a second one in 2002. Loretta continued to produce hit sings and albums for the rest of her life, even experiencing a late career resurgence in 2004 that continued to 2022. The year 2012 brought a third autobiography. Her 50th studio album dropped in 2021. Loretta had a stroke in 2017 and broke her hip during a fall in 2018, but she fought back and continued performing. She died in her sleep at the age of 90 on October 4, 2022. She was buried on her ranch next to Doo, who had died in 1996. His death was heartbreaking for her and she never remarried.

Loretta's ranch is the sixth largest attraction in the state of Tennessee. It stretches over 3500 acres and is known officially as Loretta Lynn's Ranch. Loretta and Doo were looking for a piece of Tennessee they could call their own when they stumbled upon Hurricane Mills in 1966. The property had been around since the late 1800s and the Lynns wanted the big house on the hill. The owner of the house would only sell if the couple would buy the whole town too. So they bought the full 3500 acres in 1966. There were many historic buildings, including a grist mill on the property. The Lynns preserved the old grist mill and the village is centered around it. The Hurricane Creek Dam was built in 1839 from wood and stone and refaced with concrete in 1912. There was also the Hurricane Mills Bridge, which is a gorgeous steel bridge built in 1911 by the Nashville Bridge Company and the Hurricane Mills General Store and Post Office, built in 1926. A school is also on the property. The Hurricane Mills Rural Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. The paperwork has very detailed descriptions of all the buildings: https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/99001449_text

Loretta and Doo lived in the Classical Revival-styled mansion here from 1966 to 1988 that was originally known as the Hillman-Anderson House. It was built in 1876 and has a two-story Queen Anne-style front porch with the rest of the farmhouse being in a Neoclassical Revival-style. The interior has a central-hall floor plan with a curved, self-supporting staircase in the central hall. There is molded trim, carved scrollwork and paneled doors and transoms and Greek Revival and Queen Anne wooden mantelpieces. The Lynns renovated, adding a new kitchen, a one-story side wing, new bathrooms and central heat and air. After they moved out, the home was open for touring, so that people could see how they lived and see memorabilia and family photos. A replica of the cabin she grew up in has been recreated and is on the property for touring and was used in the movie "Coal Miner's Daughter." The museum on the ranch features Loretta's outfits she wore during performances and awards she won. And up until her death, Loretta lived in a small private residence behind the mansion. There are several guest cabins and 300 powered campsites for RVs where people can stay and there are many things to do on the ranch from horseback riding to hiking to fishing to jeep events to motorcycle events and there are places to eat.

There is a paranormal side to Loretta Lynn via not only her haunted ranch, but the woman herself. Loretta claimed that she could see and talk to spirits from a very early age and at first she didn't think it was strange. She thought all kids experienced the same thing. Lynn claimed that her mother had been psychic too and she thought that it came from the Cherokee side of their family. Her mother would have premonitions of things that would happened two weeks later. People would laugh when she would tell them things, but after she continued to be right about so many things, family members started believing her. Loretta claimed her mother had told her that she would meet Doolittle. Psychic abilities came to Loretta not only in being able to see family members and others who had died, but she would have very vivid dreams. Many times, the dreams would scare her. Often she would say that spirits didn't scare her, but her dreams did. Shortly after moving to Washington, she awakened at 4am and told Doo that her father had died. She saw him in a coffin. Several minutes later, a neighbor knocked on the door and told Loretta she needed to come to his house for a phone call because she and Doo didn't have a phone. The call was her sister-in-law telling her that her father had passed. When she got home for the funeral, she told her mother that her father was in the coffin and suit she had dreamed about. 

Loretta Lynn appeared on "Celebrity Ghost Stories" on Season 3, Episode 9 and psychic Kim Russo came out to explore the ranch. Loretta told the show that the mansion had been used as a Civil War hospital. Album covers that lined the walls of the staircase would get turned upside down and would be crooked. At night they would hear things like disembodied footsteps. Her twin daughters would tall her stories in the morning about a woman who would come and stand by their beds. This would be a woman dressed in white with her hair up in a hairdo from another period. Her son Jack once claimed that he laid down on his bed one night after doing some drinking and he was awakened by a man trying to pull his boots off. When he turned and looked at the man, he saw that he was wearing a Civil War soldier uniform. His dog was in the room and growling at the guy. The dog lunged at the guy and went right through him. That's when Jack realized he was looking at a ghost. Jack got up, ran out of the room and nearly fell down the stairs because he was so scared and running away.

Loretta was really sick on tour once and had to be put in the ICU. She dreamed that she had lost her boy. Shortly after that her husband came in and told her that Jack had died. He had been riding a horse and he drowned in the river on the property. The really weird twist to this story is that Loretta's mom had visited her right after the Lynn's had purchased the property and as they walked the property, Loretta's mother grabbed her arm and told her that one of her children was going to drown there and that she should move away. Loretta had hoped that her mother was wrong. A seance was conducted on the property with the singer and her closest friends and they contacted a spirit calling himself "Anderson." He seemed angry to have them contacting him and Loretta claimed that he started shaking the table angrily and it eventually broke apart.

Loretta was walking up to the mansion on a day when it was misty raining and she looked up and saw a woman in white standing on the balcony. The woman was crying and wringing her hands. Loretta thought that perhaps her twin's babysitter had upset the woman, so Loretta went in and asked the babysitter, Gloria, who the woman was. The babysitter said that no one was there, but her. The balcony was empty when they checked. Loretta wanted to know who the woman was so she visited several people in the area inquiring as to who had built the house and who had lived in it. One woman brought out an album of pictures and Loretta was looking through them trying to find a picture of the woman and she found it. The lady in white was a member of the Anderson family and her baby died during childbirth and she mourned herself to death. She cried all the time. Kim Russo claimed that a James Anderson joined her in the car as they drove onto the ranch. He wanted the car to be stopped near an open field and he told Russo that he was going to serve as a guide for her. She got out of the car and could feel a vortex of energy and she could hear the horses and sounds of battle from the Civil War. She could smell the artillery and saw a lot of bloodshed. Those spirits are still running around the property. James said he sticks around to protect Loretta and her family after her husband died. James claimed he was going to mess with the audio to let them know he was around and Loretta's audio got really overdriven at one time.

Loretta's grandson told Tennessee’s WJHL News that “The power happened to go out one night, and as I was rounding the corner to get back into my room, the chandelier was the only light that was on in the house. What’s so strange about this is that the entire house is on the same electric breaker. There’s no possible way the chandelier could have been on while all the other lights were off.” Lynn's son Ernest and his girlfriend had said they didn't like to be outside their home on the property at night because there were so many spirits around. They would see the apparitions of Confederate soldiers and that was probably because several had been buried in the yard near their home. WKRN visited the house in 2016 and the crew claimed some weird stuff happened in the haunted room upstairs. One thing was knocking coming from inside the closet. They would open it and find nothing inside that could be causing the knocking.

Loretta's ranch was the first celbrity home that the Ghost Adventures team visited. They caught the following EVP: "Get Your House Back", "I Hear Them, I Hear Them Coming", "I Need To Go Down The Stairs", "Possibly In Trouble", "Loretta", "Lynn", "I Was Hurt", Vulgar Voice, "Gonna Cut Ya", "Ya Can't Touch Them." Aaron and Zak both claimed to be physically touched.

A review on TripAdvisor in 2011 reads, "We Loved Our Fall Visit to Loretta Lynn's Hurricane Mills Ranch. We did not know of the History of Paranormal Activity in the Area until we watched the Show on BIO last night. I remembered these Photos taken down at the River by the Campground during the "Songwriter's Festival" in 2009. We were puzzled with the two photos as there was no fog or mist in the area. No light other than from a few campfires nearby. It was clear and nothing was in my Camera View when I personally took these Photos. As you can see several were made within seconds of the ones with the Strange Mist / Orbs and are fine. I compared my photos with other Friends who were taking Photos that night. No one else had anything strange show up in their Photos. We could not explain these photos."

A tour guide was leading a group through the house and stopped at the staircase. She stepped up onto the staircase in the foyer and explained that the spirits don’t like it when you mess with the picture frames. And the guide then moved on of the picture frames. She turned around and then noticed that the visitors were looking at her funny, or rather at something behind her. They claimed that a shadowy kind of thing had appeared behind her. She was then pushed off the second step onto the floor. All the tourists ran out of the house and the tour guide followed them.

Loretta hasn't been gone that long and there haven't been any stories about her apparition appearing anywhere...yet. But if there was a place she was going to haunt, no one could doubt that it would be her ranch. Was Loretta Lynn psychic and is her former home haunted? That is for you to decide!