This article is part of an AGDAILY series on the history and lore of haunted farm locations across the United States.
If you want to see something spooky, head to Loretta Lynn’s ranch home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
Lynn, commonly known as the Queen of Country Music, purchased a home in the 1960s with her husband. The large home and ranch is now a museum and campground, which hosts lots of activities such as horseback riding and chuck wagon races!
But if you go to visit, you’ll see that visitors are not allowed past the first floor of Lynn’s old home, and for good reason!
Lynn and her family were not in the home long before strange things started happening. Lynn and her kids were frequently visited by men who looked like soldiers, a mourning woman in white, and an angry energy — and they heard chains rattling and disembodied voices throughout the home.
What Lynn came to find out after purchasing her home was that it was built on a Civil War battle site, and it’s rumored that 13 soldiers were buried somewhere on the property. These soldiers seemed to make their presence known, and can frequently be seen wandering through the house, even once sitting on Lynn’s son’s bed to take his boots off.
Lynn spoke often of the “woman in white,” who can still be seen wandering the house and property. Lynn says that the woman’s name is Beula Anderson and that she died of a broken heart after losing a baby. Anderson’s gravesite can be seen on the ranch.
Lynn has told a story about a time that she was coming home on a gloomy day, and she saw the woman in white on the balcony overlooking the front yard. She asked the house keepers who it was, and they said that nobody was home. After checking the balcony and finding nobody, Lynn firmly believes she saw the woman in white.
Lynn also told about how she and some of her closest friends held a séance in the home to find out more about the spirits that resided there. After many harmless encounters with Civil War soldiers and the woman in white, they were not expecting who they ended up communicating with.
During the séance, they were communicating with someone who called himself Anderson (the same surname as the woman in white), and he was not happy. It’s reported that Anderson shook the table so violently that it broke and fell to the floor.
Shaken up herself, Lynn dug deeper to find out more about her home’s past. What she found out was that her 1890s plantation home was built by a man named James Anderson, who is buried on the property. And the connection to the woman in white? She is the daughter-in-law of James Anderson, she and her husband moved into the property as a young couple.
And because the house and large property was originally a plantation, there is an original “slave quarters” in the basement, where chains can be heard being rattled around. This is only one of the reasons that guests are not allowed past the first floor of the home.
Upstairs in the house are two rooms that Lynn’s boys refused to sleep in. One of them, which they refer to as the brown room, is where the Civil War soldier reportedly sat down on the bed to take off his boots. Upstairs housekeepers often have heard knocking inside the closets or they’ve found pictures deliberately made crooked after being straightened out.
Our queen of country music, who passed away in October 2022, was a brave woman, as she lived in the house and raised her family there, never fearing what was among them.
Regardless of the spooks, the house is a beautiful place to set up a campsite and enjoy a family vacation, that is, if you’re woman enough to go!
Elizabeth Maslyn is a born-and-raised dairy farmer from Upstate New York. Her passion for agriculture has driven her to share the stories of farmers with all consumers, and promote agriculture in everything she does. She works hard to increase food literacy in her community, and wants to share the stories of her local farmers.
