My mother’s childhood home was just south of a small town called Tangipahoa, Louisiana, a little over an hour’s drive north of New Orleans. It was one of those rural towns with one blinking light and if you sneezed, you’d drive through it. The house was called Nebula. My three or four greats back grandfather, Samuel Newsom, built it. The brick foundations were laid out before the Civil War and completed shortly after the war. Nebula was my second childhood home growing up. It’s where I spent weekends and summers. As a child, it was a magical escape, a place to spend time away from the city.
The house had a front porch, wrapped around one corner of the house and a longer porch at the back. The layout of the house reflected the typical style of the time it was built. Four rooms were in the front, along with a main hallway and a long back porch. High ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows kept house cool in Louisiana summers. Three of the four rooms were bedrooms, the fourth room, the parlor. The kitchen, dining room, and a small butler pantry all opened to the back porch. My dad’s hobby was CB and then ham radio; he used the butler pantry to broadcast all the Morse Code around the world or talk to truckers driving by.
An oil portrait of Samuel Newsom hung in the main hallway and always gave me the creeps, because his eyes seemed to follow you as you walked by. My mom told me that it was the mark of a good painting. I'm uncertain of its veracity, but I habitually search for it in old oil portraits.
The Victorian style of decoration was clear in the parlor's furnishings. Rose-colored walls and ornate curtains adorned each window. An old, out-of-tune piano in one corner played a few keys.
The four rooms off the main hallway, each with a fireplace, became unsafe due to clogged chimneys.
The bathroom was off my parents’ bedroom, added to the house when my mother was a child. Behind a door, steps led to the attic above the toilet. During my mother's college years, a small half bath was added at the far end of the porch.
The attic had doorways on both sides, leading to the rafters. I was told to never go on those, as I might fall through. Bookshelves filled the main room, along with locked trunks. The walls had writing on them in chalk. My mother and her stepbrother did most of the wall writing during their childhood. Some trunks were open, and I would spend hours rooting through what I found inside. One of my favorite things to play with were two skirts my step grandfather found in Italy on one of his antique road trips.
The backyard had a sugar kettle full of water, filled with goldfish. I loved watching the goldfish swim around. During winter the fish were hardy and unaffected by the freezing water temperature. The kettle rested on a big slab of concrete that, according to my mom, sat on top of a well. The implied danger was always present: what if the sugar kettle fell in?
Adjacent to the main house, a locked brick cistern crumbled. Cisterns held water from wells and provided drinking and cooking water for houses. I was warned to stay away, but I wanted to unlock it and discover what was inside.
In the semi tropical climate of Southern Louisiana, they built the kitchens a few yards away from the main house. The reasons were to keep the main house cooler and to lower the fire risk. Nebula had such a building; the three rooms filled with old furniture and locked trunks that no one had keys to anymore. It always had a musty smell to it.
There was a small patch of fresh, wild mint growing next to this little house, and in summer, I was to pick the best mint leaves so my dad could make mint juleps. I never cared for the boozy part of the drink. I liked the smell of fresh mint.
Growing up, my parents and I would spend at least one weekend a month, and a couple of weeks in the summer at Nebula. It was an extensive and expensive property to maintain. Repairs were always necessary, and my dad would mow a selected area around the house in the spring and summer. Sometimes he would let me sit in his lap and I would ‘drive’ the tracker around whatever parts of the yard he was mowing.
The old barn seemed ready to collapse. I would spend hours exploring the barn. The loft could only be reached by an aged ladder. My mother was always afraid that I’d fall and break something. Some rooms were locked, with lost keys. When my ancestors had cows, they had a separate room for milking.
There were old milk tins scattered about, along with stools and chairs. The room housed nests for hornets and wasps amidst hay and weeds. Open barn rooms housed old, rusted farm tools and locked trunks, with lost keys. I asked my mom to find a tool for the trunks, but she kept saying later. She had no knowledge of the trunk contents in the attic or barn.
I always had to watch for snakes when I was outside. Southern Louisiana is ripe for rattlesnakes, moccasins, and corals. Once there was a huge moccasin snake sunning himself on the roots of the big oak tree and, since I loved playing on the roots of the tree, my mom one day grabbed her gun and shot the snake. She had a handyman come over and chop the snake up.
During a storm, wind knocked the tree over, away from the house. The tree was hollow, and the tree's age, over one hundred years, was a mere guess.
One summer, my half-sister and I built a fort in a small grove of pine trees near the front of the property. We found old board planks in the barn that we dragged out to the spot for the fort. We made sure there was no poison ivy and spent an afternoon clearing weeds. With just a few planks, we built a respectable fort. I think it may have lasted a few months before a nasty rainstorm ruined it.
Summer meant swimming and tubing in the Tangipahoa River. The river lay one mile east of the house. It was the east property line marker. Each year, we drove to the spot to see what had changed from the summer before. We would pack lunch or sometimes my dad dragged an old BBQ grill to the beach, and he would grill burgers and hot dogs. As I got older, my mother insisted that we wore battered up tennis shoes even while swimming. “You might step in glass!” was her warning. While swimming, I'd feel silly in shoes, pushing to see how long until she'd demand I put them on. The river was shallow, just a few feet deep.
The railroad tracks along Highway 51 made up the western edge of the property. There were two tracks and whenever I would hear a train whistle, I’d grab pennies and go running down the driveway to put the pennies on the tracks. There were daily Amtrak trains running between New Orleans and Chicago, and at least one freight train going back and forth daily.
The freight trains were my favorite because they seemed to go on forever and I’d always watch for open box cars to see if anyone was inside. Back then, freight trains had red caboose cars. I would wave at the person in that car and loved it when they waved back.
No over one hundred-year-old house would be complete without ghosts. Mom told me about bumps and noises in the house she experienced growing up. One story she told me happened when she was a child.
My grandmother and maid had gone for a walk down the driveway. There was no one else at home. As they were walking towards the house, they heard the piano in the parlor playing. According to my grandmother, she and the maid called out as they were walking down the driveway, but no one answered, and the piano kept playing. They got all the way into the house, just outside the parlor, and both heard the piano playing. The second the maid opened the door, the music stopped.
When it was just me and my parents at Nebula and we were eating dinner in the kitchen, sometimes we’d hear a large, loud THUD from somewhere else in the house. It wasn't constant, but it sounded like a THUD. We’d always call out, ‘Hi Grandpa, we’re ok, how are you?’ Grandpa was the name we gave the noise. We laughed and playfully suggested it could be Samuel Newsom or another family member, ensuring that everything was in perfect order. We never heard voices or saw anything; it was just the occasional THUD noise.
When I was about 11 or 12, my mom made the painful decision to sell the property. Maintaining it became increasingly difficult and costly, with no one willing or able to live there as a caretaker. My parents had even fixed up the three-room former kitchen building to accommodate someone to live on site. My parents tried to find a caretaker, with no luck. Consequently, the house and property had no insurance coverage for fire or home.
One early morning in the fall of 1981, we got a phone call from a neighbor who was in the habit of driving by during the week. Nebula was on fire. We drove silently, except for my crying mom, questioning why and who could do this. I remember smelling the smoke in the car when we were a couple of miles away.
Neighbors who smelled the smoke and saw the flames greeted us and tried to comfort my now hysterical mother. The house was too far gone to even bother calling the fire department. Only foundations and chimneys remained. I kept on walking around the foundations and thinking of everything that had burned.
All the furniture in the rooms, the locked-up trunks in the attic, the paintings, gone. The front porch where I often played or just swinging from the hammock, gone. My childhood toys that I had stashed there, and sometimes still played with, were gone. All the secrets that Nebula held within its walls, gone.
With no insurance on the property, it was a devastating total loss. In the weeks after, we discovered that someone had broken into the house and, to hide the theft, they set it ablaze.
There was no alternative but for my parents to remove the property from the market for a few months. My mom reduced the price, and it sold a few months later.
It has changed ownership a few times since then. The first person to buy the property built a house in the yard between where the original house stood and the barn. The current owners repaired the three-room building, initially constructed as a kitchen.
They were happy to finally meet us and to discover the fascinating history of Nebula. One thing they wanted to know was if we had ever heard noises or anything. We must have all exchanged a look because the husband said, “Ok, tell us, because my wife and mother-in-law have heard voices and other things.” We mentioned the THUD noises, and they said they had heard those as well, but it was voices in the yard where the house used to be. The current owners always called out, but no one answered. They asked who the voices might belong to, my mother said, a long deceased relative.
I dream about Nebula from time to time. It’s been over forty years, and I can still see every room and where every piece of furniture was. I wish I had more physical pictures, but the memories in my mind will last me a lifetime.
Originally published at the Academy of the Heart and Mind in May, 2024
Lovely piece! Makes me look back to my childhood summers in upper peninsula Michigan (north of Daggett), with grandparents and great-aunt and uncle. Old farmhouse, older dairy barn, lots of woods and a small river (no idea if it ever had a name). I would roam for hours pretending I was the girl of the Limberlost.
Really nice ride down that road of life with you .I still go back to where I grew up it’s really nice to
Remember the tree forts the swimming hole and getting tadpoles
Thank You