Ghost House

One day three years ago, Inez Adams, a life-long Cades Cove resident experienced a “ghostly” sighting of a home’s roof peak, and one side of the house with windows and an upper attic window. The area of the Cove was very familiar to Inez and she had never known a house to be located there, and the “house only appears when the season is right, when there aren’t many leaves on the trees”, she say. “Really it is a mysterious thing. It just shocked me when I saw it. I know Cades Cove like the back of my hand.”

Afraid no one would believe her, Inez began researching to see if a log cabin had ever stood on the spot. She talked to the 90 year old daughters of Tyre Shields, who owned the property before the Federal Government took possession of it and made it part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The daughters couldn’t remember a cabin ever standing there.

Several years before she saw the ghostly outline of the house, Inez and her husband had learned “dousing”, a technique using two metal rods that help in the search for graves, water wells and house foundations. She thought the Baptist minister who taught them the procedures was “nuts”, but to her surprise the technique did uncover the cabin’s well, even though the area has since become a wetland.

In the intervening years, many people have seen the cabin and the first time Inez ever took her son to the site, he saw “it before we ever stopped to show it to him. It was really plain then.” It is getting harder to see the house. It sits between a couple of rows of trees just off the loop road that runs through the Cove. The light has to be just right to bring out the shape of the house in the afternoons, and it is best seen before the leaves come out in the spring.