Members Editorial
Loretta Lynn: The Coal Miners Psychic
Members editorials are the expressed personal opinions of the members who wrote them and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the Haunt Masters Club as a whole.
Perhaps the hard, isolated lifestyle many people in the Southern Appalachian Mountains had to endure was in some way conducive to “second-sight.” After all, signs and omens were everywhere in the mountains and dreams that offered a glimpse into the future were not scoffed at. This was certainly the case for a poor, coal-mining family in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky.

Loretta Lynn was born as Loretta Webb in 1937 in Butcher Hollow to Melvin "Ted" Webb, a poor coal miner, and Clara Marie “Ramey” Webb. At the age of 13 she married local moonshiner Oliver Vanetta Lynn and at the age of 18 he gave her a guitar. She taught herself how to play and went on to become one of the most influential women in the country music genre. In her book, Tennessee Ghosts, author Lynne L. Hall details parts of this singers life that not many people are aware of.

After she married and moved to Custer, Washington, she was often able to sense what her mother was feeling so far away, and vise-versa. Both seemed to know instinctivly a day before a letter would arrive from the other.

At the very start of her career in 1959, she had a striking vision of her father lying in a coffin. When news came the next day that he had had a stroke, Loretta already knew he had died at the exact moment that she had the vision. In parapsychology, this is what is known as a crisis apparition, where the deceased appears to a family member at the exact moment of death. A few years later, she confessed, she was returning home from tour and saw her father’s image on her front porch; this is called a post-mortem apparition.

In 1967, she and her husband were looking for a new home in Tennessee when they stumbled across the old Hurricane Mills plantation. Even though it would prove to have a dark past, Loretta said she felt right at home there and bought it.

Almost everyone in the family, it seemed, knew there was just something not right about the house, though. Her twin girls had a adjoining rooms and the door between them would frequently open on its own. Occasionally, they would see the apparition of a lady with her hair pulled back into a bun walking through the door.

Their son, Jack Benny, was also kept awake some nights by otherworldly appearances. His bedroom was called the Brown Room, and he was the only one who felt comfortable in the room. One night, however, he opened his eyes to a wounded Confederate soldier standing over him. The ghost disappeared and Jack vowed he would never again sleep in that room. His brother, Ernest thought Jack was just being silly and moved into the room a few days later. One night, he also woke to the same apparition and fled the room.

After Loretta herself saw a Lady in White walking through the plantation’s old cemetery, she decided it was time to get some answers. From the local courthouse she learned that the house was built by wealthy slave owners, James and Beulah Anderson. When Loretta read that they had built a slave pit under the pourch and capped it with an iron grate, she concluded that was why people had reported hearing phantom chains being dragged across the pourch. She assumed it was a spirit who had been wrapped in chains and thrown into the pit as punishment.

She discovered Beulah had given birth to a stillborn baby and died a few days later. Perhaps this was the woman the girls saw in their rooms. They had always desrcibed her as affeectionate and it might just be that the would-be mother’s spirit was looking in on the girls to make sure they were all right.

As for the Confederate soldier, that took no stretch of the imagination. A Civil War skirmish had been fought at the plantation in 1863 and 19 of the Confederates died and were buried in the cemetery.

She had family and friends gather for a séance and James Anderson soon made an appearance in their circle. He seemed very annoyed and quickly ended the session by levitating the table they were sitting around and slamming it back down so hard that it broke in half.

In 1984, she was again on tour when she apparently had some sort of seizure that left her nearly almost completely unresponsive. When she finally came around, she announced that her son, Jack Benny, had drown. He had indeed downed at that moment.
Paranormal Research & Investigation
Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia & Western North Carolina
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