The song is “This Haunted House.” Loretta Lynn wrote it about two months after Patsy Cline died, sitting on the steps of her late friend’s home, and she finished it in a matter of minutes. Decades later, an interviewer asked whether she had ever regretted that one of her songs never came out as a single. Of the hundreds she had written, Loretta named this one, called it one of her favorites, and said it was about Patsy.
Two months after the crash
Patsy Cline died on March 5, 1963, when the small plane carrying her home from a benefit show went down near Camden, Tennessee. She was 30. Loretta had known her for less than two years. The two met in 1961, after Patsy was badly hurt in a car wreck and asked to meet the young singer she had heard dedicating “I Fall to Pieces” to her on the radio. Loretta later described Patsy as the big sister she had never had.
About two months after Patsy died, Loretta was back at Patsy’s house in Goodlettsville, just outside Nashville. In her own telling, she was sitting on the steps, looked up at the place where her friend had lived, and called it a haunted house. That thought became the title. She said the whole song came to her in only a few minutes.
Another account of the same afternoon
Retellings published by American Songwriter add the people who were there. Loretta and her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, had come to see Patsy’s husband, Charlie Dick, and the two children Patsy left behind, Julie and Randy. While Doolittle sat talking with Charlie, Loretta settled on the stairs leading to the recreation room, wrote the song in about 20 minutes, then played it for Charlie on guitar.
The accounts differ on one point. Loretta remembered steps outside; the later retelling places her on the stairs to the rec room. Either way, she was sitting at Patsy’s home when the song arrived. That same rec room held a lighter memory. Loretta liked to tell how Patsy once sent a taxi to bring her over, then waited at the bottom of the basement stairs in a blonde wig, letting Loretta walk right past without recognizing her.
A love song that wasn’t
Nothing in “This Haunted House” names Patsy Cline. Heard cold, it plays like a classic heartbreak song: someone who watched a loved one leave, still sees that face at night when the lights go out, still seems to hear footsteps crossing the floor, and finds the home they once shared impossible to live in. Plenty of listeners could take it for a woman mourning a man who walked out. Loretta said it was about her friend.
Recorded, then turned over
Loretta cut the song in Nashville on February 26, 1964, at a session produced by Owen Bradley, the same man who had produced Patsy’s records. Decca picked a different song from that session for the A-side: “Wine, Women and Song,” a quick honky-tonk number written by Betty Sue Perry. It climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard country chart. “This Haunted House” rode along on the flip side.
It also appeared that June on her second album, Before I’m Over You. When the album came out, the songwriting credit for “This Haunted House” went to Doolittle; the only track on it credited to Loretta was “Where Were You.” Years later the song turned up again on the 1972 collection Alone With You, but it was never pushed to radio on its own.
Her own explanation was about how the business worked in those days.
“Unless you had some little up-tempo thang you didn’t make it.”
What came after
The grief did not end with one song. On June 3, 1964, less than three weeks before Before I’m Over You reached stores, Loretta gave birth to twin girls and named one of them Patsy. In 1977 she recorded a full tribute album, I Remember Patsy. And when the 2019 television film Patsy & Loretta told the story of their friendship, “This Haunted House” was part of it.
Still, of all the ways she honored Patsy Cline, this is the one Loretta Lynn singled out when asked about regrets: a ballad just over two minutes long, written on her friend’s steps, that spent its life on the back of somebody else’s hit.
Did you ever hear “This Haunted House” on an old Loretta Lynn album, or are you only learning the story behind it now?