In 2005 my wife and I moved into an old farmhouse. A far cry from our previous home in the suburbs of Atlanta, it’s located in a tiny, rural community about 45 minutes west of Knoxville, Tennessee. There were many features that drew us city folks, looking for a change of pace, to this particular home. It was a foreclosure, so it had a very attractive price tag. It needed quite a bit of work, but most of it was cosmetic (We were looking for a fixer upper.). It had a good bit of acreage with it, and it had a metal roof. The roof was certainly nothing to be proud of as far as appearance, but it was sturdy and full of character. More character than we’d ever imagined, and a feature we’d grow to appreciate.

We closed on the house in September, and we began renovation and relocation during October. It just happened to work out that we moved in on Halloween. Cue simultaneous lightning bolt, thunderclap, and dissonant chord on pipe organ! Let me give you a little bit more background on the house.

According to local lore and legend, the property that our home was built on was originally owned by a railroad company. Somewhere around 1900 a railroad employee bought 100 acres when the rail company was removing their tracks from the area. From this property, as the story goes, he harvested timbers with which he built our house. The tale is pretty believable since everything from the exterior siding to the interior walls is made of native wood, and the saw marks are still visible on many of the rough hewn boards. Since this was a very rural area during that time, the court doesn’t have the best records of when everything happened, but as far as we can tell, the house was built in 1939. Through the years, the property was subdivided to friends and relatives. Other homes were built on the surrounding hills, but the original home stayed in the family. Slowly the house fell into disrepair. Fast-forward to recent history. The house was owned by family members that had some serious financial trouble. A mortgage was taken out against the house, and in 2004 the bank repossessed it. Finally in September 2005, 66 years after the house was built, it was purchased by our family; for the first time the house was owned by someone other than the original kinfolk.

During the month of October, my wife and I began tearing out old carpet, scraping and re-painting floors and walls, hauling junk out of the basement, and generally trying to get the house not to look so creepy and dirty. We spent all of our free time at the house, so we were pretty conspicuous to the neighbors. The first that stopped to introduce himself was an elderly gentleman from across the road. We saw him pull down his long gravel drive, cross the asphalt, and proceed to pull right onto our front lawn. Why he didn’t just go another 50 feet and pull up the driveway, I have no idea. Evidently that’s just what they’d always done.

After he introduced himself, and vicariously his wife, he proceeded to give us an oral history of the entire community, his home, and ours. In doing so, he told us about the neighbor to the West of us who apparently fights all the time with family members. To the East of us lived a widow whose husband just recently passed away. Of course they were all blood to the family whose home we now occupied. After spending far too long listening to stories, warnings, and admonitions, we breathed a sigh of relief when he got back into his truck and went home. Lessons learned: Keep an eye on those crazy, feudin’ neighbors to the West, and try not be visible outside the house too long unless we want to hear more tales about the locals.

Later the same week, a truck bearing the insignia of an auto tire shop pulled into the driveway while we were working. Out stepped a bearded, middle-aged man with a cigarette in his mouth, family in tow. I walked out to greet them. The man introduced himself as a Reverend. Let me stop here for a moment and speak to my readers who may not be very familiar with the Appalachian region. We live in a section of the country that is well known to contain most of the snake-handling, poison-drinking types of churches. So to meet a man who calls himself a Reverend, chain smokes, and drives a tire repair shop truck is not all that unusual.

We chatted for a while, and I learned that his wife was somehow related to the bloodline. Apparently she spent some of her childhood years at the house, and she described various features that she remembered. The Reverend told me more about the area and the neighbors. He particularly warned us about the old guy from across the road. He seemed absolutely disgusted when I told him that I had already met him. Shooting his wife a look of disdain, he said, “Honey, he said he already met the ---------- family.” She responded with a roll of the eyes. The Rev told me that the family cemetery was located across the road through some woods. Before departing, he tossed his cigarette butt at my feet and left me with, “We’ve got a lot of memories from this place. Don’t be surprised if you see us sometime just walking around the yard reminiscing.” I tried to force a smile and responded, “Well just call us first, ok?”

At this point, my wife and I were very concerned about the situation we had just gotten ourselves in to. It seemed like every neighbor and family member was at odds with the other. We learned that there was some dispute as to whether our house came with a plot of land across the street or not. Didn’t matter what the courthouse plat map showed, everyone had his or her own opinion. Apparently some of the family wanted to buy the house to keep it in the family name, but they’d decided it was just not worth investing in. Strange people were stopping and asking questions about us and the house and property. We had to be very careful about what we said to whom so we didn’t upset anyone. After all, we were the outsiders.

It was within these circumstances that we finally got the house in livable condition, and spent our first night there - October 31, 2005. We didn’t get a lot of sleep. The house was very noisy because of so much wood. It was pretty cool that night, so the wood was creaking, cracking, and groaning for hours. Did I mention there was no central heat or air either? Even if we just moved around in bed, the floor would creak underneath us. We worried for a while that neighborhood kids would try to vandalize the house because of its creepiness, and it wasn’t very apparent yet to anyone besides prying family that anyone had moved in. We also knew there were people out there who weren’t real happy that the house wasn’t owned by blood anymore. We were feeling the tension. As the creaking wood subsided, we were jolted awake by a “BANG, rumble, rumble, rumble.” The nerves were set on edge again. We were both too frightened to get up and investigate. Besides, horror movies had taught me that investigating was a VERY bad idea. Instead, we just lay there with the covers pulled up to our noses, sweating. It happened again and again throughout the night. We slowly got used to it, but deep down we both still expected a 250 pound Cletus to come bursting through a window with a sickle in his hand.

Somehow we survived the night, and felt safe inspecting the grounds once daylight broke. While we looked around outside for whatever may have caused the disturbance, we heard it again. That is when we noticed that the very large oak tree above us was dropping acorns. The impact on the steel roof was stunning. We laughed at how our imaginations had caused us to hallucinate such wild terrors during the night. But the terror was just beginning.

The nights came and went, and we were able to blame most strange noises on the acorns. Then we were faced with a new noise. We were just nodding off when we heard a rumbling on the roof. This was not preceded by a bang like the acorns. It also didn’t move vertically but horizontally. Something had just run across the roof! At this point we were officially creeped out by this unexplainable noise. If the acorns scared me into the sheets, this sound made me want to slice open the mattress and hide in the stuffing. We listened for a while in absolute silence, afraid to breath too loudly, afraid to speak. We heard it again accompanied by a second rumble following closely behind. There were two of them! And then it was over. We didn’t hear anything else as we fitfully dozed the rest of the night away. No breaking glass, no bloody sickle. Finally the dawn came.

After this night, the pattern continued almost daily. At first we thought squirrels were the culprit, but there were none around. Maybe it was some sort of weird effect the wind was having on the sheets of metal, we reasoned. But even on the stillest nights we would hear the rumbling across the rafters. Finally, one night about nine o’clock we heard the rumbling again. I’d had enough, and with all the courage I could muster, I quietly sneaked out the back door with my one million candlepower hand-held spotlight. I tiptoed far away from the house before turning around to look back at the dark roof. I aimed the spotlight at the area where I last heard the rumbling and clicked it on. The two yellow eyes of a stray cat shone back at me. I moved the light around the roof and found two other felines frozen in time, knowing that the jig was up. I hissed and yelled and threw acorns at them, but they just ran around to the other side of the house. Apparently the warmth emanating from the attic through the metal roof was too much for them to resist on those cool nights.

I finally found how the cats were getting onto the roof and blocked it up as well as I could. Even so we still occasionally see one of our two outdoor cats up there when the weather is cold. We don’t mind so long as they don’t have wild parties up there like they used to. And now that we have both the acorns and the cats to blame for any strange noises, we sleep just fine. There’s certainly nostalgia to metal roofs whether they’re on old farmhouses or new construction. It just takes a certain getting used to before unseasoned city folk can appreciate them. But once you learn to sort out the strange noises, one of the most relaxing feelings in the world is going to sleep while listening to the pounding of rain on a metal roof - and don’t let anyone ever tell you any different.