The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

If you have written history as long as I have, you would find it very interesting, like I do, that events change on whims from who knows where. Little tiny and seemingly events of no consequence cause major events to happen years later. This is a story of just how that happened in Montana maybe a dozen years ago.

But the story would not have happened at all if World War 2 had not happened. Or if Grandpa Lucke’s favorite magazine wasn’t “Field and Stream” or if Bee Lucke hadn’t introduced his wife to sleeping bags in a desperate move to get mother and her mother to go to those old fishing shacks on Clear Creek and cook and clean them while Bee fished and drank his Budweiser and Grandpa Stuart fished and drank his Old Crow. Those men folk (as they were called in those days) had no time for cooking and cleaning.

Big events can cause changes as well.

None of this ghost story would have happened if mother and I had not gone in together on a Flathead Lake cabin. Mother was going to use it for her retirement, then I for mine.

So, let’s go back to the beginning. Grandpa Lucke loved hunting and fishing. Matter of fact he dreamed of them at night and actively pursued them during the day. He retired from management of the Lou Lucke Company around 1925 to do what he wanted to do. Hunt, fish and read “Field and Stream” magazine.

Always in the Lou Lucke Company there were managers who wanted to put a line of sporting goods in. Not only were there no sporting goods up and down the highline but until well after World War 2.

So, in 1945 sporting goods were introduced in the store.

The other event that was tied to so many more in my family was that during World War 2 someone got the inventive idea of sewing two goose down comforters together and a sleeping bag was invented.

We carried plenty of them when they took off but always the most popular was the double bed sleeping bag that gave room for two adults and a couple of kids moving in during the night.

Bee quickly bought two of those double bed sleeping bags and took them out to whatever fishing shack we were summering in that year and showed mother and his mother-in-law how easy it was to sleep in the double sleeping bag than make up a bed with sheets and blankets each time getting to the cabin. The women folk had to agree. This made sleeping so simple and the chances of a mouse climbing in bed with you, not much of a chance.

Well, time marched forward. Bee died in a tragic road accident on Clear Creek. The Lou Lucke Company closed. We all went on with our lives and as I mentioned, mother and I got together and bought a cabin on Flathead Lake that we could use for our retirements.

Another one of those earth shaking events occurred. In Havre the basement of mother and her second husband’s house kept filling up with water for no reason. Strange occurrence because the house was at the very top of a Havre hill.

In any event they sold the house and moved early into the Flathead Lake home.

Mother loved to keep busy. Growing her dahlias was not enough. She went to work with

Conrad Flathead Library Friends group and started playing bridge with a group of women who were to become very dear friends.

Some of the Friends group and some of the Bridge group sort of merged together and that is how this ghost story got its start in the first place.

At the outset it should be said that mother did not believe in ghosts. No ghosts for her. Why, even dad with his stories of haunted Clear Creek was a far better believer than mother and I think that for him it never was the ghost, it was always about telling a great story!

So, when mother and her friends were having lunch one noon at Grumpa’s in Kalispell, it was like mother was only half listening when one of her friends started talking about the ghosts in the Conrad Mansion in Kalispell. The friend also announced that the managers in the Mansion were looking for docents to help with tours, answering the doors of the house and keeping up with cleaning that regular workers did not have time to do.

And that, dear readers, was how mother and two of her friends started working at the Conrad Mansion a day week. It was a fun job mother always said, but for the fact that there seemed to be spooks running the house, not the management at all.

The Mansion had stood vacant for many years before the youngest Conrad girl, Alicia, gave it to the city of Kalispell. While the house was vacant, it was always said that there were strange lights going on all night long in the house.

People who knew the house well explained that in the large office between the Great Room and the dining room, there was an inside bottle glass window. There was another inside window back of it and light shining through those two windows from the outdoors gave the illusion of an inside light going on and off and on and off.

Reasonable explanation I guess but how about the fact that every time there was a vacuum turned on in the Mansion, it was soon to come loose from the plug in. It was like the ghosts of the house did not like vacuum cleaner noise.

Or how about the fact that the Mansion management could never entice a cat to live free of charge at the Mansion in return for looking for a few measly mice. No cat ever stayed the night at the Mansion although how they always got out was a puzzle too.

Well, of course mother and her friends talked and talked these things over again and again. It did not make a believer out of mother who got more skeptical as the months moved on.

One day while on a coffee break, one of mother’s friends asked if any of them had sleeping bags. Mother laughed and said she had the mother of all sleeping bags. A double bed sleeping bed that was the best sleeping bag she had ever seen. The other two friends said they had sleeping bags too.

The friend said that the four of them should set up camp in the great room one night, have a sleep over and just see what went on during the night in the mysterious Conrad mansion.

This was a very brave woman. For just two weeks before, that very woman had seen Mrs. Conrad sedately looking out of her bedroom balcony down to the great hall to see who was making all the noise down there. (It was a group coming in the house to take a tour.)

There was much talk. Finally a date was agreed upon and two more friends wanted to stay overnight. They brought snacks, pies, brandy, pop, and even had some coffee to stay up longer and see what was happening.

When the big night occurred, mother brought to the Mansion her big Lou Lucke Company sleeping bag, a couple of pillows and she decided to buy a brand new pair of her favorite yellow flannel pajamas just for the event.

It wasn’t Halloween but it was close.

I did not encourage mother to attend the sleepover as I had learned something of the Conrad ghosts myself the weekend before. From the family mausoleum in the Conrad Cemetery, there were stone steps leading down to the Stillwater River. These stairs were called the Fairy Staircase because no one could ever get an accurate count on how many stairs there were. A couple of friends and I went out there one early morning, and were not getting a reliable count at all, when I saw a small card on a step into the crypt. I picked up the card and it was a calling card from “Alisha Conrad”. It was a card that would be presented to the maid when calling on the maid’s employers. Alisha died probably twenty years before and this card must have been much older than that because it had her maiden name on it. In the instant I saw the card for what it was, I knew there was something wrong. The card stays on the face of my grandfather clock to this day.

That story did not stop mother so before you knew it, the friends were snuggled up in their sleeping bags. All went well. Libations tasted very well and by 11:30 pm all were asleep.

At midnight the fire went out, all the lights went out and each of the sleeping bags turned into a magic carpet soaring with screaming women up and down the Mansion halls, up to the top of the inside of the roof, then down so fast as to take breath away from women who did not have a clue that they were flying around on or in their sleeping bags. It all happened so quickly that time just stood still. The only thing mother remembers about the entire incident was that when going to sleep she had one leg inside of the sleeping bag and the other leg out. At some point her leg and new yellow flannel pajamas made contact with a dark chandelier and she heard a rip in the fabric of her pajamas.

Up and down they all went doing inside the house loop-de-loops, screaming their heads off. It was so dark they could see nothing, only sometimes feel the wind as they passed each other.

Looking back on the occurrence years later, mother opined it only took a few minutes. Maybe not even that long!

The first of them woke up around 4 am screaming that she had a terrible dream. There was still a fire burning in the fireplace and some of the great hall lights were still dimly burning. The rest woke up and all had dreamed the same dream about floating around the house sometime during the night.

There was coffee and coffee cake along with cinnamon rolls. Not much was eaten as they dressed and got ready for another Flathead dawn. All drove home before dawn.

Mother came in our house pale and disconcerted. We drank coffee and watched the dawn come over the Swan Range and Flathead Lake. Mother’s dog Fallie snuggled on her lap as if to say that if he was there things would have turned out differently! Mother told me the whole story.

I asked her if she believed it? “Of course not,” she exclaimed. “Except for one thing.”

She went to get her brand new yellow flannel pajamas and sure enough, there was a hole in the leg of one just like (dare I say it?) as if it got caught on a chandelier when speeding by in a Lou Lucke Company double bed sleeping bag in the middle of a very haunted night.

Mother said she wasn’t going back to the Conrad Mansion. I decided that I wasn’t either as I looked at Alicia Conrad’s calling card when I walked by our Grandfather clock.

Do you know what is the most amazing part of this story?

None of it would have happened if Grandpa Lucke had not loved “Field and Stream.”

No “Field and Stream” would mean no interest in fishing and hunting and that would mean no interest in double bed sleeping bags and that would have meant………………

Well, go figure!