Old houses intrigue me, and I notice them wherever I go. It started when I was about twelve with an Italianate-style house in the faded resort town where my dad built a cottage. It’s had four lives. I’ve only witnessed the last three.

My favorite was the one with the ghost story.

Back in the mid-1800s, a lumber baron built his home on top of a bluff overlooking the town harbor. Ten bedrooms, high ceilings, French doors, and a widow’s walk so he could keep an eye on the lake, and his nearby boatyard, lumber mills, and mines. It was the grandest place in town, and probably the envy of everyone living in the smaller rustic homes below.

When he died, the mansion became a grand hotel, the kind with expensive tableware in the dining room and well-dressed guests arriving by train and lake steamer. The guests occasionally included William McKinley, long before he made it to the White House.

But in the early 1960s, when passenger trains abandoned the town, the hotel just sadly limped along. That’s where the ghost story comes in. Kids swore that every year on the anniversary of McKinley’s assassination they heard his slow footsteps plodding down the stairs and smelled cigar smoke in the halls. A few insisted a noose swung from the rafters in the basement, and blood drops stained the rickety stairs leading to the widow’s watch, which of course had nothing to do with McKinley, but made a great story for a beach bonfire. I wasn’t brave enough to check it out myself.

Later, someone turned the place into a funeral home. It got a facelift and once again resembled the elegant hotel—though with a very different kind of guest. Maybe people remembered the old stories, because the funeral home didn’t last long.

These days, it’s a healthcare facility. Not as grand as the mansion, not as storied as the hotel, and not as eerie as the funeral home, but at least no one’s sneaking in to see if McKinley is still pacing the halls.

The house, now over one hundred fifty years old, is no longer perched above the harbor, but refuses to give up. It stands tall, waiting for life number five.