Longview Mansion

Loula Long Combs, the first woman to drive in competition at Madison Square Garden and the Queen of the American Royal, lived at Longview Mansion from its 1914 opening until her death in 1971 at age 90. Staff find her bed rumpled each morning, and college students on the adjacent campus hear phantom hooves on the pavement at night.

Loula Long Combs died in 1971 at the age of 90, after 65 years of showing horses and winning blue ribbons. Staff at Longview Mansion say her bed is sometimes rumpled in the morning as if someone slept in it. They make it. It happens again.

Her father, Robert A. Long, built the estate in 1913 and 1914 on 1,780 acres of rural land outside Lee's Summit, Missouri. Long made his money through the Long-Bell Lumber Company, which controlled up to 110 lumber yards and 250,000 acres of timberland by the early 1900s. He hired architect Henry F. Hoit and landscape architect George Kessler to design what became one of the most ambitious private estates in the Midwest. Construction took 18 months and employed roughly 2,000 workers, including 50 Belgian craftsmen and 200 Sicilian stonemasons.

The mansion covers 22,000 square feet with 48 rooms, 14 bedrooms, 10 baths, and 6 fireplaces. It had the first central vacuum system west of the Mississippi and steam heating throughout. The grounds included 25 miles of white wooden fence built without nails or bolts, seven miles of macadamized roads, a telephone system, underground electricity, and a 100,000-gallon water tower. The farm employed 175 people and maintained 500 Jersey cattle, 16 Percheron draft horses, 61 saddle horses, hogs, and chickens.

Loula was the center of Longview's identity. Starting at 15, she became an internationally renowned horsewoman who won prizes in the United States, Canada, and England. She was the first woman to drive in competition at Madison Square Garden and was inducted into the Garden's Hall of Fame. Her horse Chief of Longview won the World Champion stallion title four times and was the only horse to win the $10,000 stake at the Kentucky State Fair two years running, in 1928 and 1929. Another horse, My Major Dare, became the first American Saddle Horse to sell for $10,000. Loula organized benefit shows for the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Children's Mercy Hospital, and the Animal Rescue League. She was known as the Queen of the American Royal.

She lived at Longview from the day it opened until the day she died.

People who've worked at the mansion describe seeing her drift across the property accompanied by a cloud of animals. Students at nearby Longview Community College, built on land Loula and her sister Sally donated, have reported hearing hooves on the pavement at night and catching glimpses of an unknown woman on horseback. A phantom boat appears on the pond and vanishes.

The mansion and several original outbuildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 24, 1985. The property that once covered nearly 1,800 acres now includes an elementary school, a community college campus, and a 930-acre recreational lake built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Longview Mansion operates as an event venue, and Loula's bedroom is part of the tour.