In Brief
Loula Long Combs lived at Longview Mansion outside Lee's Summit, Missouri from the day it opened until she died there in 1971. Decades on, staff kept finding her bed rumpled at dawn, and people on the grounds still describe her crossing the property on horseback.
The Full Story
In 1987, the mansion outside Lee's Summit, Missouri opened to the public as a designers' showhouse, and one staff member ended up with a strange morning chore. Loula Long Combs's bed kept coming undone overnight. They would smooth it down before the doors opened, and by the next morning the covers were pushed back and rumpled again, the way a bed looks when someone has just climbed out of it. The room was kept exactly as Loula had left it. She had died in that house in 1971, sixteen years before anyone was assigned to remake her bed.
She had also been born to it, in a way. Her father, the lumber baron Robert A. Long, started building Longview in 1913 and moved the family into the 22,000-square-foot house, 48 rooms and 14 bedrooms, on June 1, 1914. He built much of the estate so his daughter could keep horses, and she kept them by the dozen. The farm around the house grew so grand the papers called it Rural Versailles.
Loula made the most of it. She rode at Madison Square Garden, won in Canada and England, and was crowned Queen of the American Royal; her stallion Chief of Longview took the world championship four times. When a reporter asked about her horses, she said, "My father never refused to buy any horse I wanted, and I wanted many of them." She lived at Longview from the year it opened to the year she died in it, in her late eighties.
The horses are how people say she comes back. Workers on the grounds describe her drifting across the property trailed by a "cloud" of animals, the way she once moved through her own pastures. The hauntedplaces.org account has her seen and heard riding horseback there. None of the witnesses are named, and the dates went unrecorded; the story passes from one worker to the next instead. Some of them still won't go alone into the dim indoor ring.
After she was gone, the estate she loved was split apart. The show barn became an elementary school, the land took a community college and a 930-acre lake. Students at Longview Community College say they still hear hooves on the pavement after dark, and now and then catch a woman on horseback who shouldn't be anywhere near them.
None of it sits in a record past local retelling. But the woman who got the house built for her riding never gave the house back, and the staff who came after her kept making a bed she kept getting into.
