The gurgling pipes, the creaking floorboards, the squeaking hinges I could deal with. But the door that would not stay closed was another matter. When I was upstairs working alone on our remodeling project, I put a full gallon paint can against it to hold it shut. Even that didn't work. I would look up from painting the baseboards to find it slowly opening, scooting the paint can across the hardwood floor. When my tools mysteriously moved from one place to another, my husband called me absent-minded. When a bird flew down the hallway, he said I had dozed and dreamed it. But the door opening by itself--he just laughed at what he called my vivid imagination. The best he could be persuaded to do was to check the latch, which he said worked perfectly.

"It's just that the house has settled unevenly. After all, it's almost a hundred years old. Everything in it is a little out of plumb," he said.

The first night we spent in our newly painted upstairs bedroom, our German shepherd kept leaving his rug to circle the room, whining; his ruff stood up stiffly, and he growled deep in his throat as he stared down the hall. When we followed his gaze, we saw the door of the tiny room at the other end of the hall slowly opening. My husband sighed in exasperation.

"OK, I'll nail the damn door shut tomorrow!" he exclaimed.

The next day , as I was putting the finishing touches on the dark wood of the staircase, a handsome, neatly dressed man in his seventies came to the front door, swept off his Stetson in a courtly bow, and introduced himself as John Malone. He asked permission to bring his elderly mother for a visit. He said he had grown up in our house, and she wanted to see the old home place again. I invited them in.

"My husband, Patrick Malone, God rest his soul, built this house, my dear, for his first bride, in 1897. I was his second wife, you see . . ." She twittered and chattered as she hobbled through the house with her walker, exclaiming over everything we had done to restore the house to its original beauty, until we came to the kitchen. At last she was speechless. Finally she said, "I never thought to see the day this kitchen would have an automatic dishwasher." Her son John laughed.

"Why, mother, you had a genuine imported Irish dishwasher, didn't you?" They laughed together as they told me story after story of the young Irish maid Molly who had come to help when John was born, and just stayed on and on.

A shadow fell over her crumpled-rose-petal face when she looked at the pantry door. "Did you know, my dear, that there used to be another staircase there? Molly's little room was at the top of those stairs." John opened the pantry door and pulled the string to turn on the light. I had never noticed the dark shadows on the wall and ceiling before, mute evidence of a stairway no longer there.

"Molly always used that staircase. She was afraid of burglars, and even though she locked herself into her room at night, she ran up and down the stairs all night long, checking to make sure that the back door was locked," he said. "One night she dropped her kerosene lamp, and set the house on fire."

Mrs. Malone took up the story. "Yes, Mr. Malone finally had to tear out that stairway to stop her going up and down the stairs all night. Then she started constantly opening and shutting her door; I guess she was always afraid of being trapped again."

I thought it would have been easier to just tell Molly to stop running up and down all night, than to tear out the staircase.

"Well, yes, my dear, of course it would have been. But how could we tell her anything? She died in the fire, you see, locked up in her little bedroom upstairs."The song on this page is:"The Twelth of Never"(Johny Mathis)

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