Bobby Birdsong played in and around Bellevue as a youngster in the 1940s, when “the road was dirt, and there were woods around the house.”

Once, he recalled, some older boys “painted a skull and crossbones on the front door with Ipana toothpaste. That stuff was so strong that when renovations began on the house years later, one coat of paint could not cover it up.”

Speaking recently to the LaGrange Woman’s Club, which maintains the building, Birdsong recalled that he and his friends played under the house and spent “a lot of time looking for the secret tunnel that led to LaGrange College.”

They used buckets and shovels from their sandboxes for their excavations. Mostly all they accomplished was fighting off spiders and watching for snakes, he said.

However, Birdsong said he and friend Jakey Behr did find some batteries and an old radio, which they were convinced belonged to “German spies who were reporting what was happening on Gordon Street.” And they were positive that another discovery was “dynamite.” But a neighbor, who was a veteran, assured them the former was harmless and the latter was a telephone fuse.

His sister played “Chopsticks” on the rosewood piano in the deserted Bellevue’s parlor and Birdsong said he could not understand how wood from something like his mother’s roses could make a piano.

He recounted how the boys climbed up on the roof to see the view of downtown, the college and the high school. Old pieces of copper roof came loose, so they carried it down to “make a cave over a deep ditch” they had dug.

Exploring the house at night was never an option because the older boys had filed their heads with tales of ghosts and hauntings, Birdsong said.

Giant Yuccas in the garden were “cactus when we played cowboys” and the “magnolia seed cones were our hand grenades when we played soldiers.” The two long, slab rock benches in front of Bellevue were perfect for stretching out at night “and seeing the stars,” he said.

The first custodians of Bellevue were a Mr. and Mrs. Ray from Columbus. Every night Mr. Ray would “step out on the balcony and play the violin,” which was sweet music to a neighbor’s little boy who was tired at the end of a long day of exploring, Birdsong recalled.

— Bellevue is a Greek-revival mansion at 204 Ben Hill Street in LaGrange. It was built 1853-1855 by U.S. Sen. Benjamin Harvey Hill. It is open for tours Tuesdays through Saturdays.