It is June the 9th, 2010, the first day of my blog about BIG OLD HOUSES. I have lived in one or another of them for the last 40 years. At one point, my former wife and I used to joke that we had lived in a total of 246 rooms. I'm still in the last house, a 38-room manse in upstate New York built by a German tycoon named Charles F. Dieterich. Actually, there's a Civil War farm house in the middle of my house. Starting in 1889 Mr. Dieterich kept enlarging the place until it arrived at its present size. That would have been around 1914. My house is not huge - certainly not Vanderbiltian in scale - but it is large. Everybody assumes it must have a ghost and to be honest, it does.