This weekend the Preservation Society's Holiday House Tour will allow the public to explore some of the most beautiful and historic homes in Chapel Hill. Perhaps one of the most stunning included this year is the Stacy-Cain House at 615 E. Rosemary St.

The bright yellow home on the corner is welcoming and strolling across the yard under the towering oaks makes one appreciate its harmonious natural setting. But the hidden mystic power of the house comes as you cross the wide wrap-around porch and enter the front door. It is here it changes from being a house of the present to a home of the past.

Instantly you feel transported into a stately room from another time where an old professor has just stepped out to search for a book in his library.

After exploring a few rooms filled with their dark wooden Victorian furniture, you can almost faintly hear the faint notes of Irving Berlin's "Good-bye, France" playing on a hidden gramophone and smell freshly made ginger bread cookies. But the aesthetic beauty of the house, and the feelings it evokes, scarcely reveals the misery that once swirled outside of its walls.

At the age of 13, William Cain drilled old men in Confederate camps around Raleigh during the Civil War. But now 50 odd years later, he had become the old man teaching young students math and civil engineering at the university. He bought the gracious house on the corner of Rosemary and Glenburnie streets from one of his devoted students and fellow professors, Marvin Stacy, in 1915 as World War I engulfed Europe.

Cain and his family lived here at the close of the war and daily peered out the windows watching men returning to Chapel Hill. But these Doughboys brought back more than just the horrible memories of the battlefield. They also returned with a deadly strain of the H1N1 virus, the "Spanish Influenza."

Fortunately for Cain, the flu pandemic that infected an estimated one third of the world's population and killed over 50 million people, never crept within the wall of his Rosemary Street house, though it claimed victims throughout the neighborhood. The death of University President Edward Kidder Graham from the virus shocked Chapel Hill.

Cain's protégé, Marvin Stacy, became Graham's replacement, but the grief continued when he too fell victim to the same disease in January 1919. The loss of so many bright minds must have brought tears to the old Rebel's eyes. The same eyes saw so many young lives taken by war in his youth. It would not be until the Christmas of 1920 that Cain and the rest of Chapel Hill could hang mistletoe in comfort, knowing the end of sickness was in sight.

The doors to William Cain and Marvin Stacy's house will be open on Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 pm. Tickets can be purchased online at www.chapelhillpreservation.com or by calling 942-7818.