Preschool memories

During my preschool years, maybe I was 3,4 or maybe 5 we lived at the bottom of the road up to the ranch, where the road meets the paved highway now. Our home was a very large white house. Mom told me the other day she could see outside from the inside in some spots. She and Dad's bedroom was right off the living room but the rest of us slept on the second floor. In the wintertime there was no heat upstairs. When it was time for bed we would get up our courage and then dash up the 20 or so stairs and climb quickly under the stack of covers, warm and snug with our siblings. I remember complaining about going to bed but the fun of the run and the snuggle.
Outside of that home, across a rutted driveway was a large very old house. Maybe my parents could tell me what it was and why it was there. I only know we called it "haunted." I stood by our house staring at it but I don't believe I ever entered its scary inside in spite being teased for my fear. It was unpainted, darker wood with no window pains and probably no doors that hooked.
In the front of the house toward the highway (which was not a highway then) was a long sidewalk starting from the wood porch and ending at a huge ant pile. I loved that ant pile and would sit and watch it for a long time. If one of my siblings wanted to break it up I would not have it. I was its protector. It was about a foot high and very fasinating.
My other memory of that place was the day we made our own homemade slide down the 5 or 6 steps off the front porch. We used an old board as our slide. My memory is of lying across Mom's lap, face down as she dug the large splinter out of my behind with a needle.
That house was there a long time after we moved up to the ranch again. Sometime, when I was married and gone from home, it was torn down along with the haunted house and replaced with corrals. I wish I had a picture of it outside of my mind.