The Mansion's cast of characters includes the "last descendants" of Alexander Holston, one of the first white settlers in Yoknapatawpha and the man who established the oldest hotel in Jefferson. These two women are described as "maiden sisters," though the narrator adds, parenthetically, that "one of them, the younger, had been married once but so long ago and so briefly that it no longer counted" (421). They now own the Holston House, and run it with "cold and inflexible indomitability" (421).
In The Mansion Holcomb is a "thick but not fat and not old" woman who gives Mink chores around the house and points him in the direction of Brother Goodyhay (291).
In The Mansion Marvin Hait is "our local horse-and-mule trader" (202). He may be the same character as Hait, the mule trader who appears in "Mule in the Yard," and Lonzo Hait, as he is named in The Town, but the 'corrected text' of The Mansion says nothing to make that more or less likely. (On the other hand, in their one volume edition of the Snopes trilogy the editors at Random House changed Hait's first name in The Mansion from Marvin to Lonzo.)
In The Mansion the wife of Brother Goodyhay ran off with a "sonabitching Four-F potato chip salesman" while her husband was away fighting in World War II (294).
A former "Marine sergeant" (295) who, after seeing a vision of Jesus during a battle in the Pacific, comes back to the U.S. to run a religious community out of his ramshackle house. His wife reportedly "ran off" with a salesman while Goodyhay was at war (294). He is described in The Mansion as "a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic strip Puritan" (293).
Gihon is a federal agent of "no particular age between twenty-five and fifty" (259) who appears in The Mansion after "the police find out" that Linda Kohl is "a communist" (236).
Although The Mansion quotes "the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin" telling the French people to "Be calm. I am here" (231), in historical fact Maurice Gamelin was the French Army General whose handling of the German invasion in World War II was a disastrous failure.
First mentioned in The Mansion as "that one in Spain" on a list that includes "Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany" (183), included by name on the later "Hitler and Mussolini and Franco" (214), General Francisco Franco led the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, coming to power afterward as the country's right-wing dictator. He remained in power until the 1970s.
