Haunted Monterey house sold

Monterey's haunted house for 20 years was sold. Before its fame as haunted, the house was Furman funeral home from about 1954 to 1964. Before that is was Overly funeral home. Overly was bearded and a member of the Church of the Brethren. A neighbor has an invoice for his services i n the late 1940s--$70, exactly. He was known to flush his formaldehyde down his well. It overflowed sometimes and sickened the ducks across the road.

After 1964 Furman moved his undertaker operations to much better digs on Main Street, Leola. The owner made the house into three apartments which became abandoned about 1990. Children avoided it on Halloween. Weeds grew. Paint peeled. Windows cracked. Rodents invaded. Who knows, maybe ghosts hovered.
In the photo here the focus is on the building behind the house where the bodies were prepared for funerals.

The property sold at public auction on Tuesday for $157,000.

Last uncle dies

My Aunt Jane called today and told me Uncle Irvin died shortly before 10 p.m. last evening, apparently in his sleep, between routine nurse checks. He was born in 1915 and was 92 yrs old. George, his son, who lives in Harrisonburg, Va., wants to wait until son Peter gets back from a truck run in Wisconsin to make final plans. As soon as I find out when the funeral is, I’ll look at my schedule to see if I can fit it in.

My uncle was known as G. Irvin. The G was George, the name of his father, my grandfather. There were eight sons in that family. My father, Lester, was the next to oldest. Irvin was the last of the boys living, the fourth youngest. Of the family of twelve children, only two remain—Aunt Jane and Aunt Gladys, the next to youngest and third to youngest.

I always liked Uncle Irvin and when I was twelve or so, stayed at his house the first time I (with parents) visited Milton at EMU. I was proud to have an uncle with a Ph.D. and a professor position at EMU. His first wife, Edith (Eddie), died about 1970, and that loss was catastrophic for their four children. The oldest, George, graduated from EMHS that year. I was proud to have an aunt who could play the piano pretty well, and I remember her banging out “Ben Hur’s Chariot Race March” one time in the early 1960s when they had a meal with my folks at Monterey. I promised myself I’d learn that awesome piece sometime, and I did a few years later.

She was a nurse by profession, and I visited her at work the last time I figured I’d see her, when Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community was not much more than one brick building, the last one on the left as you leave campus on Virginia Ave. I think it is, the street than runs next to MapleWood.

In the hayday of my growing up, I had seven uncles on the Groff side (five by marriage) and ten on the Lehman side (four by marriage) for a total of seventeen uncles. Uncle Irvin is the last family uncle. I have one uncle by marriage on the Groff side, Earl, who was a classmate of Uncle Irvin's at Manheim township high school.

Rat in the cellar

I post this reluctantly...hopping many are out of town for an end of summer vacation. Several week ago I called our pest company and asked them to analyse a hole in the cellar, freshly dug, right next to the cnetures-old stone wall.

After two service calls, they determined that it was a rat hole and two deadly traps were set. It seems that the outside cellar doors had been left open overnight and a wandering rodent checked us out.

Now there are two possibilities--that our investigation, our plugging up the hole, our placing of traps at two places, has scared the rodent away; or, that the critter is lying low, waiting for the dust to settle. In either case, we've got it covered. Well, I'm not letting the dust settle. We're doing a full-court press. The outside door is being closed. And all manner of things will be well, as the saint said--not for the rat but for us.

That's organic peanut butter as bait on the trap.

dirt cellar woes

Here's a photo from about 1960 of our place. The original stone house was built after 1825. We know that because it never had a fireplace. The Franklin stove, which made the fireplace unnecessary, arrived in the Monterey area after 1825. So I like to think our 18 inch think stone walls were there since 1835.

It was probably built as a retirement house for the Eby family farm behind it. The addition to the house is a late 19th century wooden structure, circa 1890. The barn was built by my father in 1954, with a little help from me. Much of its timber frame was taken from the previous barn.

The house was also built over a spring. It has been dry since at least 1951 when my parents bought the property, the the hole was always there and serves as a french drain (a plain hole in the ground).

All this to say, that having a 19th century dirt floor in your cellar is very "green," but comes with a bit of a cost. This year we've been aware of two.

1. Is borderline level of radon in the house coming from the earth?

2. If we laid concrete would that solve our rodent problem in the cellar?

Details later.