Skeleton, dude.

It all started with a skeleton.

In 1940, a plumber working in the basement of a New Britain Township farmhouse discovered the skeletal remains of a mystery man buried under the concrete floor. I haven't read the entire progression of news articles yet, but where I left off, Pennsylvania Motor Police (the 1940s version of today's State Police) suspected the remains were those of one Christopher (Christian, actually) Rumph — a man who had disappeared some 31 years previous.

I followed Rumph through the 1880 and 1900 censuses (1890 is hard to come by) and, indeed, there's no record of him after 1906.

According to census records, Rumph, a German immigrant, arrived in America in 1866. By 1880 he had married Hannah Elizabeth Layman, whose family owned land in what was then New Galena — bordering what is today Lake Galena (the lake wasn't there until 1972 or so).

This is her:

They had two children, Charles and Anna. Hannah (called Lizzie) died in 1905. Christian vanished soon after. Charles and Anna stayed on in the house for a number of years afterwards, until 1928, when the place was sold at a sheriff's sale (and purchased, interestingly, by a Countess Maria Virginia Milesi Cibotti, who went on to die in Philadelphia).

When I left off, a newspaper article from May 1940 related that police had administered a lie detector test (!) to Christian's son Charles, who insisted his father had gone back to Germany "in a huff." In a bit of a cliffhanger, however, the last line of the article reads "Now authorities are investigating the possibility that the skeleton was that of a victim of a prohibition era bootlegging feud."

Huh?

So that's all I got, folks. Meanwhile, I poked around the 1876 J.D. Scott atlas and narrowed down the location of the Skeleton House:

And, since I'm cool like that, I traced an overlay of the Lake Galena from a current map:

So hopefully, the house is still around. I wish I could just march up to their door and be like, "Skeleton, dude!"

(I won't. I just wish I could.)

Anyway, that's where I left off. Now I'm distracted by old Intelligencer files on the North Branch Reservoir project, which is sort of what the whole Galena / park / Limerick Nuclear Power Plant / Point Pleasant Pumping Station shebang was officially called.

(I think.)

I liked this one:

Luxemburg! Whew. Close call.