A Story Good for Haunting—But Home Owners Say There Are No Ghosts

Bob and Kay Hurd grew up in a Midwestern town of just 600 people.  Bob's father was both mayor and milkman, while Kay's family farmed.

Childhood sweethearts, the couple married in 1957 and, when they moved to Warren 11 years later, they welcomed the rural feel of the community.

"The day we moved in, I chased cows off the road so we could get through," says Kay.

For their new home, the Hurds chose a charming three bedroom, 1 1/2 bath colonial farmhouse, built in the late 1700s and shingled in white clapboard.  And it wasn't long before their neighbors stopped by to let them know just what they'd gotten themselves into.

"Some of the old timers would immediately come over and tell us these horror stories," Bob says.

Turns out the Hurds had bought the old Wiegand farm, a legendary piece of Warren property complete with its own murder mystery.

As the story goes, at about the turn of the century, the once-thriving 100-acre homestead belonged to a farmer named Fred Wiegand.  Wiegand's first wife had died, leaving him with a young son.  So, in 1911, Wiegand married a woman from New York, Catherine Blauvelt.

"They got married and divorced and then they got married again," says Bob.  "They used to argue considerably.  So he killed her.  And he buried her here, according to articles in the newspapers, along the driveway."

But the second Mrs. Wiegand, perhaps sensing her approaching demise, had asked her neighbors to come looking for her, should she not show up at church on a Sunday.  When she failed to appear at church on March 24, 1918, her friends and neighbors alerted authorities, who paid a visit to her husband.

"Fred Wiegand said [his wife] had gone to visit her sister in New York," says Bob.  "The problem was that there were all kinds of her clothes hanging on the clothes line.  So the police gave him a certain amount of time to show evidence of where she was."

With the law closing in, Wiegand penned a suicide note, then killed himself.

"Fred Wiegand, a well-to-do farmer ... committed suicide Saturday afternoon by shooting himself through the heart," writes the Courier News on April 1, 1918, one of the newspaper accounts of the time compiled by the Warren Township Historical Society.  "The act was committed in a tool house among the outbuildings of the pretentious-looking estate.  His son, Lewis Wiegand, heard the shot and rushed into the building, only to find his father's inanimate form upon the floor of the building. Beside the body was a note directing the son to look in a box in the house for a letter."

"'I have killed the old devil and thrown her body in a hole,'" the newspaper accounts quote the suicide note as saying.  "Lewis had nothing to do with it."

Though initially arrested as an accessory, the son, Lewis, was later cleared.

Meantime, there are varying accounts of how the body of the second Mrs. Wiegand was discovered on the enormous property.  One suggests a medium used her devining rod to find the burial site.  Another states that an elderly sheriff who walked with a cane came upon the body when his cane sank in the newly softened earth.  But the commonly believed story is that two neighbor boys constructed a device to indicate whether the ground was hard or soft.

"[The boys] observed a depression in a stone-covered cow path about 500 feet north of the Wiegand barn," the historical society quotes the Unionist-Gazette as reporting.  "They explored the tell-tale spot caused by heavy rains of the day before and, three feet below the surface of stone and brush, discovered the ghastly object of their long search, wrapped like a mummy in burlap bags.  The body was fully-clothed, even to a gold breast pin which Mrs. Wiegand usually wore."

Descendants of Fred and Lewis visited the Hurds recently.

"They said 'We knew there was a family secret, but nobody would ever talk about it,'" says Kay.

Bob and Kay Hurd—who raised two daughters and now have five grandchildren and one great-grandchild—say the farm's grisly past would not have deterred them, had they known of it before they bought the now nearly 3-acre property.

"[Mrs. Wiegands] doesn't walk around the house," Kay says, with a smile.  

"Nor does he," adds Bob.  "But we've had some terrific Halloween parties in the barn."

Have a Noteworthy Neighbor you think Warren Patch should profile?  Contact Mary Ann McGann at tagintheback@optonline.net.