I’m sure at one time in their college experience, all students have experienced boredom. What people choose to do with this boredom, however, is the difference among many students. One Saturday, some of my friends and I were going through this. We were bored, so we decided we wanted to go to some kind of haunted house, cemetery, or something similar. Being honors students, we had just finished reading Nelson Johnson’s Boardwalk Empire, so when we saw Jonathan Pitney’s house come up on a website listing local haunted places, we decided that we had to go!
Of course, we had to go late at night to hopefully experience some ghosts and get really freaked out. At around twelve thirty in the morning, we all piled into our friend’s minivan and made our way to Pitney’s house. We did get lost on the way there and drove by it several times before discovering which one it was, but eventually we got there. Because the house was on the corner of a main street, we had to park on the side street, in the parking lot of a cemetery which was ominous in itself. After looking around in the cemetery for a bit, we made our way over to the Pitney house. However, it was not what we expected. We expected to find the house to be extremely old, possibly quite deteriorated, in a desolate area. The actual Pitney house is in a residential neighborhood and is kept in good condition. There are people living in it, so it must be recently renovated. The house is unique in that it is built to be much squarer than the more modern houses around it, and it also has three stories which are rare to see nowadays. Also, above the final story, there is a small, lookout tower on the top, at least that’s what it looked like to me. Whatever one would call it, they are not frequently seen on most houses. Because there are people living in the house, unfortunately, we were not able to sneak around and get close.
On our way back from the Pitney house, we went through the cemetery again. This time we found the Leeds’ family graves, Leeds, as in Jimmie Leeds, the farmer who owned all the land in this area and sold it to Pitney. There were very recent graves from the Leeds family all the way up to graves that were no longer readable. Several of the older graves were also sunken into the ground; one was over three quarters of the way in the ground, completely unreadable. We could not find the original Jimmie Leeds gravestone, so I assumed that this almost completely sunken grave had a good chance of being his.
Even though the Pitney house was not what I had expected, getting to see it and experience a part of this area’s history that I had read about was very interesting. The Leeds’ graves were an added bonus! We had no intention of looking for or finding these, but it was another interesting piece of history to experience. This was definitely a better way to cure our boredom than just watching a movie.