…and her parent’s will be home soon
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My Town, By Cora Hayes
328 Glass Street: The Donerton Building
The Donerton Building was built in 1871 and was the tallest building in town. Five stories tall and made of granite, it was the pride of the city. Then the mine closed, people started leaving town and the owners of the building, the Donerton brothers, could not fill up the office space. When the glass factory burned down, The Donertons sold the building to J.P. Randall, a local businessman.
Randall immediately dropped the rent on all offices and convinced the county that leasing his first floor was much cheaper than building a new County Records Office. This got the building up to about 75% occupancy, where it stayed until the Museum of the Strange leased the entire fifth floor in 1905.
The Museum is exactly what it says, a place full of unusual artifacts from around the world. Truth be told, after the first year or two, people hardly went there anymore, but the owners, the LeMort family, kept bringing in new items every so often. Today, it’s really more of a storage place than a museum, which is probably why it’s only open to the public two days a week.
I deal with a heap of weird things in my line of business, so I’ve been over there a few dozen times. There are interesting things there, but what’s more interesting is what all that concentrated, and possibly arcane, strangeness has done to the building as a whole.
First off, the stairway is always cold. Even in the heat of summer when that granite soaks up heat, you’ll still feel chilled on the stairway.
Radio reception in the building is not good and Bill Moore, the County Clerk, told me that sometimes radios pick up stations from far away, like San Francisco and Miami.
On the third floor is W. Diggins, Accountant. Not much strange about that, except that by my calculations, Mr. Diggins is around 125 years old now. But since he has few clients and is the only employee, nobody seems to have noticed, including himself.
Twice a year, the main hall on the fourth floor becomes a highway for mice. LOTS of mice. This lasts about 3 or 4 days and then it’s all over but cleaning the smell of mouse piss out of the carpet.
There are other reports of one off strange happenings, like Mercy Oliver finding out back in 1924 that her hair would not hold a curl inside the building. At some point, I need to really investigate that place.
Next time, I’ll tell you about our local watering hole.
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