Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

So, sometime in the recent past, someone in the Renovo Heritage organization had the idea to team up myself and Chris Miller for a writing job.

Chris called me up a while back, and said that the Renovo Heritage Foundation was holding a murder mystery as a fundraiser, and they wanted us to write it. I agreed to help out with it. Actually I made Miller buy me coffee first. I would have done this just for fun, but I didn’t tell him that until after I’d finished the coffee.

We wrote a cool murder mystery set in the northern part of Clinton County. The coolest part of this is that we used actual settings, incidents, and people in our mystery. Oh, we fictionalized the hell out of this, but everything is based on actual history.

We set the thing in a tavern called the “Mad House.” This was a real tavern in Keating Township, back in the early 1800s. It was the first tavern in the area, before East Keating Township existed—This was back when the place was still called Grove Township.

We had a great list of characters, all of whom were real historical people from that area. Chris and I made no effort to establish a consistent time frame here; we just took our favorite people and slapped them all together into one amorphous time. So we had scientists and fugitives from the Civil War interacting with psychics from the 1930s and oil drillers from the 1950s. I assume it all works out, plot-wise.

Dorcie Calhoun was our oil driller. He was an interesting character, both fictionally and in real life. You know those rich people on TV shows who are always lighting their cigars with money and stuff? Dorcie was actually like that. He discovered gas in Leidy Township when everyone told him there was none up there, and made a fortune. He would buy new and expensive cars every spring, drive them home, and use them to pull his plow so he could farm in the air-conditioning. I am not kidding.

Seth Nelson is another one of our characters. Nelson was an early settler in the area, a panther hunter, and an unrepentant teller of tall tales. During his life, he claimed to have often fought bears and panthers in unarmed combat, been struck in the head by meteors, gone blind but recovered his sight through sheer concentration, and have become immortal. As he’s been in the Nelsonville Cemetery since about 1905, it’s a pretty safe bet he made up at least some of that stuff.

We used Madame Jeanette, a so-called psychic who is bad at making predictions, in our mystery. Now, you could be forgiven for thinking we made up Madame Jeanette, but no. Madame Jeanette is an actual person who visited Renovo back in 1930. She advertised that she was staying in a local hotel, and getting paid to predict peoples’ “past, present, and future.” During the time she visited, she somehow failed to predict the death of 107-year-old Catherine English, which is just sloppy psychic work.

And we have my personal favorite, Loop Hill Ike, Isaac Gaines. Ike was descended from the Underground Railroad fugitives who settled up in Keating Township. He had a reputation for being the paranormal guy—If you felt you were being haunted, or harassed by a cryptid, or something, he would help. He was a Civil War draft dodger—He shot the recruiter in the leg and hid out in the woods for a few years, where he had some more paranormal adventures.

If all of this sounds entertaining to you, it happens on April 12 at five PM, and even includes a dinner. You can get tickets at renovoheritage.org for only thirty bucks. See if you can figure out who the murderer is! Because Chris and I aren’t telling.