Lou’s View 5/13

Chickens do not generally appear in murder mysteries.

Now that I’ve stated it, it seems obvious, doesn’t it? You don’t see a lot of chickens featured in mysteries. Sue Grafton never wrote “C Is For Chicken.” There’s never been a TV show called “Chicken Of The C.S.I.”
And yet, there was once a mystery discovered by chickens. Leave it to Lock Haven.

1903 was a fairly busy year in Lock Haven. William F. Sperring was the mayor. The new Lock Haven Hospital was under construction on Susquehanna Avenue, near where Lock Haven University stands today. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company had bought some of the old, unused canal beds, and they gave permission for the city to use the beds as part of the new sewage system to be extended to the north and western portions of the city. Lock Haven was growing. And on the east end lived a man named Jones.

M.S. Jones was an African-American reverend who lived on East Bald Eagle Street. He was also a farmer. Back then, nobody had one job. I’ve noticed that everyone was a lawyer and farmer, or lumberman and raftsman, or some combination. So Jones was a reverend and farmer. And he farmed, among other things, chickens.

One morning, in August of 1903, Jones was out tending to things when he noticed his chickens scratching in a corner of the barnyard. The whole flock, apparently, which is a little unusual. So he went to check out what was going on, and he discovered the thing that was attracting all the chickens. It was a dead body.

It was the body of an infant, and hadn’t been buried all that long. Jones was described as “horrified,” understandably. Under the headline “Chickens Unearth A Mystery,” this ended up on the front page of the Clinton County Times.

Let’s take a moment to comment on the Clinton County Times. The newspaper was a newer one, and based on Bellefonte Avenue in 1903—Right across from where the Civil War monument now stands. The Clinton County Times delighted in running articles about anything strange and unusual; I’ve seen front-page space dedicated to men running naked down the street, or editorial battles in which the publisher threatened to go to war with local dogs. Chickens discovering a dead body is exactly the kind of thing that would have editors at the Clinton County Times shouting to stop the presses.

Jones contacted the authorities, and within minutes, Police Chief Lannen and Health Officer McGhee were at his door. Chief Lewis Lannen was new to the job, but considered competent. He was also new to being a husband, as he’d married his wife Tillie a few months prior, in April of 1903. In the announcement at the time, he was described as “The new chief of police.” So Lannen and McGhee did an investigation.

When I found this story in the newspapers, I did a little investigating myself. I’m fairly sure they never did find any answers. It would have made the news. I didn’t find any news stories that mentioned this one being solved, and I went through the newspapers for a solid three months after this happened. There was nothing, and I looked very thoroughly, because I have no life.

With a few rewrites, this would make a good TV series. Imagine the advertising: “One’s a reverend! One’s a chicken! They’re both detectives! Tune in Thursday for ‘Murder: She Clucked’.”

Oh, don’t kid yourself. You’d totally watch that.