Free The Sallie House Haunting: A True Story by Debra Pickman Page A

that members of the Finney family had occupied the home well into the twentieth century, when it became rental property owned by Dr. C. C. Finney. The property remained in the family until 1946. I was stunned to learn that our house was 127 years old.
    I also tried to acquire reliable information on the property from before the Finney ownership. Eventually I found a record stating that the land had previously been part of a much larger land holding. The owner of the larger tract was Samuel Pomeroy, who bought the land from the Atchison Town County on April 17, 1857. After this transaction, the land moved into the hands of two brothers, Theodore and Thaddeus Hyatt, on April 5, 1859. Within seven years, a feud between the brothers led to a legal event which resulted in the Hyatt partition in 1866.
    Much of the information dating before the Pomeroy ownership was indecipherable, due to the illegible handwriting of the person who recorded the information. Atchison had two floods in 1858 in which many of the historical records had been destroyed. As far as I could make out, the land was at some time owned by a flower company. A person better versed in the legal records time would surely be able to make better sense of what I was trying to decipher.
    The records referenced three generations of Finneys. Michael Cromen Finney married Kate Kathrens, producing James, Charles, and Agnes. James was a single man until at least 1881. In 1899, Kate Finney purchased the land just to the north of our house (Lot 11, and the South 1’ of lot 12). Kate and her children lived in the 508 house until Charles married. Kate gave or sold the land to Charles and he built the house at 510 North 2nd Street in 1905. The third generation of the Finney family also had a Charles H. Finney born to Charles C. Finney and Louise Marie Zibold Finney, and he also became a doctor. Charles C. Finney eventually owned and/or controlled all the family property well into the late 1940s. Through more research, we learned that in March of 1946, Charles C. Finney deeded lots 9 and 10 to his son Charles H. Finney for “one dollar and other considerations.”
    The Record of Historical Properties mentioned that Agnes Finney True (the daughter of Michael and Kate Finney) and a Catherine Boyes (or Bayes) and Joanna Barnes were involved in the land transactions concerning the Finney lots 9 and 10. There were no clear records to show how Catherine and Joanna fit into the family at the time.
    When I continued my research on the deeds several months later, I noticed many conflicting records. The property changed hands several times until 1958, when it was mortgaged to Billie Joan Butler and Ethel Anderson, both single women, and remained so until 1991. In November 1992, just over a month before we moved in, the house was sold to Les Smith.
    Having already tied a variety of names to the house, my next objective was to see if any girl child bearing one of those last names had ever died while residing in the house. However, with all the ambiguous records I thought that maybe there were other names that I should consider.
    Weeks later, I was researching telephone directory publications preserved by the local library from the beginning of the town’s phone service. Instead of searching the directory for a particular name, I had to scan each page for the 508 North 2nd Street address and then note the family name listed with it. Working page by page through eighty-seven directories was very meticulous work. Although there were a few books missing, compiling the results did support my theory that the property was used as a rental.
    With my list of names from the deeds and phone records, I headed to the four binders of computer-generated cemetery records. I was relieved that the listings were alphabetically listed by last name. Even though the information wasn’t always complete, it made available information such as the full name of the person who had died, what cemetery they were buried