The Chair in the Snow: How Minner Falls Blamed a Ghost

The Chair in the Snow: How Minner Falls Blamed a Ghost

Cold, controlled dread: a lone high-backed wooden chair sat upright in four inches of packed snow with no footprints, drag marks, or tire tracks for sixty yards around it - and the town that owned it had spent eighty-one years blaming a dead woman for three separate fires. Who put the chair there, and why did the legend outlive the evidence?

In this episode, we tell the story contained in the town records and the work of one retired schoolteacher, laying out the photograph, the archival discoveries, and the contradictions that kept the legend alive. What the archives actually show, and why the town clung to blame, is the question that drives the episode.

Person: Alan Weber Person: Sandra Pruitt Person: Bruce O'Brien Date: July 9, 1931 Location: Minner Falls town hall

- The chair was found upright in roughly four inches of packed snow with the surrounding surface unbroken for sixty yards. - The overnight low before the chair's discovery had been eleven degrees. - The town record shows the chair was sent off-site for reupholstering to Henry Batt in 1929. - Marcia Murphy was in her mid-fifties in 1931 and living alone on a farmhouse on Teller Road. - Four years after the 1931 east wing fire, a deed in the county-seat registry resolved Murphy's property case in her favor.

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