A minister's wife told me this story about incidents that occurred when they first moved into a large Edwardian-era church rectory in Duluth, Minnesota. When her husband took the position of minister at this venerable old church, the family moved into the rectory next door. Like many upper-class houses of its day, this one had a system of bells with which the owner could call the servants to perform some task. The bells in the rectory were wired for electricity. For example, if someone in a bedroom wanted a maid to bring up linens, they could press a button in the bedroom and a bell would ring in the kitchen. A board listing all the rooms in the house would let the maid know by an arrow indicator which room was ringing.
By the time this minister's family moved into the rectory in the late 1970s, the bell service had not been used for decades. Some of the little arrows pointing to the room numbers were broken; some dangled loose and useless. So when one day shortly after the family moved in, one of these bells rang, it startled the minister's wife, who was downstairs at the time. Since she knew nobody was upstairs, she wondered how and why the bell was ringing.
A small bell box with arrows similar to the one in the rectory.
The incident turned out to be one of several. Over the next few months one or another of the bells rang on a half dozen other occasions. In each case, no one was upstairs to press a button, yet a bell rang in the kitchen.
The couple became concerned that faulty wiring might be causing the bells to go off seemingly randomly. The wiring in the house was original, and they worried that a short could start a fire. They called an electrician to check out the house's electrical service. They told him about the bells ringing when no one had pressed a button and asked him to pay special attention to the bell wiring.
After examining the wiring, the electrician declared that it was sound--except for the bell system, where at least half the wires had been disconnected. To assuage their fears about shorts, he suggested that he cut the wires to all the bells. They readily agreed to this solution, and he severed each of the wires where it entered the box in the kitchen.
Imagine the couple's shock when, as they stood talking in the kitchen a couple of days later, one of the bells rang. They stood gaping at the cut wires as the little bell kept ringing for 15-20 seconds.
Completely unnerved, they called back the electrician, who suggested another solution: take down the bell box. So they did. The box was removed from the house, and that at last ended the ringing. In any case, whoever had been ringing for service wasn't going to get it, and after the removal of box, they could no longer bother the living occupants of the house.
A Minnesota rectory of similar vintage that was converted to a B&B.
No comments:
Post a Comment