The mid-June surprise discovery in Clancy of a casket believed to date from the 1880s was especially interesting to Patrice Payne Fritsch, a former renter of the old ranch house nearby.
The cast-iron casket, uncovered during the excavation for the foundation of a new home on land previously part of the Haynes Red Cliff ranch, was reburied elsewhere in Clancy. A woman who has been called the “graveyard detective” said research leads her to believe that the body inside was that of the mother-in-law of the ranch owner prior to the Haynes family.
Fritsch said she and family members experienced some unusual happenings in the old Haynes Red Cliff ranch house when they lived there in 1992-93. “It was never a bad place to live,” she said recently. “It was just bizarre.”
The occurrences convinced her and her daughters that there was some sort of presence in the house, she said.
Now living out of state with a new husband, at the time she lived in the ranch house, Fritsch was married to Scott Payne, now deceased. The couple rented the ranch house and lived there with their high-school aged daughter Lindy and had another daughter in college at Dillon, Katie. They were waiting for their new home to be constructed elsewhere in Clancy at the time.
Scott, active in fairgrounds issues, was off at a meeting late one night and Patrice decided not to wait up for him, she recalled. Believing she heard footsteps, she thought Scott had come home and she got up from bed to greet him. The footsteps ceased, but her sense that someone was in the room did not. “I could see the bed sink, and he wasn’t there,” she remembered.
Another time, Patrice returned home late at night with daughter Lindy. Both of them stopped in their tracks when they looked up at the attic, she reported. Absolutely positive she had not left any lights on in the attic, Patrice saw a light on “and somebody was standing in the window,” she said.
Lindy saw it, too, she said.
“I said, ‘Now tell me you don’t believe,’” recalled Patrice of her comment at the time.
Several similar incidents over the 14 months they lived in the house convinced them that there was a spirit in the house, she said. A few times she or other family members would walk into a room and momentarily see someone there, she said.
Patrice said she spoke about the incidents with another former tenant of the house and was told, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s just Henry. He won’t hurt you.”
On one of Katie’s visits home from college, she became a believer, too. She was trying to sleep and someone kept opening and shutting a door. After investigating and finding nothing, she eventually called out, “Henry, stop,” remembers Patrice.
“And it stopped,” she reported.
She said she and Lindy once ventured up into the attic out of curiosity and found it full of “old treasures.” Lots of books and Bibles were stored there, as were records that appeared to have some sort of official government status.
Even for someone who thinks ghost tales are nothing but a lot of nonsense, any tenant would have to love the character of the old house as it was when she lived there, said Patrice. The cooking had to be done on a wood cook stove, and the creek ran beneath the back step, she reminisced. A corral out back was constructed by Scott, and the place just carries a lot of fond memories for her, she said.
“It was a fun old house to live in,” she said.
As for “Henry” or any other spirits in the house, “I’m a believer, and my daughters are both believers,” she said.
