Former tenant says ranch house near iron coffin was haunted

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.”