Out Of A Fairytale
During a visit to the rural Mohawk Valley, a couple was immediately drawn to the historic house in Ames’s farming community. During the rebuilding and restoration of their early 20th-century home, they decided to start in the old mudroom, a 70-square-foot addition that seemed bolted on as an afterthought.
However, they unintentionally revealed the first of a number of mysteries that the property had been holding when they began to remove the decaying skirting boards. Nothing could have prepared them for what they ultimately learned about the house’s sinister background, despite their anxiety about what else they may discover.
Beautiful Scenery
Patrick Bakker and his partner Nick Drummond purchased their dream home in 2019. They were strangely drawn to the part of rural Montgomery County with its spacious meadows and farms.
The surrounding area looked like it belonged in a storybook, and the house they were going to see certainly did.
Repairs
A silhouette of an American Foursquare house perched on a hill in the middle of nowhere popped into view out the window as they drove deep into the farmland.
Despite the house’s extraordinary aura, they did not realize that a strange gift was left for them by the previous owner.
Whispers
The first year the couple lived there was largely unremarkable. Although the house needed work, it was nonetheless robust despite its age, and Nick was eager to start making repairs.
He believed he was more than qualified to take on the mysterious home, given his years of experience and fascination with historic architecture. However, Nick and Patrick’s delight subsided when they met the neighbors.
Dismissing The Rumors
Nick and Patrick weren’t sure what to make of their neighbors when they first met them. They appeared kind, but they kept asking them why they had purchased the house.
Nick and Patrick were unaware that their new home had quite the reputation in the neighborhood. Their new house had a mysterious past and was the subject of many odd stories.
Adding To The Intrigue
According to rumors, the old 20th-century house was rumored to be in bad shape. It had been listed for a while, but once possible buyers learned about the rumors, they backed out. Nick and Patrick, however, were not like them.
Up until this point, they had dismissed the rumors and the urban legends surrounding the mansion.
Beginning The Process
The rumored mystery surrounding the house had only heightened the excitement. Nick told the authorities, “The rumors about this place just made the whole thing better.”
Staring at the broken, rotted skirting boards on the lawn, he stammered, “Rumors floated around, and we thought it was all a hoax.”
A Strange Discovery
As Nick led a team of contractors into the mudroom one fateful September day, everything changed. In the midst of the commotion inside, he decided to work outside.
Nick attempted to gain access to the bottom of the room so that he could insulate the room by removing the skirting boards. He realized that the foundation was rotten; however, that would be the least of his problems.
Hidden In The Walls
The more he ripped off the wooden slats one by one, the more he realized that the room had already been insulated.
“How strange,” he said. Insulation was undoubtedly not a popular practice when this house was constructed in the early 20th century. His first indication that something was awry came from it.
More Packages
Nick reached beneath the flooring, and his knuckles smacked into a solid wall. But that also didn’t make sense. There was no need for walls beneath the floors since the room was a porch.
Nick tore more of the slats away, puzzled and fascinated. A large item dropped out of the wall abruptly.
Lining The Entire Wall
Nick inspected the material that he had thought was insulation inside the wall and discovered it was actually another package. Then he found another. His heart began to race.
The thing is, it wasn’t just one or two… the entire hollow wall of the mudroom seemed to be laced with packages. Nick turned and bellowed for the contractors to come out and help him. What had he uncovered?
The Rumors
“We pulled the rest of the boards off and realized the whole side of the mudroom was filled with these packages… The workers wanted to open them, but I wanted to leave them as they were because they are historic”, Nick said.
Nick scratched his head at the sight of his findings. How did they get here? Suddenly, it clicked.
The Legends Were True
Nick called out for his partner, Patrick. He arrived just as Nick was shakily pulling another package out of the wall and lining them up on the ground.
Patrick’s jaw came unhinged. They looked at each other. “Do you think the rumors are true now?” Nick asked. Freaked out, they carried the packages inside. What did they contain?
Paying Heed
Nick and Patrick carried the packages inside and stacked them neatly on the dining room table. But when they carefully inspected the first one, they were stunned by what they saw.
What was inside the brown and tattered packages could be proof that all the rumors about the house were true. For the unwitting couple, it was starting to get a little too real for comfort.
The Mystery Man Of The Mohawk Valley
It was time to take what the neighbors had warned them about more seriously. With the discovery of the packages, Nick worried that perhaps there was much more to this house than they initially thought.
They began to delve into the house’s history and found the notorious man who built it.
Detective Work
The house, as it turned out, was built in 1915 by an enigmatic real estate dealer known around the Mohawk Valley as “Count” Adolph Humpfner, dubbed by locals and newspapers as “The Mystery Man of the Mohawk Valley.”
It was rumored that he was an unsavory character who possibly had ties to none other than the Mafia.
The House That Humpfner Built
Nick and Patrick huddled around their laptops as they began to read the riveting story of this curious man’s life and when he ended up building their house.
You see, the house was built before the Roaring 20s, but what Nick had just stumbled on was fascinating. They read with their eyes wide at the man’s hidden cache of criminal secrets.
Mysterious In Life And Death
Nick and Patrick now had an idea of what they were dealing with; when they delved deeper into the house’s history, what they discovered left them feeling queasy.
“Count” Adolf Humpfner went under several aliases. He had fled his Bavarian family home and settled in Ames. And his first wife had gone missing in 1912.
Rich Departure
Indeed, even Adolf Humpfner’s demise seemed shrouded in mystery. Harry Barry, the executor of his large estate, was the only witness.
Now that the rumors about the house were confirmed, what other ghosts of its former occupants still stalked the old mudroom?
Bootlegged Whiskey
The “count” had left behind over $140,000 on his passing in 1932 – an enormous sum back then – as well as the deeds to the local school gymnasium, a bank, houses in New York City and New Jersey, and foreign bank accounts in various names.
But where he had made this money was another story. So, what had Nick and Patrick found?
What Else Is In There?
The strange bundles that were hidden in the mudroom were, in fact, bottles of bootlegged whiskey. Humpfner had hidden them in the walls during a time when the sale and production of alcohol were illegal, and incredibly, they’d remained hidden there ever since.
Humpfner’s businesses and even his truck had secret hiding places that were revealed upon his passing. But there was something else hiding in his home in Ames.
More To Show
Nick and Patrick had just uncovered the first signs of the criminal dealings that went on in their home a century ago, but that wasn’t enough to put Nick off. Soon enough, curiosity got the better of him.
Nick knew that with a man like that, he must have hidden more in this secretive house.
The Old Well
“A few days went by, and I thought, ‘What else is in that mudroom?’” Nick said in an interview.
He immediately thought about the crawl space hatch they’d seen. The previous owner had told them that the hatch led to an abandoned well. “But then I said, ‘Oh my God, now we have to crawl into that hole!’” Nick recalls.
Disappointment
It turned out that the hatchway led down to a couple of compartments that were built beneath the building. It was dark and damp and “full of dead things”, Nick recalled, shivering at the memory.
But what were they hiding? Nick descended into the dark underside of the house to find out.
The First Compartment
Nick surveyed the area. In the first compartment, there was a rug that was placed to cover an old well. The well was lined with stone and had been dug out by hand—some 8 feet down into the well-lay water.
Nick was disappointed as he didn’t find any more of the smuggler’s stash, just a handful of empty bottles, but it wasn’t over yet.
Suspicious Details
Nick, with Patrick in toe, crept down into the second hidey-hole. “The first thing that was weird was we didn’t see any floor joists,” Nick explains.
“Then, we noticed a solid ceiling made up of a bunch of boards, and all the boards were attached with flathead screws.” But why would someone do that?
The Mystery Deepens
Photo: Instagram_Nick Drummond
Instead of joists to support the floor above, Nick could see solid wooden slabs. The flathead screws were obviously used to remove the boards easily.
“There would never have been a ceiling in a crawl space. That was never an insulated room. So, that made no sense, either,” Nick explained. “So, I thought, ‘There’s something in the floor.’”
A Real Legend
“This is so crazy,” Patrick says in an interview. “Those two boards in the mudroom. Why didn’t anyone rip them up? There’s a weird romance in the anticipation of that. Is it filled with jewels, is it a body, is it money? You only get that once. I like the anticipating.”
“We knew the hatch existed, but it’s an unfinished mudroom,” he said. “It’s just crawlspace access. We never really thought about it. Previous owners said that’s just how you get to the abandoned well.”
The Well’s Dark Purpose
Nick and Patrick pried a few boards back and found four more packages but decided to leave them where they were. “We have a legend here that is real,” Patrick explains.
“When do you get those? And that’s one reason why we haven’t taken the rest of the bundles up yet from under the mudroom.” But there may have been a reason for the well that the couple hadn’t anticipated.
A Bootlegger’s Collection
“So I crawled in the hatch and got this photo of the abandoned well under the floor! It’s beneath some of the secret booze compartments,” Nick wrote in an Instagram post.
Soon, the comments and speculations were flooding in. One user wrote: “Bootleggers probably had to whack a guy now and then…. it’d be a good spot to hide ‘em.”
Sharing Their Find
In total, the couple found 66 bottles of “Old Smuggler” whiskey. A good number of the bottles dated back to 1923 — lending credence to the theory that they were stashed during the prohibition era in New York.
The story of the couple’s find spread quickly on social media, and soon auction houses and collectors were knocking on the door. But Nick and Patrick only had one thing on their minds: the mysterious man and bootlegger, Adolph Humpfner. What else could possibly be stashed in their home?
What Will They Do With Them?
The couple set about cataloging the whiskey, reporting the find to the proper authorities, and shared the results on Facebook.
Nick wrote, “Out of the initial bottles found, about 13 are full. But four of those have tops in rough-ish condition, so I’d say probably nine ‘good’ bottles.” But what did they intend to do with them?
How Does It Taste?
The couple plans to sell off the bottles that were still full — Nick estimates that each one would bring in around $1,000. The empty bottles wouldn’t go to waste, either.
They’d form a part of the decor for their home – now dubbed “Bootlegger Bungalow”, once fully renovated, putting them on a display that is appropriate for a bootlegger’s former residence.
A Crazy Story
It would be a pity not to give the whiskey a try, though, so Nick and Patrick intend to keep one bottle for themselves. And, naturally, their fans on social media wanted them to share how it tasted.
They replied on Facebook, “To everyone asking if we have tried it, we haven’t! But we will!” to the delight of their ever-increasing number of followers.
“It’s a who-done-it,” says Nick, “and everyone wants to help figure out what the actual story is. Everyone is sending us snippets of crazy information.”
Rumors linked Adolf Humpfner to dealings with the mob in the 1930s, a death under suspicious circumstances, and a missing bride. The couple is still determined to reveal the unknown history of their house and the enigmatic man who built it, uncovering new snippets of information every day as they piece the story together.