With a creaky gait and a long oxygen tube snaking behind him, Russell Rhoades hauled himself by the banisters up a dim back stairwell of his old Crawford County home and showed a visitor the closet of his skeletons.
"Back in here," mumbled Mr. Rhoades, 77, as he stood in front of a small door cut high into a bathroom wall. "Way back in there."
A week earlier, on Sept. 16, Mr. Rhoades' grandson, David Simmons, was in the same spot, cleaning out 40 years' worth of storage from the elevated crawl space as part of a second-story renovation project.
As he moved around on his hands and knees, loose floor boards parted to reveal a parallel passageway below.
Mr. Simmons angled a flashlight into the darkness. It illuminated a macabre sight: skulls and bones, jumbled in what appeared to be the decayed remnants of a casket. There was also an old clock and part of a kerosene lantern.
"I told him he had to turn it in to the cops," Mr. Rhoades said.
Theater props? Homicide victims? No one in the family knew, and neither did the authorities when they arrived later that day.
Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. Scott Shipton said he came to the home on Stockton Corners Road in Wayne Township with an open mind and lots of questions.
"It makes you wonder why," Cpl. Shipton said last week. "How they got there, how they've been there that long with nobody ever noticing."
Mr. Simmons piled the remains into a box and passed them along to county Coroner Patrick McHenry. He, in turn, sent them to Dr. Dennis C. Dirkmaat, director of the Applied Forensic Sciences Department at Mercyhurst College in Erie.
There were roughly 50 bones -- a complete human skeleton contains just upwards of 200 bones, from the large leg bone to the tiny bones of the inner ear -- that came from at least two people.
Dr. Dirkmaat's graduate students assembled the framework of a single male skeleton with a partial skull, ribs, vertebrae and bones of the arms, legs, hands and feet.
The feet bones had holes, and one toe bone had wire remnants.
"It's relatively crude stuff, heavy-gauge wire. You can see they took pliers, twisted them up and connected them," Dr. Dirkmaat said.
The skull, already cut in half by a hand saw, also had holes that probably once held a clasp. A rusted screw penetrated the skull from the inside, likely for mounting on a wall.
Dr. Dirkmaat estimated that the person was 30 to 50 years old at the time of death. But nailing down when that death occurred is a different story.
"It could be 50 or 100 years old," Dr. Dirkmaat said -- meaning the person could have been born between 80 and 150 years ago.
Another skeleton, likely a male in his 20s to 40s, included part of a skull. There were other bones, such as a clavicle.
Mystery was piling upon mystery.
Mr. McHenry, a retired state trooper himself, initially surmised that the bones might have come from an old church cemetery near the house.
But then he brought the bones to Dr. Dirkmaat.
"The first words out of his mouth: 'I have to compare this to an old skeleton I have downstairs,' " one that came from a former Erie County coroner.
That skeleton's origins could be traced to a nearly 200-year-old fraternal organization called the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The society, which performs charitable work, uses skeletons in its initiation.
"It was an Odd Fellows lodge that had been closed up for years, and someone bought it, presumably to renovate it, and found it," said current Erie County Coroner Lyell P. Cook, who was working at a funeral home when the discovery occurred about 30 years ago. "It was in an old coffin. There were all kinds of costumes and regalia, and they didn't know what else to do, and they called us. We've run into that various times."
At a recent Pennsylvania coroner's convention, Mr. McHenry heard more of the same from Tioga County Coroner Dr. James L. Wilson. Just a few months ago, an old Odd Fellows lodge and its contents -- from furniture to the resident skeleton -- were being liquidated.
Dr. Wilson handled arrangements for the bones to be cremated. He decided it was not worthwhile to try to identify the remains.
"It would all be ancient history," Dr. Wilson said. "There were no signs of trauma."
It was looking more and more like the bones in the Rhoades home might have belonged to a group of Odd Fellows. One of Mr. McHenry's deputy coroners heard a rumor to that effect. So Mr. McHenry asked locals for help.
Through their research, he discovered that the home had its origins as a local hall for the National Grange, an agricultural organization.
That chapter was chartered in 1874, and it is possible, though not definite, that the hall was built around that time, said Roger C. Williams, 75, of Woodcock, Crawford County, president of the Vernon Grange.
Mr. Williams said he received a phone message from a man indicating that the Grange hall, which closed in 1908 or 1909, became an Odd Fellows lodge. Mr. McHenry also got a call, perhaps from the same person -- he would not identify the man -- who said the same thing.
Charlie H. Bailey, a former head of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, confirmed it. He guessed that the facility -- known as Deckards Lodge No. 12 -- was founded around 1829. It stayed open until March 1967, when it consolidated with another lodge. Mr. Rhoades bought the property soon after.
"This happens periodically," Mr. Bailey said of the discovery of the skeletons. "They just basically didn't remove them when the lodge closed up."
Leland E. Dorchester, 81, of Cochranton, an Odd Fellow for almost 55 years, recalled his share of visits to the Deckards lodge during initiations.
"The initiation in itself, best I can put it is this way, it showed the mortality of man," Mr. Dorchester said. "You're standing there viewing the scene and you are in full realization of life and health and such, and like all things this is what you will become."
Mr. Bailey complained that media coverage often distorts the Odd Fellows' ritual, symbolism and message.
"All our lessons are biblical," Mr. Bailey said. "It's used to represent immortality and to show that all men, no matter how rich or poor, high or low, we all meet at that same level in the grave."
After several weeks of research, authorities are sold on the theory that the skeletons from the Rhoades house were indeed remnants from the old Deckards lodge.
Dr. Dirkmaat concluded that there was no sign of foul play. He thought the lodge might have cobbled together bones from several skeletons to make a complete one for the initiation ritual.
Cpl. Shipton said he will take his lead from the coroner. Mr. McHenry seems ready to believe that he does not have an unsolved murder on his hands.
"It's that type of enigma where if it was more recent, I'd be shuddering," Mr. McHenry said.
Finding out who the skeletons were in life likely will be a fruitless task.
"It's somebody whose body was essentially donated to science," Dr. Dirkmaat said. "There's really no possibility of identifying this person."
However, the coroner would still like to identify the source of the skeletons.
"While the statute of limitations for desecration of venerated objects or abuse of corpse have expired, I still feel obligated to make at least some attempt to make a complete investigation," Mr. McHenry said.
That effort likely will be fraught with frustration as well. Mr. Dorchester said no Deckards lodge Odd Fellows remain alive. And a Michigan company that is the largest supplier for fraternal organizations in the U.S. said the person who might have known something about sales of skeletons in bygone days is dead.
Theories abound on where supply houses obtained skeletons -- from Native Americans, asylums, even the Ganges River in India.
Perhaps what Mr. McHenry's caller told him is the simplest and most likely answer.
"He said the skeletons that they used back then were of actual persons that died right in the township or the county where the Odd Fellows lodges are," Mr. McHenry said.
They were donated to science, and then to the Odd Fellows, where they ended up in Russell Rhoades' crawl space, resting undisturbed in darkness and dust for 40 years.
First Published: October 5, 2008, 8:00 a.m.
