A Couple Tore Up The Floorboards Of Their New York Home – And Uncovered A Cache Of Criminal Secrets

Renovating their home in upstate New York has been a boring and largely thankless task for a young couple. So, when one of them pulls bits of skirting from the walls of one of the house’s rooms, he is not expecting any reward – just more work. But the man was actually about to make a jaw-dropping discovery.

Patrick Bakker and Nick Drummond are two young professionals who moved from the Maryland city of Baltimore to the New York countryside in 2019. The latter – who is a historic preservationist and designer – is no stranger to house renovations. But this time, Drummond is fixing up his own home and is stunned to discover something that he could not have expected.

The house is in the tiny settlement of Ames, and the couple had been living there for a year or so. In the late summer of 2020 they decided to transform the home into something more livable. It would be a big job, but they saw the promise in the rundown property. Though there was something they didn’t see, and it gave them quite a shock.

Drummond pulled away a part of the cladding from one of the home’s walls in October 2020, and it unveiled something that had been hidden away for many years. All of a sudden, rumors about the house seemed to have been confirmed, while the ghost of its former owner stalked the mudroom.

It wasn’t what the couple had expected when they had left Baltimore for New York state. But it’d been a necessary move when Drummond had scored a position with an architecture firm in Cooperstown. At the same time, Bakker could take advantage of the new surrounds to make his dream of owning a studio for floral design come true.