Drawing found in 200-year-old attic leads to century-old family murder mystery
While restoring her family's nearly 200-year-old house, an American woman found a relative's name next to a drawing in the attic, leading her to uncover that the relative had been murdered more than a century ago. The investigation into the house's history continues.
Twenty-nine-year-old Sommer Durana and her husband Antonio are restoring her family's house, built in 1834 and owned by the family ever since. During the renovation, the attic revealed numerous notes left by past residents — names, dates and drawings scrawled across the walls.
One detail in particular caught Durana's attention: a name that kept reappearing, belonging to a relative from an earlier generation, written next to a drawing she described as "pretty explicit." This prompted her to dig deeper into the woman's fate, searching census records, marriage and death registries, old photographs and newspaper archives.
A tragic discovery
It turned out the relative had gotten married, but was murdered less than two months later — on Halloween. Her death certificate listed homicide as the cause of death, and Durana also found period newspaper articles covering the crime. While it remains unclear who created the attic drawing or what it was meant to depict, the discovery completely changed how the family now views it.
Further research uncovered another sad story: the murdered relative's sister also died young, shortly after her own wedding, from an infection.
Other finds
The attic also contained a drawing of a factory and an old schoolhouse; the family later discovered that one of Durana's relatives now lives in that former school building. Elsewhere in the house, they found old newspapers and documents, family photographs, audio and VHS tapes, an answering machine, a card game, as well as old bottles and jars — some possibly containing preserved food from the late 1800s.
Not everything found has an explanation — the house also yielded two animal skeletons and a jar with unclear contents found beneath the building. With help from family members and social media followers, Durana continues identifying people in old photographs and uncovering new connections to the house's past.
