Is it the Bishop or is an intruder haunting
Brownella Cottage?
By DOUG OSBORNE, Trustee, Galion Historical Society
It was about 2:30 one morning and I was awakened by the telephone. The phone call was from the police department dispatcher asking me to meet two patrolmen who were responding to a security alarm at Brownella Cottage.
It was a dark and stormy night! It really was!
I arrived at the cottage and was greeted by the patrolmen who told me they had checked all, of the outside entrances and found everything in order" but we needed to check out the interior to see if anyone was in there, or evidence of someone having been.
I entered the house and told the officers that the alarm system indicated the north door of the museum was the sensor which had been activated.
The officers searched the house and found no one so we went to the museum to check the north door. It was closed and locked. We came back in the house to try to reset the alarm system.
The alarm system would not reset. I told the officers to go ahead and leave and I would call the security company and work out why it would not reset.
The officers left and I went to the kitchen telephone to call the security company and found the telephone was dead.
I went back to the museum to check the door again. I unlocked the door, opened it, closed it and locked it again and returned to the house to check the alarm message board. The board now said it was okay and the alarm could be set.
I went from the alarm room back to the kitchen where our master light control panel is located. (from this panel one can turn on or off all the lights in all the rooms.) Now I was going to turn off the master lights, go to the back hall where the alarm controls are, reset them and leave.
As I turned the lights off I heard someone running up the hall towards the kitchen, where I was standing in the dark. He stopped in the hall just 
before the doorway into the kitchen.
I stood silent and he stood silent.
"What do I do now?"
The police missed finding this person. They were gone and it was just me and him.
I slowly and quietly moved back across the kitchen and turned on all of the lights. The lights came on and someone ran back up the hall toward the front of the house.
I looked around the corner into the hallway and could not see him. My heart pounded, "What do I do now?"
I decided to turn off the lights, run to the alarm control panel, set the alarm, lock the door and go outside to wait for the motion detector to be set off by the person still in the cottage. The police would come and apprehend the intruder. I waited in my car in the driveway. As soon as the person moves to leave, the alarm will go off and we will have him.
Twenty minutes passed. No alarm.
I decided to go home, have a cup of coffee and wait for the dispatcher to call again about the alarm at Brownella Cottage. The motion detectors picked up nothing. The call never came.
Who or what ran down the hall in the house? I don't know. I do know that the running sounds were loud and clear and reacted to my turning the lights on and moving about the cottage.
This is the only experience I have had personally. Others have had unexplained happenings prior to mine.
(From The Galion Inquirer)