Woman Spots Mysterious Drawing in 190-Year-Old Family Home and Uncovers a Relative’s Tragic Story

Some old houses hold far more than dust and forgotten furniture. For one young couple, bringing a nearly 200-year-old property back to life has meant unearthing generations of family stories, some far stranger than others.

Earlier in September, TikTok creator Sommer Duran posted a video on the platform, sharing some peculiar findings she came across in her family home.

Among photos well over a century old and a collection of strange drawings, one particular name kept surfacing: Bessie.

Duran explained that she was exploring the attic of her family’s 1834 home when she noticed the name appearing again and again. It wasn’t until she spotted it beside a drawing that she decided she wanted to know more.

The name belonged to one of Duran’s great-great-aunts, and it was written across the attic alongside old dates, names and drawings left behind by earlier generations, which she shared in her TikTok video.

But after coming across what she described as a “pretty graphic drawing” of a woman with Bessie’s name beside it, Duran couldn’t stop wondering who she had been.

“That made me curious about who she was, so I started digging through census records, marriage and death records, old photographs and newspaper archives,” Duran, 29, told People in a recent interview following her post.

Her search into the name on the wall ended up uncovering a heartbreaking piece of her family’s past. Duran found that, just about two months after her wedding, her great-great-aunt was killed on Halloween.

According to Duran, Bessie’s death record lists her death as a homicide, and she eventually tracked down old newspaper coverage of the case. While she can’t be certain who created the attic drawing or what it was meant to depict, learning what happened to Bessie changed the way she saw it.

“I can’t know for certain what the drawing in the attic was intended to represent, but finding out what happened to her definitely gave that graphic drawing a completely different context,” she said.

Duran never imagined she’d end up down this kind of rabbit hole when she and her husband, Antonio Duran, 27, set out to restore the nearly 200-year-old house.

One of her ancestors built the home in 1834, and it has stayed in the family ever since, with the couple still turning up traces of the people who lived there long before them.

The attic by itself is covered in names, dates and drawings. The sketches depict people, a factory and an old school, which the family eventually identified.

In another curious link between past and present, one of Duran’s relatives now lives in that very school.

As the family worked their way through other unexplored corners of the house, they turned up old newspapers and documents, family photographs, cassettes and VHS tapes, an answering machine, a Flinch card game and an assortment of old bottles and jars.

Some of the discoveries, however, have been far more puzzling. “We’ve found two full animal skeletons — one in the attic and another that was actually stored inside an old lunchbox,” Duran said.

Beneath the house, near an old well area, she found something she was in no hurry to inspect more closely: a bottle containing spiders and what appeared to be a small bone. “I put that one back where I found it!” she shared.

Even so, much about the house remains a mystery. Duran is still sifting through old records, identifying relatives in family photographs and working out how the names and objects scattered throughout the property tie back to the people who once lived there.

Her online followers have also eagerly joined the sleuthing as they watch the restoration progress, and other family members have also helped her connect names to faces as she unravels more of the family’s past.