It was the Gothic, ghoulish, or just plain weird, that brought out the bidders, and inquisitive, to the May 21 Sargent Auctioneers sale in Lima, Ohio.

Lined up at Sargent’s auction facility were nearly 200 lots of what many would consider the macabre: coffins, a human skeleton, antique funeral lamps, biers, and other related salesman sample funeral ware.

At first, auctioneer Don “Sarge” Sargent was a little apprehensive.

“I had people come to me and say, ’Sarge, I don’t know if I’d sell those things, there’s a lot of people that will look down on it. It’ll hurt your business,’” he said. “But, I said, ’hell, we’re in the business to sell’ – we just sell what comes along, and if people want it we’ll sell it.”

And apparently, people wanted it: and they bought it. That’s just the, ahem, “bare bone basics” of the auction business.

For the event, Sargent’s normal Wednesday night auction crowd nearly doubled, bringing in nearly 500 bidders and kibitzers.

Looking over a glass-covered casket housing what appeared to be a human skeleton, Jim Shaffer openly mused on whether his wife would allow him to store the casket in their living room.

“It’s some weird stuff,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s weird, but it would be kind of cool to have.”

The assortment of coffins, skeletons and other macabre wares came from a 73-year-old collector, according to Sargent. “He just got to the point where he didn’t want the stuff anymore,” Sargent said. “He used a lot of the stuff for furniture, decorated with it. He had about five caskets in his bedroom … I’ve known the guy for years. I had no idea he had (these things).”

One of the more unusual items, Sargent said, “was a pile of human bones” within a box with paperwork, purporting it to be “a Chinaman who helped build the railroad in the Missoula, Montana area.”

Before selling the skeleton, Sargent checked with local authorities to make sure what he was doing was legal.

Allen County Prosecutor Jurgen Waldick said it was legal because the bones, believed to be from the 18th and early 19th centuries, were sold old.

Adding that his office had not fielded such a question before, Waldick quipped: “All I can say is that if they do go for sale, they’ll cost an arm and a leg.”

Although they weren’t quite that dear in price, the skeletons made a respectable mark on the auction, selling for $300-800 apiece. The auction company charged no buyer’s premium. The antique coffins generally sold around $350, with one glass-cased casket bringing $400.

The bidders came to Sargent’s auction with many motives.

Mike Goff was looking for authentic adornments for his business, Harold’s Haunted Cornfield.

Sorting through a stack of antique funeral home catalogs next to a heavy wooden crate that once housed embalming fluid, Ben Warrick – in a very real sense – believed he had died and gone to collector’s heaven.

“This is really a great collection,” he said. “For collectors, this is a gold mine.”

Chicago artist, photographer and collector Jeff Cohn was interested in several of the funereal items from the Victorian period. He often uses the items in his artwork.

He bought one of the older coffins, a Victorian “toe-pincher” (also called “heel squeezers” or Dracula coffins) because of their narrow tapering foot of the coffin. Heavily contested, the coffin sold for $675.

He also was interested in many of the elaborate funereal pieces used during the Victorian period.

“I find there’s just something quite powerful about having these,” he said. “There inspirational to me … there’s just something about that period when things like this were quite a bit more important. The people of that era had a different set of values. They looked at things differently. Essentially, today we find that quicker and cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean better.”

Antique dealer Don Orwig recognized several of the faux-skeletons sold at the auction and lighted coffins as items from ceremonies hosted years ago by the Odd Fellows fraternity.

“Two of the coffins I bought were rigged with lights and the skeletons lighted up,” he said. “We’re seeing more of those, now that several of the old lodges are losing their membership and selling out. There’s quite a few collectors for these things, particularly among the Odd Fellows.”

He also bought several coffins and other funereal items for an unnamed funeral museum in Kansas.

“It was an unusual auction … one of the most unusual of 34 years in the business,” Sargent concedes. “I doubt if I ever find this again … but who knows anymore, anything can happen these days.”

Contact: (419) 229-1922

www.sargentauctioneers.com

Eric C. Rodenberg

Associated Press contributed

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