Ernest Fickle roomed in Harry Perrine’s home on County Line street for a while in 1939. Early in 1940, he and a couple of other men broke in and stole $250-worth of tools. Ernest sold them in Youngstown. The police traced them back to him and he was fined $25

Ernest was arrested twice in the fifties for intoxication and disorderly conduct. One time, he was found begging in the Castleton hotel lobby. In 1958, when he was 43, police in Lock Haven, a hundred miles to the east of New Castle, found him sleeping under an apartment stairway, drunk. The court ordered him to leave town.

He died at the age of 52, in 1967. He’d been living in a rooming house on Division street with other out-of-work, single men who were arrested from time to time for public intoxication, theft and drunk driving. Ernest was the first of many tenants to die while they were living there. The following year, George Sanders died when his clothing caught fire while he was lighting a stove. The February after that, John Curry died of some sort of illness, not long before Angelo Marmo died in hospital. Two years later, Dewey Rineman died, followed by Elizabeth Marmo and Hubert Hahn in 1973.

That number of deaths in one house within only a few years appears to have been unremarkable. The place burned down in 1976. It was unoccupied at the time. The other houses on the block were demolished soon after.

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Sources: New Castle News (7 February 1940, “Arrest Three For Tool Theft”; 19 February 1940, “On Court House Hill”; 3 May 1956, “Jailed 5 Days”; 20 March 1959, “Call To Castleton”; 23 October 1967, “Funeral Services”; 1 April 1969, “State Suspends 41 drivers’ licenses”; 19 may 1969, “Man Pleads Guilty To Motor Violations”; 8 July 1969, “Man Charged In Beating”; 24 December 1969, “Deaths Of the Day”; 23 February 1970, “Deaths of the day”; 1 June 1971, “Deaths of the day”; 20 December 1972, “Police”; 7 June 1972, “Man Admits Theft Implicates Another”; 16 January 1972, “Deaths of the day”; 7 April 1972, “Death Record”; 18 November 1974, “County Record”; 5 June 1976, “Fire Record”); The Lock Haven Express, 17 November 1958, “Two Men Arrested By City Police”.