By ERIN MATHEWS

Salina Journal

During a trip to the beauty shop, Valerie Larson learned a piece of her family history had been destroyed by fire.

"A lady said, 'We had some excitement last night. The party house -- the old Hotz House -- burned,' " she said.

The woman had no idea Larson, of Tescott, was one of the last people to have lived in the northwestern Saline County house.

"It was a family landmark," she said. "I felt really sad."

Larson, unlike the hundreds -- if not thousands -- of teens who later visited the place as uninvited guests over the years, lived in the house at Shipton and Miller roads until she was 21/2 years old. Since her family moved out in 1957, the stone house built for her grandfather Henry Hotz in the early 1900s has been empty.

The home is on private property owned by brothers Ken and Gary Schoshke, and people are strongly discouraged from visiting it -- especially now that the fire Wednesday could have caused structural damage to the remaining stone walls.

Over the years, young vandals and partiers and people who have sought out the place looking for hidden treasure have caused damage to the property. They might have started the fire that consumed the wooden floors, staircases and roof.

But even what remains of the two-foot thick stone walls after the fire speaks of a home that was unusual for its time and place, built for a man who had ideas ahead of his time.

Tunnels and underground chambers dug under the house and on the property captured the imagination of teens who came to see them over the years, and stories about the house abound. Depending on whom you talk to, the house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, where runaway slaves hid, was fortified against Indian raids, was a whiskey hideaway for bootleggers, was an asylum for the mentally ill or had an illegal drug lab.

Those stories are amusing to the descendants of Henry Hotz, the man who dug the tunnels.

The danger of Indians was long over before the house was built, and slavery had ended more than 50 years before, said Leroy Hotz, of Brookville, Larson's older cousin.

Was grandpa a bootlegger?

"My grandmother was a teetotaler," Larson said. "I don't think she would have allowed him to do that."

Crazy people? Illegal drugs?

"If you stick to the facts, you kind of take the edge off almost any story that's going around," Leroy Hotz said.

Hotz remembers visiting the house for holidays and on other occasions when he was a teen. However, he and his brother Walter were discouraged by their uncle from exploring the tunnels too much.

"He insisted on an adult going with you, and that took all the fun out of it," he said. "Back in the '40s, kids didn't disobey their parents to the extent they do now."

Walter said he went back to the house a couple of years ago when the tunnels -- which were often filled with water -- happened to be dry.

"They weren't near as big as I remembered them being from when I was a kid," he said.

Another commonly told story about the house is that it was haunted by the ghosts of murder victims buried in the tunnels. Since the house was abandoned, many a Saline County boy took girls out there to scare them, spinning new variations on the tale that often featured a farmer who strangled his wife and children and buried them in the tunnels.

The ghost story is dramatized in a YouTube video called "Haunted Kansas." In that tale, the farmer killed his family because he thought they were causing the deaths of his cattle. When he realized the chemicals he was using on his crops were contaminating the cattle's water supply, he became distraught and hanged himself -- after taking out six more people.

"I guess that would make a lot of ghosts, wouldn't it?" Larson said.

Leroy Hotz said the fact that the farmer's descendants are still around should be a bit of a stumbling block for believers in the ghost story.

Walter Hotz, of Salina, also finds the ghost stories amusing.

"I just wonder if that hot fire did anything to the ghosts," he said. "Did it chase them out or are they still hanging around?"

So, why exactly were the tunnels built?

"The weird part is the actual reason for digging the tunnels has never been totally clear," Leroy Hotz said.

But family accounts give two reasons for the tunnels: insomnia and sand.

The house was built for Henry Hotz by Swiss stone mason Albert Mueller. Mueller was sent from Switzerland to work on a ranch Hotz managed, but he proved to be a poor ranch hand, according to historical accounts on file at the Salina Public Library, which were provided by Hotz descendants. After he put a mule's halter on backward, Hotz asked Mueller exactly what he could do right and was told he was a stone cutter.

Hotz set Mueller to work building his house. Mueller quarried the stone from a rock formation in a pasture across the road to make the thick blocks for the walls, and then numbered the stone blocks and reassembled them like a giant puzzle on the building site.

The tunnels were added by Hotz later, but there were many unique features to the house when it was built. A hand-dug well under the house used for cooling milk and butter was accessed through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. The house also featured a carbide gas stove and light system and water piped in from a cistern on the north.

According to family stories, Hotz suffered from insomnia and would go down by the cool well when he couldn't sleep. Then he started digging a tunnel near the well, and the tunnel would flood when the water level rose. Leroy Hotz said his uncle kept a boat in the tunnel in later years.

Henry Hotz also tunneled under the carriage shed, shop and chicken house, where his two tunnels joined in a room with a concrete roof. He dug a third, separate tunnel into a hillside in the pasture nearby. This area was used as a livestock shelter.

The sand Hotz excavated from the tunnels would be mixed with cement to make the many concrete structures he built on his farm, which included two cisterns, culverts, fence posts, ornate pillars, cat dishes, calf feeders, chicken waterers, brooders, cane press and molasses boiler, table, grainery, shed and a structure his sons dubbed "Fort Holdem." The fort, a partially underground livestock shelter, Hotz built to demonstrate the strength and utility of concrete for bridge building. It featured concrete pillars holding up a concrete lid, which visitors were encouraged to drive across.

When not building with concrete or tunneling, Hotz, his wife, Bertha, and their eight children worked in his orchard, squeezed Japanese Honey Drip cane juice for molasses, tended their huge melon patch and milked 15 cows. He bought the first combine in the vicinity in 1919. The combine was pulled by six horses.

Hotz's right arm was partially paralyzed in an accident in a Swiss brick factory where he worked before coming to the United States, so he learned to carry things on his head -- including watermelons balanced on end.

Hotz also constructed and operated a grocery store and creamery in Glendale. All that remains of the store now is the cool, concrete basement Hotz constructed, where hunters sometimes still hang their deer to cure.

"Father never hesitated to undertake anything that entered his mind," one of his daughters wrote.

n Reporter Erin Mathews can be reached at 822-1415 or by e-mail at emathews@salina.com.

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Tom says....
I partied at the Hotz house while I was in school. I heard many stories about the house. One in particular about the shed or barn I don't remember. There was word that a corps remain in the loft and no one could get up there. I tried in several different occasions but every time we tried, something happened. The last attempt I was almost at the top of the ladder and one of the kids stepped on a nail and we had to go. My car would not start we pushed it down the road then it finally started. I believe there is some truth to the haunting there. Although allot of the stories are fabricated this one was not.One other night we were out there partying I was dared to go into the tunnel which could be accessed from the front side of the house not the stone but the cement structure which had 2 windows and a door. I started to enter the tunnel I got my shoulders in there and something grabbed me, friends had to pull me out. So I am sure that it is haunted to some extent. Not everyone has experienced something like that there, so that is how stories are fabricated and the Hotz house has had so much popularity.
1/13/2009

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