The Beech House

Before it became a place for the community to gather, the Beech House was where generations of Coldwater families came to say goodbye. The stately home spent more than six decades as a funeral home, with an embalming room, an elevator and spaces designed to receive both mourners and the dead. Today, the building is being restored for a new purpose—but some believe traces of its former occupants and visitors remain behind.

The story begins with Dr. John Henry Beech, a respected surgeon who built the Italianate-style home in 1859. Beech had arrived in Coldwater nine years earlier and later served as a surgeon with the 24th Michigan Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. At Gettysburg, he continued operating as the battle swept through town, working for three days while he and his fellow surgeons were effectively prisoners behind enemy lines.

Death was also no stranger to Beech’s personal life. His first wife, Eliza Crownse, died the same year the house was completed. His second wife, Mary Jane Petty, died in 1872, and Beech died of acute pneumonia inside his Coldwater home in 1878. He had married a third time but left no children.

The house passed to Horace and Grace Kitchel in 1907. The Kitchels transformed its appearance by raising the roofline, removing the original cupola and adding a third-floor ballroom. Nearly 30 years later, the property began a much darker chapter.

In 1936, Frank and Lulu McConkey moved their funeral business into the former residence. A two-story addition constructed at the rear of the house is believed to have accommodated an embalming room and elevator. Kenneth and Eleanor Putnam purchased the property and funeral business in 1946, raising their three children in the same building where they served grieving families. Kenneth reportedly loved the house so deeply that he referred to it as his “fourth child.” The Putnams owned it for 52 years before selling it in 1998, and the building continued operating as a funeral home under later ownership.

With more than a century of domestic life, loss and mourning contained within its walls, perhaps it is unsurprising that strange stories have followed the Beech House. Those familiar with the building have reported unexplained occurrences inside, raising questions about whether every presence departed when the funeral home closed. Are the sounds and sensations simply the effects of an aging house settling around its newest visitors, or echoes of the many lives that passed through its rooms?

The Beech House is once again filled with voices, footsteps and gatherings. The question is whether all of them belong to the living!