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It was clearly a case of suicide of a distraught man haunted by mental illness. But then the gossip started that told a different story.
Sheldon Purdy Pharis moved away from his native Onandaga County in New York and wandered into the Redwood City area in the autumn of 1853. He established himself by working in local businesses until he was able to start his own company that supplied wooden shingles to construction projects in the area. He earned the nickname The Shingle King. He obtained his merchandise by gleaning scraps leftover from loggers working on felling local trees. He oversaw a company that eventually produced three million shingles.
Despite his success, he was not happy. Looking back, it seems that Pharis experienced mood episodes due to an undiagnosed mental illness. Had he lived one hundred years later, in a time of better mental health care, his story may have ended up quite differently.
According to witnesses, Pharis’s mental instability increased right before his 1884 death. His obituary in a local newspaper claimed that “at the time of his death and some previous thereto, he was bordering on insanity,” and the minister at his funeral stated that “his death was occasioned by the wild freak of a disordered brain.”
And finally, two men staying at Pharis’s house on the night of his death testified that they were asleep but were awoken by something that sounded like the “dropping of a boot on the floor.”
Pharis was buried in a nearby cemetery and soon after the rumors started about the possible murderous intentions of those two men staying with Pharis on the final night of his life. The problem was that despite the official ruling of suicide, the cold fact remained that the bullet that had killed Pharis entered his skull from the back of the head – a very unlikely spot for a suicidal wound.
Did Pharis kill himself or die at the hands of others? What do you think? Give us your opinions below.
