The home at 777 Pine St., in the Borough of Emmaus, is featured in an 11-page article in the September-October 2021 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine.

The article is titled “What really happened at 777 Pine Street?” The author previewed the story with an editorial teaser: “I thought we were doing a renovation, not an exorcism. The house had other ideas.”

Because the article described an unfolding mystery, the story went viral and caused much comment on social media across the country and in Canada.

Written by former 777 Pine St. owner and writer David Howard, the home is alternately described as a dream home and a nightmare, with a bit of haunting, frustration and a lot of befuddlement thrown in.

Bought in the fall of 2009 by Howard and his wife Ann Quigley, the home was admittedly more than they could afford. The two were, however, entranced by the house.

“All we knew was that we wanted to live in the house,” Howard wrote.

They figured they could handle the obviously needed repairs and upgrades. After a lot of “what ifs” and “yes buts,” the couple made an offer that was accepted and they became homeowners.

From the start, the two were overwhelmed. They discovered rooms that were sealed off on the second floor, a hidden neighborhood watch tower with a submarine-type hatch and a maze of rooms in the basement.

The article switches time periods and travels back to the 1930s and Howard’s research into the saga of the man who had the house built in 1955, Robert Swinehart.

From his childhood, Swinehart had an innate ability as an archer. He became celebrated in his hometown and in media across the country in 1966 when he became the first person to bag a rhinoceros, a lion, an elephant, a water buffalo and a leopard with a bow and arrow, while on African hunting safaris.

Swinehart was notorious for promoting himself in print media, television and speaking tours. In 1970 he self-published a biographical coffee table book regaling his life in words and photographs.

Switching time periods and subjects again, Howard described a series of unfortunate events and cascading home repair issues that resulted from the house’s lack of maintenance over the years.

Howard credits his wife Ann for tackling many of the home projects, saying she became a quite competent do-it-yourselfer, replacing cedar siding and windows and patching drywall and a series of on-and-on homeowner repairs on a never-ending “to-do“ list.

Trying to explain the series of household mysteries that kept cropping up, friends and neighbors even went so far as to pronounce the home as haunted.

A mysterious and unsolvable problem with the low-voltage electrical system installed in the 1950s when those systems were fashionable, was a turning point and the couple began to admit they were in over their heads.

When a contractor described the home’s maintenance needs as a “money pit,” the pair, weary of doing battle with the house, decided in 2018 to put 777 Pine St. up for sale. The new owners closed on the house nine years to the day after Howard and his wife took possession.

To close the narrative on Swinehart, Howard described how he followed Swinehart through media reports and interviews with Swinehart’s family and acquaintances.

The narrative reported the years of progressively strange behavior and mental health problems preceding the archer’s death in 1982 by his own hand.

Howard and Ann moved to a city hundreds of miles from Emmaus, to a place “where the air is salty and the winters are long” and they settled in a rented place where someone else fixes the furnace when it conks out.