Friday, July 22nd, 2022
Listing: House with indoor pool and Public Enemy No. 1
Celina property full of character and lots of history
By Erin Gardner
Photo by Paige Sutter/The Daily Standard
A two-story house located at 117 North Brandon Avenue in Celina has been the subject of national media in recent weeks. Either of these two cells from the former Allen County jail may have housed infamous bank robber John Dillinger.
CELINA - Melissa Bartley said she has found herself in a "whirlwind" recently.
She and her husband, Ray, are selling their home at 117 N. Brandon Ave., which they bought in 2018. The home in question is a distinctive two-story house with a comfortable 6,467 square feet, four bedrooms and five bathrooms.
The kicker? In the middle of the first floor sits two jail cells that allegedly housed infamous bank robber John Dillinger.
The property, posted at $275,000, was featured on Zillow Gone Wild's listing of unusual homes and has gone viral.
Since then, the house has sparked the interest of Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, the Columbus Dispatch, Newsweek, the New York Post and the Kansas City Star.
Ryan Stackhouse, the Superior Plus Realtors agent who listed the property, said the national attention it received came as a shock to him.
"I listed it and I think the first day after listing it, my phone was just blowing up, I mean, inundated with calls," he said. "One of my colleagues happened to pick up on the fact that it had made Zillow Gone Wild, which was a Facebook page and there were thousands and thousands of comments on it and shares. That was just the beginning. From there, it spiraled into TikTok videos being made on it. It really just took off from there."
Bartley agreed the attention was unexpected.
"It's just been an overload of information," she said. "For us personally, it had nothing to do with us. The house is famous, not us, which I like it that way. We really haven't had much change."
Photo by Paige Sutter/The Daily Standard
A two-story house located at 117 North Brandon Avenue in Celina has been the subject of national media in recent weeks.
According to the Celina sesquicentennial history book, the house was built in 1972 by the Vic Steinke Brothers. Optometrist Dr. LeRoy Weber had owned the home.
Weber built the house to use as a private office and eventually expanded it to become a lavish home for entertaining, as he had a reputation for partying, according to Stackhouse.
Not only did Weber love to entertain, but he also had an affinity for John Dillinger.
Photo by Paige Sutter/The Daily Standard
A two-story house located at 117 North Brandon Avenue in Celina has been the subject of national media in recent weeks. The top bunk of one of the house's jail cells.
According to Citizens National Bank, Dillinger robbed the Bluffton bank on Aug. 14, 1933. In October, he was brought back and held in the Allen County Jail in Lima, 12 miles south of Bluffton, to stand trial for the Bluffton bank robbery.
On Oct. 12, 1933, Dillinger's gang came to the jail claiming to be officers from Indiana tasked with taking Dillinger back to stand trial there.
When a sheriff asked for their credentials, they opened fire, killed him and busted Dillinger out of jail.
"From what we've been told, one of the local jails…when they were in the process of tearing it down, he (Weber) had been told (that the jail had held) John Dillinger and he wanted that," Bartley said. "I have people tell me all the time in Celina that they can remember driving by the house when it was being built and seeing just the jail cells in the yard. It's kind of funny. Not only are the jail cells in the house, but the railing in the great room…is from that same jail. It just comes down to him being a John Dillinger buff and having enough money to buy it, and that's what he did. He built it right around it."
Nowadays instead of housing a famous bank robber, the Bartley's occasionally sentence their pups to time behind bars when they misbehave.
However, the jail cells aren't the only eccentric feature of the property.
Stackhouse said the exterior was designed with Swiss architecture. The house has four bedrooms each with their own full bathroom, and a two-story great room with an overlooking balcony.
Photo by Paige Sutter/The Daily Standard
A two-story house located at 117 North Brandon Avenue in Celina has been the subject of national media in recent weeks. The house has three chandeliers salvaged from a demolished Columbus theater.
It also features chandeliers from a torn-down Columbus theater that Weber originally installed, a second kitchen upstairs, a stone-lined staircase, an indoor pool, a sauna and a pub.
One of Bartley's favorite things about the house is the pool, more specifically a yellow submarine painted on the wall.
"The indoor pool is unique," she said. "My favorite thing (about) the house is the yellow submarine that my friend Tiffany painted on it. She hand-drew the yellow submarine because I'm a huge Beatles fan. My kids are named after the Beatles, so I had to incorporate that somehow. It is the coolest."
Photo by Paige Sutter/The Daily Standard
A two-story house located at 117 North Brandon Avenue in Celina has been the subject of national media in recent weeks. There is an unfilled swimming pool on the first floor next to the game room.
Online, the house received mixed reactions. Some loved the novel features of the home, while others found it excessive.
"I love reading all those comments. Some people hate the house with everything in them and I just think that is OK," Bartley said. "I don't expect anybody to like what I like, and they shouldn't expect me to like what they like. That's kind of what we need in this world."
Stackhouse agrees the comments are mostly about the cells.
"There (are) jokes about locking the kids up when they're misbehaving (and) putting the dogs in there," he said. "What kind of home has jail cells? Others just tend to poke jokes at the way the house is set up. It's a mix of styles. A lot of people are saying what a great price is for a house of that size and it's in decent shape."
However, the house is not without its faults. The indoor pool has yet to be filled, and a grotto-style hot tub has been out of commission for some time.
Bartley said the main reason the family is selling the home is maintenance. It takes a lot of time and labor to keep the nearly 6,500 square-foot home tidy, she said.
For example, Bartley said it took her an hour and a half just to vacuum the carpet in the great room before the newspaper arrived.
"It's a big house, it's a lot of maintenance (and) it's a lot of work," she said. "We want to live our lives. We love music, we go to concerts every month. We want to go spend our money not on things, but on memories. Those we take with us."
Right now, the property is under contract and has been on Zillow for 27 days. Stackhouse said they received multiple offers, and Bartley said the house sold for $310,000.
