It could have been a scene from a Keystone Kops comedy in a local movie theater, but the headline in a 1905 Lewiston Evening Journal was the real thing.

A midnight burglar picked the house of a prominent Auburn resident for his escapade one October night. Any home invasion is a serious matter, but this incident had a humorous twist, and the reporter put plenty of chuckles into his account. In fact, he stretched it out to nearly a quarter of a page.

The headline was “Midnight Burglar Hunt, Or Perryville’s Parade,” with a subhead that said “Prominent Citizen in Nightie, Gun in Hand, Chased a Badly Scared Robber Through Streets.”

The episode took place at the home of Harry Hartwell at the corner of Coburn Street and French Street, which is now named Lake Auburn Avenue. The news story said Mrs. Hartwell had “a woman’s dread of burglars,” but her husband valued a sound sleep. On that night, it said, Harry Hartwell’s “snoring apparatus was in running gear” until his wife’s screams jolted him out of bed.

The Hartwells had a big watchdog, but the thief had taken a pan of milk from the back piazza refrigerator and placed it down to keep the dog quiet. Then he went to the locked door where he “forced the key back and turned the bolt.” The intruder was in the process of placing silver and china pieces into a blanket on the couch when Mrs. Hartwell stepped into the hallway and let out a shriek.

Hartwell bounced out of bed and, “without waiting to dress, seized his double-barreled shotgun and started downstairs.” The burglar ran and so did Harry.

“Down French Street and in back of the corn shop the thief disappeared before the hunter could draw a bead on him. Mr. Hartwell took no thought of the fact that he was denuded of all street apparel, but continued the chase for a long time … fire in his eye and two charges of buckshot in his gun.”

The reporter said neighbors were roused by the ruckus, but “it was taken for granted that a wild man was loose and everyone kept under-cover.”

In the meantime, Mrs. Hartwell had called the police, and officers Lyford, Stetson and Austin soon arrived, but the burglar made a clean getaway.

“It is a great pity that Mr. Hartwell could not have sighted the thief when he came downstairs,” the news story concluded. “He is a man of iron will, nerve and strength, and it is safe to say that had the two men met there would have been one burglar less to terrorize the good people of Perryville.”

That newspaper article may have been laced with a healthy helping of imagination, but it provided a very interesting look at life in Auburn about 106 years ago.

Not all burglars in the area were able to elude capture. There was another brief story on the back of that very same newspaper page that tells of some other police work that led to an arrest.

The previous week, there had been break-ins at Gorham, Bethel and Mechanic Falls, at the Shurtleff store in South Paris, and on that same night a thief attempted to enter the Brooks’ store.

“Mr. Brooks heard someone prying open the window and made the fact known so suddenly the burglar jumped off his ladder and ran,” leaving his tools and black felt hat behind.

State Detective Odlin of Lewiston connected that hat with a suspect, who also had been a bit careless with his shoes at another crime scene. The detective said the culprit at the Gorham break exchanged his shoes for a new pair, leaving his old shoes behind. The shoes were a perfect fit on the suspect, and an arrest was made.

There was no reporter’s byline on either story. Someday I may ask Mark LaFlamme, Sun Journal police beat reporter and columnist with a witty appreciation for the whimsical side of transgressions of the law in the Twin Cities, if he may have had an ancestor on the paper’s staff back then.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He may be reached by sending email to [email protected].