WEST SALEM, Ohio — A man was renovating his landmark home when a century-old mystery fell from the ceiling plaster, in the form of a human upper arm bone, and stuck to his shirt.

        Now West Salem's part-time police chief is relying on the village's “tribal knowledge” to find out if he has a homicide victim.

        “It's not a gruesome homicide where Jane Doe or John Doe was put up in the attic,” Chief Terry Johns said. “Nobody feels any pain. It's a history lesson.”

        Chief Johns says he already has received a half-dozen leads on whom the skeletal torso belonged to before it found its way into a late doctor's attic. Residents have described ancestors who disappeared in the late 1800s and have offered to give blood samples for DNA testing.

        James Given bought the 110-year-old house on Main Street of this town 40 miles southwest of Cleveland three years ago. The arm bone fell on him a week ago while he was using a crowbar to tear lath and plaster from the living room, at a spot where a 1953 addition meets the building.

        In the crawl space, Mr. Given found nine more upper body bones, but no hands or skull. There was also a flour sack stained with what looks like blood along with an 1898 medical almanac, an arithmetic book, a red shoe, two ice-skate blades, some brittle newsprint and pieces of a lithograph from the 1800s.

        Wayne County Coroner J.T. Questel determined the bones belonged to a man in his 20s about 6 feet tall who died 50 to 100 years ago, Chief Johns said.

        Family oral histories have helped Chief Johns solve mysteries before in the 2.5-square-mile village of 1,505 residents.

        Now, he is trying to raise money for DNA testing of the bones, stored in a department safe.

        The other items found in the crawl space belonged to the home's first owners, who probably never lived there.

        Dr. Babington McCauley, an 1882 graduate of Western Reserve Medical School, had the home built in 1891 and died in 1898 of kidney disease.

        The arithmetic book is inscribed with his wife's maiden name, Carrie True. Carrie McCauley died of tuberculosis in 1887.

        After a lengthy probate case, the home sold for $800 at public auction. It passed through several hands before the Given family bought it for $70,000.

        Mr. Given said he's glad he didn't discover the bones right away, or his wife might have insisted they move.

        “If I see things moving around in the night, we're getting out of here,” she said.

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