For years, thousands of people had been keeping an eye on a chair that sat atop a New Jersey home after the structure's roof was ripped off in a 2020 storm. On Monday, their watch ended: "Chair is down 7:10am," wrote one of the 11,900 members of the "Chair Watch" Facebook group dedicated to the furniture-turned-roadside-attraction. The chair was clearly viewable to travelers along the state's Route 47, which heads out to Jersey Shore communities including Cape May, NJ.com reports. It was distinctive among the other furniture, appliances, clothes, and personal items that can also be seen on the open-air top floor of the home because of how close to the edge it had long perched, previous bad weather having failed to dislodge it.
"Glad it came to a natural end and the chair came down due to the forces of nature in a storm," wrote the creator of the Facebook group (there was a storm involving gusty winds and rain Sunday night into Monday). The home's current owner, who uses the surrounding property as a work site and does not live in the house, has plans to demolish it. He says that before the chair blew down, he planned to retrieve it before demolition, due to the public interest in it. He told CBS News earlier this year that the ghost of a woman who lived in the house before a fire tore through it in the 1970s must have been watching over the chair. (More strange stuff stories.)