With Halloween looming, it’s time to name Eugene’s creepiest house. The boarded-up old farm building at North Game Farm Road near Chad Drive is a good candidate — and counts as an informal piece of Eugene history to boot.

Near it, on prime farmland, has sprouted up all manner of progress: an apartment complex, an upscale subdivision of single-family homes, a car dealership and a Veterans Administration hospital.

Meanwhile, the long-vacant farmhouse, a boarded-up three-unit structure with attached boarded-up sheds, slowly caves in.

Its peeling yellow paint, disintegrating shingle roof and “Keep Out!” and “Private Property” signs have been on display for decades to people who travel on North Game Farm or connect to Chad Drive.

The place is part of a farm the local Harmon family has owned for about 100 years. It’s currently owned by five Harmon family members, who also hold farm acreage on the other side of North Game Farm.

They hope to cash in on the three-quarter-acre parcel the house sits on. The land is zoned for neighborhood commercial development — ie, a convenience store, coffee shop, nail salon or the like.

Why have they kept the place undeveloped for so long?

The family is holding out for a rich price.

“I get people asking me about it all the time, but they don’t want to pay anything for it,” says Sharon Lee Harmon, one of the owners, who lives several miles away in a 125-year-old farmhouse on 10 acres of farmland.

The North Game Farm three-quarter acres plus boarded-up building are for sale, she says. But she hasn’t listed the property with a broker.

In an interview, Harmon was initially coy about the asking price. The place is “private property” and her plans are her “private business,” she insists.

But, she eventually adds, “It’s worth a lot of money, and we’re not giving it away.”

Then she abruptly throws out a number: $4 million.

On nearby Chad Drive, prime commercial land sells for up to about $1 million an acre.

The Harmons’ old farm building was separated from the rest of the Harmon farm decades ago, when North Game Farm Road was built, cutting through their holdings. That put the old farm building on the west side of North Game Farm, and the rest of the Harmon acreage on the east side. Harmon remains testy about the splitting of the family holdings. The Harmons still own about 30 acres of farmland on the east side of North Game Farm.

City planners put the land east of North Game Farm outside of the growth boundary, meaning it is kept as agriculture. But the run-down farm building and the land it sits on — along with much of the rest of the Chad Drive area — was placed inside the city’s urban growth boundary, opening it to dense development.

Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.