Brooke here:

The house continues to offer up surprises.  Some are not-so-pleasant, like the drowned mouse.   The Vomiting Fountain is among the enjoyable as it’s amazing to discover a wonderful but forgotten thing.

While showing our friends Steve and Allison the house, Brown discovered a cherub’s head in the ivy.  We poked at it for a moment and came to the unanimous decision of “fountain.”  This was the first we had known that there was an actual honest-to-gosh fountain sticking off of the side of the house; the sellers hadn’t shown it to us and none of our previous wanderings had caused us to trip over it.  But there it was.

Which, naturally, segued into trying to turn it on.  The house has a whole parcel of odd features that seem to go nowhere and do nothing: the light switch near the floor in the master bedroom, the outlet suspended sixteen feet in the air over the staircase, and the Box That Clicks In The Basement come readily to mind as devices which probably do something but hell if we know what.

Brown goes into the house, and a few moments later a stream of water shoots straight out of the fountain’s mouth, then cuts off as quickly as it started.  Brown came out and asked: “Did it work?  I found a dial attached to a hose.”

“Yes,” we said.  I asked if he wanted me to go in and turn it on so he could watch the fountain barf in a six-foot radius.

“No,” he said.  “There’s a hole in the line and the water goes straight into a power outlet.”

“Ah,” we said, and I added fountain repairs to The List.