A dummy artillery shell caused a stir when found Sunday in the home of a recently-deceased resident of Bethel Beach Road in Port Haywood.

According to the Mathews County Sheriff’s Office, a call came in about unexploded ordnance found while the home was being cleaned out, and deputies responded. After examining the object, they roped off the scene and contacted Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Unit Two at the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station for assistance. The EOD team removed the ordnance and took it away.

Jeremy Elliott, a Mathews resident who works with munitions at NWS, said it was his understanding that the EOD team x-rayed the rusted 18-inch-long cylinder and determined that it was a dummy, containing a fake fuse that was “just a solid piece of steel.”

The cylinder was either a real piece of ordnance that was never filled or a piece that was manufactured to simulate the real thing, said Elliott. He said that the team destroyed the piece by blowing it up.

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