In the midwest, many people (farmers/ranchers) pronounce the fastener driven into a post for holding wire as steeple. I grew up that way too. Here are a couple of websites noting the differing pronounciation: a topic thread and a blog.
Note: I do pronounce the little wires puncturing and bent to hold papers together as staple.
Both of them have their corresponding verb forms.
The OED has quotations starting in 1722.
Emmett
I distinctly remember when I was at a campground in Indiana, the bus driver making announcements to a bus full of tourists saying "What's a matter, are you deef" Â Â It was a pronounciation I had never heard and I still remember it 30 years later.
Have you ever been to Deaf Smith County in the Texas panhandle? Named for a 19th-century soldier and scout Erastus "Deaf" Smith, whose nickname was pronounced "deef", the local pronunciation of the county itself fluctuates from one resident to the next.
According to http://www.morewords.com/ there only three words or root words (thirteen if you count all variations) of the form '*eaf': deaf, leaf, and sheaf. The prounonciation of "eaf" favors "eef" two-to-one.
I also looked at the 78 words of the form '*eat'. The 25 which seemed to be to be words or root words are: beat, bleat, caveat, cheat, cleat, compleat, eat, feat, great, heat, hereat, meat, neat, orgeat, peat, pleat, seat, sweat, meat, teat, thereat, threat, treat, wheat, and whereat. Three have two syllable endings, one has the long 'a' sound, and one is french derived and is pronounced differently in Britian and the US (orgeat - barley or a liquid derived from it). In the rest, the long 'eet' sound is favored sixteen-to-two over the short 'et' sound.
'Deaf', 'sweat', and 'threat' are the ones in these uses of 'ea' that do not follow the two-vowels-in-a-row-makes-the-first-one-long-rather-than-short. (And, yes, I know many other words that do not follow that rule.)
Emmett
It seems when southerners do emphasis using nasal pressure, lots of sounds come out pretty close to 'ee.' For instance, 'I ain't glad, I am mad as hell !' might push toward this :' ah een gleet, ah meed eez heel ! '