Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

One waitress had been particularly outspoken in her disbelief of the ghost stories. Soon after, while she was in the kitchen, something grabbed her ponytail and pulled it straight up into the air.

  “Get away!” she screamed.

  Her ponytail remained upright a moment, dropped limply to her back, then suddenly shot straight up again.

  Other female customers also related that they felt their hair being lifted or stroked when no one else was around.

  The ghost was always acting up, Calvert said. It was as if he tried to prove to everyone that he was there.

  Things like heavy breathing and footsteps scared a number of employees. On one occasion, a bartender cleaning in a secondfloor barroom stooped to check his supply of glasses in a lower cupboard. Hearing heavy breathing, he froze. He thought he knew who it was.

  “Leave me alone!” he yelled.

  As he straightened up, gripping the edge of the counter, the breathing become shallower, and then the bartender heard what seemed to be someone walking away across the squeaky floorboards.

  On a December morning just before the place closed for the winter season, Calvert was working alone in his office. He heard someone walking across the hardwood floors outside his open office door. The footfalls stopped at the doorway. He turned to see who it was.

  “All I heard was a deep groan. I ran out [because] it scared me to death.”

  Calvert said whenever he was alone in the restaurant it was like the ghost wanted to let him know it was there, too. But then once he reacted, the ghost would leave him alone.

  The ghost of William Caffee—if that is indeed who was responsible for these oddities—developed quite an affinity for doors and locks. Several times, either in early morning or late at night, someone might hear keys jiggling in the front-door lock. Or a door that was unlocked would suddenly be found locked.

  Calvert said sometimes when he or the waitresses were ready to leave for the night, they found the outside door locked—from the inside. That particular door used a deadbolt locking system with a key that only Calvert possessed.

  The ghost did his best to scare people away, Calvert believed. It was as if he resented crowds of people. Considering William Caffee was executed in front of a crowd of thousands, it might be understandable if he resented large gatherings.

  Walker Calvert and his wife and comanager, Linda, were inside one spring day preparing to open for the season. One of the entrances has outside and inside doors, creating a small airlock vestibule between them. The outside door was seldom used and always kept locked. The interior one had been sealed in plastic to keep out drafts. When Calvert removed the plastic and Linda opened the door, a voice called out, “Hello!” Linda jumped back, startled.

  Curiously, Calvert did not see an actual something that could have been the ghost until several years after he started working there.

  Just before sunset on a crisp October evening, Calvert went upstairs to check the door that opened from the far end of a second-story bar onto a wide porch. The porch contained an L-shaped wooden bench and an attractive tree that grew up through a hole in the floor. An exterior wooden stairway led up to the porch from ground level.

  As Calvert opened the door to the porch, he noticed what looked to be a person sitting on the porch bench barely two feet away, attired in a gray miner’s jacket and denim pants. But Calvert says he knew immediately the man was not real—because he had no head. A black felt hat rested directly on his shoulders.

  Calvert said the clothes were old, rumpled, and dusty, but not ill-fitting. His body was turned to face Calvert.

  “I didn’t reach out to try and touch him,” said Calvert. “I didn’t want to get that close!”

  He put the key in the lock and closed the door. When he looked back at the bench, it was empty.

  Surprisingly, Calvert was not in the least upset by this encounter. “I’d had so many connections with him that I didn’t think much of it,” he said.

  He had been told the ghosts of hanging victims might appear as headless apparitions. He assumed the ghost was that of William Caffee.

  The same week that Calvert saw the man on the porch, a waitress saw the ghost of a younger man in the second-floor barroom, adjacent to the porch. This one had a head. He stood by the bar for a moment, then vanished.

  To Walker Calvert’s knowledge, the ghost of William Caffee never harmed anyone, nor was he a threat to the Walker House. He did not smash dishes or try to set fire to the place. The ghost did get irritated, however, by those large crowds. Caffee’s last earthly sight, of course, was the raucous throng pushing against the scaffold, eager to see him swing. Caffee had been brandishing beer bottles just before he mounted the scaffold for his early afternoon hanging. Could that account for the beer bottles that sometimes flew into the air and crashed to the floor during busy lunch hours at the restaurant? Calvert wondered about that.

  Caffee’s ghost was certainly prankish, and, at times, downright frightening to someone startled by his sudden presence. Yet perhaps he was only trying to be “helpful,” rattling pans in the kitchen, checking out the bar, and helping to lock up at night. The ghost may have wanted to do nothing more than to look over the books on the morning the ghost surprised Calvert in the office. It is not always possible to predict a ghost’s wishes.

  Before he went to work at the Walker House, Calvert scoffed at the supernatural.

  “Now it’s all possible.”

  Current owners of the Walker House acknowledge that the paranormal is a part of the history of the building but term the stories isolated “anecdotes.” They say that over the years numerous psychics, ghost hunters, and researchers have searched for evidence of the paranormal but with little or no success. Video and audio equipment have not detected anything that could be identified as a “presence.” People who have lived for several years in the Walker House say they have never encountered William Caffee or any other ghostly being.

  A Mother’s Plea

  Southwestern Wisconsin

  The bond between a mother and her child is often beyond comprehension—a slight, unexpected stirring from the baby’s nursery can awaken her from deepest slumber, a kind of sixth sense warning her of imminent danger to her child. But does that sense of peril end at what is taken by most of us to be death?

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cholera was a terrifying disease, a nearly always fatal intestinal infection that swept across various regions of the United States, leaving thousands dead in its wake. No one was exempt. Not until well into the twentieth century were cholera epidemics brought under control; even today the word “cholera” evokes images of slow, agonizing death, sometimes coming within hours of a diagnosis if it is left untreated.

  The story of little five-year-old Maxie Hoffman’s reprieve from “the yellow death,” as it was called, is one of the most amazing such tales to have emerged during this time, albeit one that is nearly impossible to verify.

  Maxie lived with his parents, brothers, and sisters on a small Wisconsin farm in the mid-nineteenth century. Shortly after his fifth birthday, he contracted cholera. The doctor looked in on him, but he knew little about the disease and even less about its treatment. All he could do was make the child comfortable and offer his sympathies to the family. And, he added, pray that no one else in the family contracted the disease.

  Maxie died three days later. The doctor ordered that the child be buried immediately to help prevent the cholera from spreading any further.

  His small body was placed in a simple pine coffin. His father used part of the family’s savings to buy silver handles for the casket. Maxie was buried in the country cemetery.

  On the night following his death, Mrs. Hoffman awoke wild-eyed, screaming in panic. Her husband reached out to console her as she sobbed out the nightmarish scene that had been more vivid than life.

  “It was Maxie . . . in his coffin. But dear God, he was alive!”

  She collapsed in her husband’s arms.

 
“He . . . he was trying to get out. I saw him. His hands were under his right cheek. He was twisted. Oh! He’s alive . . . I know it! We must go to him!”

  Mr. Hoffman said he understood. The agony had been great for both of them. As the “baby” in the family, Maxie held a special place in their hearts.

  Mrs. Hoffman’s dream reappeared the next night.

  The details were the same as the night before. Maxie lay twisted in his coffin, one tiny hand clenched tightly under his head.

  This time, Mr. Hoffman acquiesced, reluctantly agreeing to her pleadings. He sent his eldest child to a neighbor’s house for help. Together the men would exhume Maxie’s body. Mr. Hoffman believed this was the only way to persuade his wife that her son had indeed passed away, as horrifying as the experience would be.

  It was well past one o’clock in the morning when the Hoffmans’ neighbor held the lantern high as they raised Maxie’s coffin from the freshly dug earth. Mrs. Hoffman huddled close with two of the older children as her husband pried off the top.

  A gasp arose nearly simultaneously from everyone’s lips.

  Maxie’s body was twisted onto his right side, a hand clenched under his cheek.

  Just as his mother had dreamed.

  Although the child showed no outward signs of life, Mr. Hoffman scooped up the boy’s still form, placed it gently into the buckboard, and drove through the night to the same doctor who had pronounced Maxie dead only days earlier.

  After answering the pounding at his door, the physician drew back quickly from Mr. Hoffman when he saw Maxie cradled in his arms. Reluctantly, but at the family’s insistence, the doctor tried to revive the child, if only to please the distraught mother. He detected something, an unnatural warmth in the frail body, perhaps, that caused him to continue his efforts.

  The minutes passed. At last, nearly an hour after the doctor first began, Maxie’s eyelids fluttered open. Everyone huddled around, almost afraid to hope, while the doctor coaxed some brandy down the child’s throat, then placed heated salt bags under Maxie’s arms, a common restorative in those days.

  Within the week, Maxie Hoffman, healthy and normal as ever, played cheerily with his brothers and sisters. He would remember nothing of his own premature “death.”

  Is there an explanation? We can only guess that Maxie was one of those rare medical cases in which an individual showing no apparent signs of life has been pronounced dead only to revive later. In the nineteenth century, the technology for assessing the presence of life was limited to the doctor’s stethoscope or intuition. The child was fortunate indeed. His mother’s dream saved him from death after burial.

  Maxie Hoffman lived a long life until his death at the age of eighty-five in Clinton, Iowa. The silver handles from his first coffin always held a place of prominence on the fireplace mantel in his home.

  The Psychic Detective

  Milwaukee

  There is no reliable evidence, of course, that the fictional Sherlock Holmes, the master of Victorian detection, ever visited America, let alone Milwaukee. More’s the pity, for Holmes, and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, missed the opportunity to meet a man of that city whose abilities to solve seemingly impenetrable crimes were said to have nearly matched Holmes’s own.

  Or did they?

  Arthur Price Roberts, known as “Doc” or “The Professor” to his friends, was a psychic detective. Like Holmes, Doc Roberts was called on by authorities and private clients to help unravel intricate crimes or to find lost possessions. But unlike Holmes, who solved his puzzling cases through the powers of observation and deduction, Roberts claimed to use his own mysterious “psychic powers.”

  Doc Roberts was born in Denbigh, Wales, in 1866. He immigrated to this country as a young boy, settling first with an uncle in Fox Lake, Wisconsin. As a teenager, he headed for Blanchard, North Dakota, and took a job herding cattle. There, he once said, he first became aware of his psychic powers. Roberts claimed that a man named Wild lost some money and Roberts found it. He said that he “saw” a picture in his mind’s eye of its hiding place.

  Incredibly, Roberts remained nearly illiterate all his life. He feared an education would destroy his psychic abilities.

  Doc Roberts rose to fame in the late nineteenth century and continued his celebrated career for over forty years. Most of his psychic puzzlesolving took place in Wisconsin, although he occasionally was called upon to solve cases elsewhere in the United States.

  Roberts did possess one of Sherlock Holmes’s more startling traits—the ability to correctly surmise a person’s background, current difficulties, and other personal information through mere observation. In 1905, for instance, he took on the case of Duncan McGregor, a Peshtigo, Wisconsin, man who had been missing for a number of months. His distraught wife sought Roberts out when authorities reached a dead end in their investigation.

  Mrs. McGregor said later that when she visited Roberts, he met her at the door to his home and proceeded to accurately identify her and the cause of her distress. There is no evidence that Roberts either knew of the case or had ever seen the woman before.

  He concluded that first, brief meeting by saying that he could not help her at that moment. But, he added, she should come back in a few hours after he had some time to concentrate on the case.

  Roberts took an unusual step for him and went into a sort of trance. Normally, when asked to put his abilities to work, he received a mental picture immediately.

  The trance apparently worked.

  Mrs. McGregor returned early that evening. Gently, Roberts revealed that her husband had been murdered, but he could not identify the individuals responsible.

  “The testimony I could give would not be admissible in court,” he apologized. He told her that the body of her husband was in the Menomonee River near Milwaukee, snarled in some sunken logs that prevented it from rising to the surface.

  Mrs. McGregor alerted police, who dragged the river at the location Roberts specified. They found McGregor’s body. His clothing had become entangled in sunken logs on the river bottom.

  Geography did not constrain Doc Roberts’s psychic senses.

  In one of his more dramatic cases, he found the body of a missing man in Arizona without ever leaving his Milwaukee home.

  In this case, wealthy Chicago financier J. D. Leroy sought out Roberts after his brother vanished on a trip to the American Southwest six months earlier. The police did not have a clue as to the man’s whereabouts.

  Doc Roberts disclosed that the man had been murdered and his body dumped in a place called Devil’s Canyon in Arizona. He then described for J. D. Leroy the area in which his brother’s remains would be found.

  A few weeks later, Roberts received a letter from Leroy. Police had found his brother’s corpse in Devil’s Canyon, only a few hundred feet from the very scene Roberts described. The body bore signs of foul play.

  In yet another case, Roberts allegedly tracked a murder suspect to Canada without leaving his home state. He was visiting Fond du Lac when police in that city approached him for help on an old, unsolved murder case. Their search for a suspect had been stymied.

  Roberts listened carefully to their story, then held up his hand for silence. He proceeded to describe the murder victim in detail. Although the police were amazed, the cynics still were not satisfied. They claimed Roberts really had not revealed anything that could not have been obtained from published accounts of the crime.

  But what happened the next morning surprised everyone. Doc walked into police headquarters and asked to look through their mug shots of known criminals. He sat for several hours scanning the faces as he slowly turned the pages. At last he called detectives over and placed his finger on the picture of one man, known to officers as a petty criminal.

  “That’s your killer, gentlemen!” he exclaimed. He said police could find him in Canada—working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  Fond du Lac police notified their Canadian brethren of the man’s name and des
cription and said he was wanted for murder. Sure enough, the Canadians found him, working for the Mounties. He confessed to the Fond du Lac murder.

  In another dramatic case, Doc Roberts claimed to have saved a man from the electric chair. The family of Chicagoan Ignatz Potz asked Doc for help while Potz was awaiting execution after being convicted of first degree murder. He claimed that, although he was present at the killing, he took no part in it.

  Roberts went to work and uncovered evidence supporting Potz’s claims. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  Roberts made more headlines in the mid-1920s in two separate crime investigations.

  He was consulted by Northwestern National Bank officials following a bank robbery. Based on a séance Roberts held, a suspect was identified and arrested. However, the man was later acquitted for lack of admissible evidence.

  One of Wisconsin’s most famous murder mysteries also involved Roberts. The body of Clara Olson was found in a shallow grave near Mt. Sterling, in Crawford County, on December 2, 1926. After her husband, Erdman Olson, became the prime suspect in the murder, he dropped out of sight. Doc Roberts predicted that Erdman would never be found alive. He was not and the case remains unsolved. Roberts apparently was not able to “picture” the culprit.

  Roberts’s crowning achievement came in the months of October and November 1935 when Milwaukee was rocked by a series of terrorist bombings that held the city in their grip for over a week. Roberts allegedly predicted not only the bombings but the final horrific blast, which proved to be an accidental detonation caused by the bomb makers.

  The extraordinary episode began on October 18, 1935, a Friday afternoon. Roberts told a group of acquaintances that the city would experience several bombings in the very near future. His audience wanted desperately not to believe this awful prediction, but they were too familiar with Roberts’s uncanny accuracy to dismiss his words. It is not clear if anyone considered informing the police.

  On Saturday night, October 26, the Shorewood Village Hall was dynamited at 7:23 p.m. The estimated five sticks of dynamite ripped a hole in the building’s foundation and splintered a tall, white column. The explosion was felt for blocks around with windows blown out in scores of homes and offices. The resulting fire consumed what remained of the village offices at 3930 North Murray Avenue.