Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  June 2011

  Haunted Wisconsin

  Part I The Haunted North

  The Gmeiner Enigma

  Henry DeLong does not like anyone closing the guest bedroom door in his home. In fact he is so insistent that he’s been known to slam it open if he finds it shut. There would be nothing wrong with this except that Henry is a ghost and the family that lives in his former home got mighty perturbed with his behavior.

  It took Deb Fenske—who lives there with her husband, Steve—some time to figure out what was going on in her house.

  “I thought maybe it was because the door wasn’t closing properly, so I’d close it and push on it to make sure it was shut tight. Again a few minutes later it would be open.”

  Then came the day when she “got the message,” as she put it.

  She had returned home for lunch one winter day and found that bedroom door standing wide open. She wanted to keep it closed for very practical reasons—it’s a rambling, century-old, two-and-a-half-story brick house that’s expensive to heat in the cold months, and closing off some rooms made good sense. That upstairs guest room was one of them.

  Once again Fenske shut the door tight, then went up to the top floor for a few minutes. Thud!! She thought it sounded like a door somewhere below her crashing open and hitting a wall. Fenske found the guest room door wide open once more.

  “I got the message,” she said, smiling with resignation. “I stood on the landing facing the guest room and made a deal with Henry. I told him we would keep the door open, but that when we have guests who stay in that room, that he not open the door if they had closed it.”

  So far, Henry has kept his promise. The Fenskes haven’t had another problem with that particular door.

  Sometimes it’s not easy living in an older home under the best of circumstances, but even more so if the many oddities that unfold within its walls hint that a previous owner has not altogether vacated the property. Deb and Steve Fenske had heard something of those stories that went along with the historic Henry and Elizabeth DeLong House, on West Fulton Street in Waupaca, when they bought the place in July of 2000. On one occasion, a young woman who had previously lived there told Deb Fenske, apprehensively, that she had wanted to speak with her about the house for quite some time. When Fenske said she wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about, the latter blurted out, “Your house is haunted!” Fenske smiled back and assured her she didn’t see it as a problem. She preferred to use the word “spirit” rather than “haunted.” The DeLong House is a classic boxy, American foursquare, turn-of-the-twentieth-century home of brick and concrete construction. The broad front steps, guarded by two small stone lions, lead to a wide, enclosed front porch. Above, a dormer protrudes from the steeply pitched roof. The low, ornamental banister stretching around the porch roofline and framed windows with interesting, decorative woodwork add pleasing touches to the post-Victorian “prairie box” building style. The uniqueness of the house as early twentieth-century domestic architecture and the loving care with which it has been treated over the last century has earned it a place on the local, state, and national registers of historic places.

  Conrad Gmeiner built the house in 1903 as a gift for his wife’s parents, Henry and Elizabeth DeLong. Gmeiner, who owned the Waupaca Brick Yard from 1903 to 1944, also put up three other houses adjacent to the DeLongs’, all of them made of brick from the Waupaca brick kilns.

  Henry DeLong was a commercial potato farmer who sold his produce as far away as Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. The Fenskes found the remains of what they believe was the potato-weighing station near the driveway. At the turn of the last century, even though the area surrounding the homes remained farmland, new housing was drawing residents away from central Waupaca. Trolley cars rattling down Fulton Street made their way to and from the Wisconsin Veteran’s Home in the nearby town of King, and in the summer they carried tourists from the train station to popular resorts along the scenic Chain O’Lakes area southwest of the city.

  The DeLongs loved the house, according to Deb Fenske. Henry and Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter told her that a spirit in the house was more than likely that of “Grandpa Henry.”

  Both Fenskes soon discovered that even though Henry DeLong “agreed” to keep the guest room door closed when someone visited, that didn’t mean he had vacated the room, let alone his old house. For instance, there was the time Deb went in to tidy up the guest room. She found an indentation on the bed, and a pillow sham was turned vertically when it had been horizontal. The pillow showed an indentation, as if someone had been sleeping on it.

  She asked her husband whether he had been in there. He was puzzled, because he hadn’t for some time.

  “Well, somebody has!” she said pointedly.

  Henry as the culprit made sense to her. They had figured out it had been his old bedroom after all, and he may even have died in it. Deb said Henry’s spirit was happy in there; she was even resigned to the occasional, odd ways in which the departed owner decided to say hello.

  The Fenskes no longer expect their resident spirit to wander only the upstairs bedrooms. Deb fell asleep one evening on the living room couch and awoke to find a man—she was quite certain it must have been Henry—standing next to her. He was older, wearing baggy, bib overalls, a denim jacket, and a broad-rimmed straw hat. He stared at her for a few seconds before vanishing. “He loved this house so much. If that’s who [the ghost] is, he’s never done anything bad to us.”

  Although the family assumes the ghost they live with is Henry DeLong, they can’t be entirely certain. Oddly, Henry DeLong must have been camera shy, because they haven’t been able to locate a single photograph of him. Deb, for one, would like to know if the fleeting figure she saw was indeed DeLong.

  The couple remain unsure because they’ve discovered at least one other male ghost in the house. As Deb woke up one morning, she saw him standing by their bedroom window, staring in the couple’s direction. He didn’t seem to be focused on them, however. This was a bigger man than the earlier ghost she’d seen. He was dressed all in white and had dark hair.

  There is some evidence that Elizabeth DeLong could not care for her husband adequately as he became elderly, and they hired someone to help with his medical needs. The Fenskes think the person Deb saw might have been someone like a hospital orderly working for the DeLongs. This person’s old bedroom might have been Deb and Steve’s bedroom. Deb has also seen him a few times hanging about the hallway outside their bathroom.

  Both Steve and Deb Fenske readily admit that their stories about living in a haunted house sound “weird” and “bizarre” to strangers, but both are very comfortable sharing their extraordinary experiences. Deb Fenske is the product and marketing manager for a Waupaca corporation, while Steve is the hazardous material training coordinator for Wisconsin’s Emergency Management Department.

  Neither of them has been harmed nor exceptionally frightened. Events are usually more “startling” than frightening. For example, there was the time she saw the man in white looking down at her in bed. She tried to awaken Steve, but by the time he sat up the image had vanished. It’s also just plain discomfiting to have a ghost popping up in one’s bedroom. “I’d just as soon they stayed out of there,” she said firmly.

  Yet it was an incident in the couple’s bedroom that gave Deb the notion that someone or something else shared their home. Shortly after they moved in, she placed three small, carved statues on the bedroom dresser. Before long she noticed that one statue in particular, a delicate carving of a woman, was in a different position. She pointed it out to Steve and they decided to “test” whether it might have been caused by vibrations, perhaps from opening dresser drawers. They pulled the drawers out and although the statues moved slightly, none of them turned. One night the couple made sure the female statue was facing out, toward their bed. In the morning, it had turned one hundred eighty degrees, so that it was looking away from them. They didn’t turn it back around, but when t
hey got home from work, the statue was facing outward again. No one had been in the house since the couple left in the morning.

  Perhaps it’s coincidence, but the statue is thought to represent a goddess of fertility. The Fenskes have no children.

  The couple has decorated their home to match its historical, turn-of-the-century charm. Throughout the ground floor, gleaming bird’s-eye maple floor-boards complement the original dark oak woodwork. A parlor just inside the front door features a full-width, built-in cloister bench that opens to reveal a storage compartment. For Halloween trick-or-treaters, Deb puts a “body” inside with its arm dangling out. In one corner of the small room is a spinning wheel handmade by Deb’s father-in-law.

  A formal dining room contains several shelves and tables with the Fenskes’ collection of Christmas antiques, including several dozen folk art Santa Claus figures, which they display year-round. Early American prints decorate most of the walls.

  But it’s in the living room—in a corner that has a formal Abraham Lincoln portrait looking out into the room—where the Fenskes have found there is an especially significant amount of ghostly “activity.” In that corner, a brightly patterned, two-piece sectional forms an “L.” Deb described it as a “portal . . . like there is something right in that area.”

  “I’ve been on that couch wide awake watching television and had a blanket pulled right off my legs. I saw it in midair. Then I touched the spot on my leg where the blanket was, and it was like somebody had put dry ice on it.”

  Once it was as if someone they couldn’t see had been sitting there and then rose to take a stroll. Again, the television was on, the couple sitting at opposite ends of the long sectional, when Deb dozed off. Their Dalmatian dog was under his own blanket on the couch between them.

  “I heard someone and thought Steve had gotten up to go to bed. I thought . . . it was strange he didn’t wake me up.”

  As she snuggled under a blanket, Deb heard him go up the stairs and stop on the landing. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw him there turning to look at her before continuing on up. She heard him walk around a bit more upstairs.

  She was still wondering why her husband hadn’t told her he was going to bed when she decided to turn off the television and go upstairs herself, but first she wanted to throw a blanket that had fallen to the floor over their “very spoiled” Dalmatian. She leaned over to pick it up, and that’s when she realized Steve hadn’t gone upstairs. He was asleep, curled up at the far end of the sofa.

  Yet someone had gone up that staircase, someone she thought had been Steve, someone who started out at least in the vicinity of the sofa.

  They have now heard those same sorts of footfalls so often over the years that they’ve lost track of all the occasions. Sometimes Deb will insist that her husband look around the house because it seems as if someone is there, but they’ve yet to discover a prowler. They laugh now because Steve says he does it more to “humor” his wife than out of any belief that he’ll find an intruder.

  In fact it took some time for Steve to fully appreciate the impact of what his wife was telling him. They had both seen the small statue change positions, but other than that Steve hadn’t witnessed anything out of the ordinary. He had no reason to doubt his wife’s stories about the two men she’d seen on separate occasions, or the night someone definitely not Steve walked upstairs, but yet remained unconvinced. For a time.

  One night as Steve was going upstairs, he stopped on the landing midway up. Directly in front of him someone else was moving up the next flight of steps to the upstairs hallway. The figure—really nothing more than a separate, distinct shadow—stopped for a few seconds before moving off down the hallway. Both Steve and Deb have taken to calling these apparitions “shadow people.”

  “I didn’t really believe all these things for the longest time, until I saw that shadow. I wanted to, but it was always her that saw figures,” Steve recalled.

  More recently, an extraordinary episode with a folding chair in their dining room caught Steve and a friend off-guard. Deb found some satisfaction in knowing her husband was now fully in the “haunted loop.”

  The Fenskes were hosting a birthday party for the daughter of some friends. They had temporarily leaned several wooden folding chairs against a wall in the dining room. Steve and the girl’s father were in the front living room chatting when Deb came out of the kitchen carrying a couple of beers for the men. As she passed the folding chairs, there was a sharp SLAP! She looked down to see that a seat on one of the folding chairs had snapped open. She glanced over toward Steve and their friend. Their mouths fell open.

  “Steve was practically hyperventilating,” she remembered. “His eyes were bugging out.”

  Both men were pointing to the chair. It had not only fallen open, but also then turned nearly ninety degrees, as if inviting someone to sit down. Deb had only seen it slide away from the wall and open.

  “I will never forget the looks on their faces,” she remarked with a laugh. “I didn’t think Steve’s eyes could get any bigger, and I’ve never seen [our friend] speechless. He’s going ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. A chair falling down from against a wall is one thing, but falling down and turning is something else.”

  The Fenskes’ matching Dalmatians—Lexi and Luther—also seemed sensitive to a presence in the house. Both dogs have since died . . . but may now be presences themselves.

  Before the couple moved in, they brought the dogs to the house to get used to their new surroundings. Lexi in particular would run up to the finished, walk-up attic and stare at the ceiling. She would run in circles, yipping and looking as if trying to keep something in sight.

  Later, if the dogs were sitting with Deb and Steve in the living room, the dogs frequently looked up at the stairs and seemed to follow something passing through the living room and on into the dining room. “Their heads were in perfect synchronization,” she said. Neither Deb nor Steve saw or felt anything.

  Lexi died unexpectedly a few years after they moved in. The couple was devastated by her loss, especially because Luther had health problems of his own, including becoming blind and diabetic after eating some herbicide. Deb and Steve were able to keep him alive through medication for three years. The Dalmatians always seemed perfectly in sync in life, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the departed Lexi paid an unexpected visit one day.

  Steve was in the living room when the aged Luther jumped up on the sofa next to him. A few minutes later Deb came out of the kitchen.

  “Oh my god!” she cried. At that moment, Luther’s head—right down to a Dalmatian’s distinctive black spots—had changed to become Lexi’s. His head changed, his face changed. But then he shook himself and returned to his normal self.

  Lexi had always begged for back rubs. She would back up into Deb’s lap hoping for a good massage. If Deb complied, the dog moaned in delight. Luther, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with someone touching his back. Right after Luther’s head seemed to morph into Lexi’s, he jumped off the sofa and went over to Deb and nuzzled her, something that he rarely did. She petted him carefully. He turned around and backed into her as if he now wanted a back rub. He even plopped his rear end onto her lap. As Deb rubbed his back—for the first time—he whimpered with pleasure, just as his pal Lexi used to do.

  Since the dogs’ deaths, Deb in particular still hears their toenails clicking across the hardwood floors, especially in the winter when the house is more tightly shuttered.

  At times she’s been sitting on the couch when she’s felt one of the dogs leap up and sit on her legs. “I’m thinking I’ve got a ninety-pound ghost dog on me,” she says. “I could feel her weight, I mean she was on me!”

  But as with the two human ghosts in their house, Deb and Steve Fenske are perfectly comfortable with these friendly, although unseen, canine companions.

  The Henry DeLong House is one of a cluster of four brick homes Conrad Gmeiner put up a century ago, but the only one with the notable design
ation as an official historic site. Next door to the Fenskes is the original Gmeiner home, a late “Victorian transition” house with a wide, open front porch. Mara Westerhouse and Danny Tamburrino bought it in late 2009. Remarkably, that house along with the Fenskes’ and another home across the street might be the center of a “haunted historic district” in that part of Waupaca.

  The Gmeiner house has had sweeping changes made to it over the years, but not enough to prevent the appearance of revenants from the past.