Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  However, years before Officer Chuck Golden’s encounter, Tim and Alice Early lived there and might have had some insight into what Officer Golden experienced.

  The young married couple planned to rent out the second floor and remodel the downstairs portion for their growing family. Their idea was to restore the home to its former grandeur. The Earlys were prominent business owners in River Falls; Tim’s late father was once a Wisconsin state senator.

  For the first few months after the Earlys moved in, “it was like someone was with us,” Tim recalled. “You know how someone can sneak up on you and, although you don’t hear them or see them, you know that someone is there? Well, it was that kind of an experience.”

  In time, the couple began to think it might be something they hadn’t wanted to consider—a ghostly presence—though neither of them ever saw any sort of apparition. Along with that sense of someone always nearby, the couple said there was enough mischievous business to add eerie details to their general impression—doors swinging open for no apparent reason, lights suddenly blinking on, their little daughter Jessica’s rubber ball inexplicably rolling across the room, the volume of a stereo suddenly increasing.

  Neither parent ever discussed the odd events with Jessica, then two years old, yet on more than one occasion the child came toddling out of her bedroom at night because something had frightened her. She could never, of course, put into words what had scared her, but her parents didn’t think it was her imagination at play. Later, Tim learned that a friend of his had sensed a presence in the same room when he had been a tenant there as a college student some years before. The entire house had been subdivided into several apartments and sleeping rooms. The man often joked with his friends about his “third roommate.”

  The unexplained incidents increased when the Earlys started a major remodeling project on the first floor. The two largest rooms had been a living room and dining room separated by a pair of the mansion’s original French doors. Curtains also had been draped over the wide doorway since earlier tenants had once used both rooms as sleeping quarters.

  Tim Early remembers one day in particular:

  We were remodeling what was going to be our living room. The evening we completed the work I was sitting in the dining room with my daughter. Alice was in the kitchen. At the same time the light went off in the empty living room and the French doors between the rooms swung open. I called [out to] Alice and about the same time, the screen door on the front porch opened and slammed shut.

  There was no breeze that night. Alice assumed that their “friend” had left the house and perhaps for a very specific reason. She thought it was because they had remodeled the main room and were going to make use of it. This otherworldly dweller would simply have made the place too crowded.

  Any old house has a varied and sometimes obscure history. The Earlys researched the history of their home but couldn’t establish any link between the haunting and former owners or occupants. Their experiences did, however, prompt a continuing interest in psychic phenomena for the couple: living in a haunted house can do that for people. On one occasion, an English exchange student told them the rounded walls found in some parts of the house were designed to foil evil spirits—they couldn’t find a corner to hide in.

  The Earlys tried to find out more about the source of the mysterious happenings when they asked a psychic friend from southern Wisconsin to hold a séance in the house.

  The woman found two presences in the house, a negative entity and a “friendly” spirit, which is the one Tim and Alice had encountered. The psychic did not want to dwell on the negative presence but described the pleasant spirit she could “see” as a gentleman sitting in a rocker on the long-vanished side porch, stroking a cat and gazing off into the distance. He seemed to be very fond of the cat, the psychic said. Tim Early thought the man was probably looking off toward a side street that has since been blocked from view by several large houses. The psychic could not get any better mental picture of the negative specter and they all left it at that.

  “There is definitely a [friendly] spirit in that house,” the psychic said. “This was his house at one time. I don’t think he’d do anything negative. If the spirits [who live in a house] are friendly, they were very happy.”

  The Early family eventually moved away from the Parker mansion, but neither Tim nor Alice would be surprised to hear of the police officer’s peculiar experience. They’ve certainly never forgotten their years in the Parker mansion.

  Is it possible Officer Chuck Golden heard a cry from that second, more negative presence?

  Golden, now an investigator with the River Falls Police Department’s Youth Services Division, isn’t willing to go that far, but he maintained, “I heard what I heard, yet I couldn’t substantiate it by finding a woman in the apartment. I believe to this day I heard two voices.”

  Is it possible the apartment’s occupant was arguing with himself or somehow changing his voice throughout the episode? Maybe the “gagging” the woman in the apartment below heard from upstairs was the pot-smoker choking when he inhaled.

  Golden won’t rule out the possibility, but he is clearly skeptical about it:

  What I heard from [the woman’s voice] was substantially different in style and tone from what the guy was saying. It was just different. It was a plea for help. The guy sounded like the aggressor. The other voice . . . was a plea like “oh God, something bad is going to happen.”

  And that was what led the officers through the doorway, knowing full well the legal implications of going into a private residence without a search warrant.

  The veteran River Falls police investigator has gone on to handle hundreds of other cases during his seventeen-year career. Yet this “weird” and “odd” case from Chuck Golden’s earliest months on the force has stayed with him, and comes back as clearly as if it took place yesterday.

  Although he doesn’t know how it could be possible, Golden remains certain of one thing: it is his absolute conviction that he heard a violent domestic altercation underway in that second-floor apartment, that he heard a female being attacked, crying out to God in obvious agony. The only question is, to whom or to what did that voice belong?

  Ghost Island

  The heavily overcast sky draped the fabled seventeen thousand-acre Chippewa Flowage wilderness waterways in a gloom that seemed unusually appropriate for this brisk October afternoon. A cold front had slipped through the region, bringing with it a hard breeze rustling through the lofty second-growth birch and pines. A fine mist roiling across the open water washed against the shores of the 140 islands in the Flowage. Off a spit of land called Sliver’s Point, two fishermen bundled against the cold sat in their open boat debating the best way to find a few of the water’s fabled muskies.

  The two men included veteran fishing guide Al Denninger. He’d been hired to take the other man in the boat on a daylong outing. Denninger said they’d pull up to shore on the closer island, near Sliver’s Point, lay out their lines with hook-rigged suckers, set them up along the water’s edge, and open their spools. They’d then sit back and let the suckers do the hard work, luring the elusive muskies. Denninger joked that it was angling the “lazy way.”

  The men pulled their boat up on the sandy shore, put out the rods and lines, and unfolded a couple of lawn chairs. Then it was just sit and wait.

  The men checked their lines every so often and listened for the “clickers.” A lot of time to kill until something happens.

  Directly across the water from the men was an island whose southernmost point, where the channel narrows, was only some eight to ten yards from the tip of the island on which they now sat. The channel is so shallow off the isles’ points that during dry spells a sand bar is only a foot or two beneath the water’s surface.

  As the men quietly talked fishing and listened for a hit on their lines, their gazes ranged across the pristine waters. Only nature interrupted their reverie, the occasional cry of a loon or gull and the g
ently lapping waves of the clear waters against the shore.

  Suddenly, Denninger saw his friend’s face go pasty white and his eyes widen. He was looking off toward the island across the channel.

  “What’s that?” his friend stammered.

  Denninger turned to look, expecting to see an animal swimming in the water, or maybe a loon.

  “No, no! That, up there!” the man said, pointing down the distant shore, about a hundred yards away.

  Denninger followed the man’s gaze.

  Against the island’s tree line and about ten feet in the air, a floating, white, bulbous form was clearly visible. It had emerged through the trees yet did not change its form or shape as it moved. The solid object hovered at the water’s edge.

  It had been misting off and on during the day and that’s what Denninger thought it was at first, some sort of haze or vapor cloud. But then again it didn’t dissipate or change in any way. No darkness to it, nor any shadow.

  Denninger, immediately aware of its human shape, later explained, “It looked like it had shoulders and it tapered on both ends.” A yawning gap was at the place where its right shoulder should have been.

  As an outdoorsman, he noticed more than anything else that the mysterious shape moved . . . against the wind.

  What Al Denninger didn’t know at the time is that the island on which the strange apparition materialized has something of a history of peculiar and unexplainable phenomena. The owners of a nearby lodge had even given it a name bespeaking its unsettling legacy:

  Ghost Island.

  Barb and Bill McMahon have owned Golden Fawn Lodge on the Chippewa Flowage for more than thirty years. It’s within eyesight of Ghost Island a few hundred yards across the water.

  From its earliest years, lodge guests would make discreet inquiries about the island across the channel. Did someone live on that island? Why would there be noises over there at night?

  “No one would ever tell me what they heard, though, just odd sounds,” Barb McMahon said.

  The name Ghost Island cannot be found on any official map because very few of the seven score islands in the Flowage have official names. Locals know them by geographical or historical landmarks, such as Big Timber Island or Darrow Island. Resort owners have their own maps with hand-lettered names to help vacationers navigate the waterways.

  The islands are what remain after Northern States Power Company dammed the Chippewa River back in 1923. The river merged with ten existing lakes in the overflow to form the thousands of acres of interconnected waterways and island wildernesses known today as one of the nation’s premier vacation and fishing destinations.

  When their guests’ reports about the nearby island started surfacing in the early 1970s, the McMahons first attributed their uneasiness to the sounds of nature perhaps unfamiliar to “city people.” The McMahons knew the island had no cabins or camping sites. The odd fall deer hunter perhaps, or a fisherman, might arrive to spend some daylight hours, but no one would have any business on the island after dark.

  That’s what made reports by the Golden Fawn Resort guests about nighttime activity on that island so unusual. There are fewer than two dozen camping areas on the entire flowage. Otherwise island visits are limited to daytime hikes or shore lunches.

  Could it simply be that natural causes were at play, or that hikers or campers were on the island against regulation? It’s possible, but Barb eventually concluded that maybe, just maybe, something more disturbing was at play here.

  The McMahons first labeled the place Ghost Island on their resort brochure in the 1970s as a kind of joke. But then the teasing tones faded. She could understand questions from an occasional puzzled guest or two; after all, the sudden cry of a loon can startle almost anyone. But when it became a half dozen or dozen times each season that vacationers tracked her down to ask if someone lived on that island, well, Barb started seeking more detailed information.

  “They just heard odd, strange noises. I always thought it was unusual that people would not describe for me what they heard, but then again people perhaps don’t like to because they don’t want someone to think they’re peculiar or hearing things or to be told it was all in their imagination.”

  The McMahons’ resort stretches across several hundred yards of water-front acreage on a wide, quiet bay. Vacationers staying in the cabins farthest away from the main lodge, at the tips of the bay’s “arms,” and thus closest to Ghost Island, most frequently asked about the island.

  Ghost Island and its ominous atmosphere was experienced firsthand by Barb’s husband.

  Bill McMahon loved to fish an inlet on that island, but he was uncomfortable there and didn’t know why. He stayed for only short periods of time and then left for another site.

  Bill is a veteran outdoorsman who knows the Flowage well; he is not easily intimidated by the loneliness inherent in wilderness living, nor has he any similar feeling about any other location in the Flowage. He didn’t fish near Ghost Island for years.

  He said the hairs on the back of his neck would rise right up when he was by that island . . . like someone is up there watching him . . .

  Or some thing?

  But Al Denninger and his client didn’t know any of that history as they sat transfixed at what they were watching. Nothing in Denninger’s experience had prepared him for this, and from his background it’s safe to say that he is a man prepared for almost anything.

  Although he was an old hand at the Flowage, guiding had been a sideline. Until his retirement in 2001, Denninger was a professional Milwaukee firefighter. He had seen nearly everything a firefighter could witness in his three decades in one of the world’s most dangerous occupations. He is not a man to be trifled with, nor someone who seems even remotely capable of being frightened.

  Denninger called the Ghost Island experience “interesting.”

  “I knew that it was something that didn’t belong there. It was totally foreign, strange; I’ve never seen anything like that. I wasn’t scared, but I did get more excited as I wondered what it was.”

  His client was clearly upset. He wanted to pull up their lines and get away from the area as soon as possible. Yet as the object continued to hover on the shoreline across the channel, Denninger characteristically kept his wits about him and grabbed a Polaroid instant camera he kept on his fishing boat. Those who know him best joke that he is rarely without his cameras, and takes photographs of anything and everything.

  He steadied the camera and shot off one picture, but when he tried to take a second the shutter failed to operate. Assuming the Polaroid was out of film, he pulled the developing print out and put the camera back down in the boat as he kept an eye on the white orb still lingering along the shoreline. In retrospect, Denninger wished he had taken out either the video camera or the 35mm camera he kept onboard to fire off more shots, but he wasn’t thinking of that at the time.

  The picture Denninger captured on that day was of this extraordinary floating form that looks more than a little human. The soaring birch and pine trees in their fall foliage along the shoreline are clearly visible behind the figure.

  The orb sat there for a couple of minutes before it slowly made its way down the shoreline about fifty yards, paused there for a second or so, and then lifted slowly in the air. Denninger said it blended into the sky and he lost track of it.

  Denninger estimated the object’s height at anywhere from twelve to fifteen feet, based on the distance he was from the object. “It was big. You found yourself stepping back mentally” to keep it in perspective, he said. “You knew it wasn’t right.”

  He even climbed in his boat and motored over to where the object had first appeared. There was no evidence that anything had disturbed the shoreline.

  Despite his companion’s unease, the two fished a short while longer before leaving the island for another spot some distance away, but neither place proved very good for fishing and so they headed back to Indian Trails Resort, a few miles down the Flowage, wher
e Denninger was headquartered.

  Then there is the matter of the Polaroid camera.

  It was not out of film.

  Once they got away from the island, he looked again at the camera. It indicated three exposures remained. He aimed it at his client and it worked. And continued to work for as long as he owned it.

  “Now, I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t so excited or scared that I was too stupid to push the button. So I’ve always wondered if that [orb] had anything to do with what we saw.”

  Sawyer County historian and author John Dettloff owns Indian Trails Resort, one of the oldest in the region. Denninger showed him the picture.

  “He said this thing kind of rose up and disappeared,” Dettloff recalled. “We were all baffled. It has very defined edges on the sides and the top. It almost looks like the shoulders, the torso of a figure. But it was huge, about ten feet tall when you compare it to the trees. For quite awhile we just talked about the picture as odd.”

  Dettloff later took a boat down to look at Ghost Island himself, walking through the brush and thick woods. He didn’t find anything unusual that might pinpoint the source of the mysterious object.

  Dettloff said that everyone who lives, works, or vacations on the Flowage is used to seeing fog, smoke, or low-lying clouds. But he didn’t think the photograph was any of those natural phenomena.

  “You might see . . . on a distant shoreline a bunch of vapory clouds or fog, but it has a different type of look to it” than what’s in the picture, he explained.