Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  Dettloff has known Denninger for decades and believes in the photograph’s authenticity. Besides, both men in the fishing boat that day saw the object before the photo was taken.

  “It’s something we can’t explain. What would cause Al’s client to have his blood run cold and for Al to even take the time to photograph it?” Dettloff wondered.

  The photograph and Denninger’s experience were topics of conversation around Indian Trails Resort for weeks but didn’t spread much farther until John Dettloff visited the McMahons at Golden Fawn Lodge sometime later. He took the mysterious photograph with him.

  But before he showed it to Barb McMahon, he asked if she knew anything about the island across the bay from their resort.

  Dettloff pointed on a map of the Flowage to an island that they could also see from their main lodge.

  “Oh,” Barb answered. “You mean Ghost Island.”

  Dettloff could barely conceal his surprise. Although he had lived in the region nearly his entire life and had closely studied its history, he had never heard that name applied to this or any other island.

  “Why do you call it that?”

  Barb McMahon said guests had been reporting strange sounds and lights coming from that island since they bought it a quarter of a century earlier. It seems like a “haunted place,” she told Dettloff. She showed him a notebook the family kept of the reports of unusual activity on the island. A ghostly guestbook.

  “When I heard the story, I was pretty skeptical,” Barb admitted. “But when I saw the picture, well . . .”

  Al Denninger later visited with the McMahons, whom he had never met, to learn of the stories vacationers had passed along.

  Dettloff said there is little exceptional in the history of the high ground now called Ghost Island. Before the 1923 flooding, it was actually just another wilderness tract close by the Chippewa River as it flowed through Sawyer County. As far as he can determine, Dettloff said, there had never been any permanent settlements at that particular locale, but he did point to two interesting historical facts that make the argument for a haunting more intriguing.

  A pioneer trail known as the Chippewa River Road between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls to the south and Hayward to the north was built in 1884, and followed, as its name suggests, the river nearly all the way. Dettloff found that a section of the road cut directly across what is now Ghost Island.

  Although the highway was rerouted when the Flowage was created, for nearly forty years, travelers on foot, horse, wagons, and finally in automobiles traveled that historic route.

  Could some foul event on that old roadway have released the ghosts of today?

  A second possibility links Ghost Island with the Ojibwe people, the historic Native American inhabitants of the region. The vast Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation is intertwined with the Flowage on its western and southern borders.

  Dettloff said it’s not inconceivable that there could be Native American burial grounds on the island.

  High ground, now the islands of the Flowage, would have been used for Native American interments in centuries past. To protect the sites from encroaching white settlers or even other tribes, the Ojibwe seldom marked burial sites or disclosed their locations.

  Despite all the speculation and discussion, only one firm conclusion about Al Denninger’s photograph and Ghost Island has been established: there was something hanging in the air on that foggy day, and the Polaroid photograph establishes that fact, but what it was and why it was there continues to puzzle.

  The newspaper journalist and photographer who initially broke the story kept her reportorial neutrality yet said the photograph and Denninger himself provided rather convincing evidence of something at least . . . unnatural.

  “Skeptics will say it was a cloud formation or fog and I will never convince them otherwise,” Kathy Olson said. “But I think there are a lot of things that can’t be explained away. This may be one of them. A ghost? I don’t know. A presence? An entity from another dimension? I don’t know how to explain it.”

  Historian John Dettloff took a matter-of-fact approach.

  “The picture tells the whole story. It’s a Polaroid. Whatever is on that picture was there. It’s something we can’t explain. It has nothing to do with Al’s character. Where did the picture come from?”

  As for Al Denninger, he doesn’t talk much about the story anymore. He has the photograph to prove what he saw. A psychic who hired Denninger to take him to the island after the story was publicized “felt nothing,” Denninger said. The psychic did say the object in the photograph was “something from beyond.”

  Denninger, who lives in Rhinelander, remains puzzled and “overwhelmed” by what he saw. “I do believe in ghosts. But I never gave it much thought before that. I was . . . totally in awe of what I was seeing.”

  He’s never seen anything similar in the years since.

  The years have not changed Ghost Island, or the nearby resort still owned by the McMahons. They have more people interested in talking with them about the story of Ghost Island, or sometimes exploring it themselves. Perhaps those visitors are looking for . . . what? A glimpse into the hereafter? An encounter with their own globular apparition? Some evidence that not long ago two ordinary men encountered a mystery that lingers still, unsolved, in that corner of the North Woods?

  “It surprises me,” Barb McMahon admitted of the continuing fascination with the story of Ghost Island. From entire families to college-age “ghost hunters” to university paranormal study groups, McMahon regularly fields questions about the haunted island just across the bay from her home, handles requests to rent boats so that visitors can row out to see it for themselves, or sometimes even poses for photographs or autographs earlier copies of this book.

  Perhaps Barb has the most interesting perspective on Ghost Island and its reputation for unnerving resort guests or veteran anglers looking for the elusive muskie.

  “Sometimes you talk yourself out of something. You think that it must have been your imagination. That’s why people . . . won’t tell you what they’ve heard, or what they’ve felt.”

  Like a fisherman who suddenly weighs anchor because of that gnawing discomfort, that eerie, unexplained sensation that someone is watching him, someone he can’t see.

  It is, she said, a fear of . . . the unknown.

  The Lynch Affair

  The time is shortly before noon on a sunny day in early December 1871. The place is the 160-acre homestead of Richard Lynch, near Hatchville in southeastern St. Croix County. One of the hired men, young Jim Snodie, is raising his broadax for another swing at a chunk of downed timber that he will shape into one more railroad tie his boss will sell to the railway companies for their burgeoning passenger and freight system connecting Chicago and the Northwest.

  Although he is still a teenager, Snodie is a powerfully built young man with considerable experience in cutting and shaping ties for other farmers in the area. The ties are made from the trees clear-cut to make way for settlers’ cabins and farm fields. They are a good source of quick income for the farmers and local woodsmen.

  Richard Lynch has hired Snodie and several other men to clear a portion of the heavy stand of timber on his farm. He is working in a clearing some forty yards behind Lynch’s two-story log house.

  On this swing, however, he stops abruptly when he hears the welcoming clang of Mrs. Lynch’s dinner bell coming from the back porch. Snodie drives the broadax’s blade deep into a white pine stump, turns and runs for the kitchen door, his thoughts fastening around the pleasure of a few minutes of rest and a hot meal.

  But as he reaches for the door latch, Thwack!

  His broadax embeds itself in the doorframe just inches from his outstretched hand.

  He whirls around to confront whoever has thrown the ax with such powerful force and accuracy. Everyone else appears to be either already in the house or working elsewhere on the spread.

  Snodie frowns as he grabs the ax with both hands and
pulls it out. A few feet away from the porch is another pine stump into which he sinks the ax with all his strength. He pulls a bit on the handle to make sure the blade is firmly embedded before he turns and heads again for the kitchen door.

  Whooshh! Thump!!

  The lethal ax flies past his left ear and bites deeply into the doorjamb. Again the young woodsman looks around for the perpetrator but no one is within sight.

  Thoroughly perplexed, and not a little frightened, the brawny teenager yanks the ax from the frame, which it has nearly split in half, hefts it over his shoulder, and treads warily back to the clearing. He doesn’t know what is going on or why he’s being attacked, but clearly it seems to him that some force does not want him to go inside that house. And he’s not about to push his luck.

  The flying broadax that nearly ended Jim Snodie’s young life on that day proved to be among the first in a series of bizarre ordeals that some called the work of poltergeists or spirits, and which would continue through most of the 1870s at the Lynch farm, about thirteen miles west of Menomonie, in St. Croix County’s Cady Township. So notorious and widespread became the reports that newspaper reporters and curious visitors by the hundreds from the United States and abroad descended on the little homestead tucked away in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

  And what exactly did the sightseers and journalists witness?

  A Menomonie newspaper editor, R. J. “Rock” Flint, found “chairs jumping to the ceiling and then falling to the floor with terrible force, crockery and tinware flying across the room like lightning, propelled by some invisible agency. Bullets of wood, pieces of board, axes, handspikes, etc., etc., hurled through the air by unseen hands.”

  Cooking utensils were said to have hurtled across the kitchen, furniture rearranged itself into piles, and bolts of cloth mysteriously cut into patterns . . . or slashed to shreds. On another occasion a pair of shears hovered in midair above a quilt before veering downward to cut it to pieces.

  Whatever—or whoever—was responsible for the events created one of the most sensational “hauntings” ever reported in Wisconsin.

  One visiting member of a Spiritualist church believed as many as seven spirits were loose on the place, while editor Flint wrote in the Dunn County News that some people thought it was the work of “Auld Cloatie,” an archaic term for the devil.

  Flint wrote on September 13, 1873, that the problem was “a conundrum we cannot answer. It may be a spirit, animal magnetism, an ‘odylic force,’ witchcraft, or the devil, for naught we know. We believe the Lynches are honest and are not practicing deception.”

  Were the Lynches honest and guileless victims of some demonic force, or were family members, as some observers suggested, at least partly responsible for the widespread commotion?

  Not much was or is known about the family’s background, so such a question is difficult to answer—and especially now from a distance of nearly a century and a half.

  What is known is that Richard Lynch, his second wife, Elizabeth, and five children—three boys and two girls—moved to Cady Township in May 1871 from Marshall County, Indiana. By August of that year, Richard had built, with the help of several area neighbors, a two-story log house in the midst of what was called the Big Woods, a wilderness tract stretching for miles in all directions, broken only here and there by settlers’ cabins with their few acres of planted crops. The Lynch homestead was in Section 36 of Cady Township.

  Rumors about the first Mrs. Lynch circulated soon after their arrival. Some said she had lost the thumb and forefinger of her right hand in an accident and died from the infection. Another tale had it that she’d been murdered, but details were sketchy.

  When the family arrived in Wisconsin, Elizabeth Lynch was barely out of her twenties, scarcely a decade older than her stepson, twenty-year-old Alfred, who was away working on another neighborhood farm during most of the “troubles,” as it was called at his family’s farm. The children who lived at home included David, age seventeen; Mary, ten; Georgie, seven; and Lucinda, nicknamed Rena, two. Rena was Richard and Elizabeth’s only child together.

  Most contemporary reports about the Lynch haunting assert that all was serene in the relatively spacious cabin for their first six months. Later, however, a Minnesota newspaper reporter would claim Elizabeth Lynch had grown unhappier by the month on the Wisconsin frontier, and that the alleged ghosts or spirits were nothing more than pranks instigated by her and ten-year-old Mary to convince Richard to move back to Indiana.

  Whatever the case may be, the series of intriguing, albeit sporadic, episodes eventually touched the lives of not only the Lynch family but also neighbors, volunteer “investigators” of the paranormal, newspaper reporters, and the simply curious.

  It is not entirely clear at what point the family problems became public, nor is it fully possible to piece together a consistent chronology of what is alleged to have occurred. The public record is sparse and, of course, no one is alive today who remembers the events.

  Apparently, Richard and perhaps Elizabeth first thought it was nothing more than prankish behavior by one or more of the children. All of them denied knowledge of the mischief, but Georgie, who had been caught in a number of typical childish high jinks, was sometimes spanked when household items went missing. For instance, when Mrs. Lynch put down a utensil while preparing a meal, she’d find it had vanished if she became occupied with another chore. Her dresses also began to go missing. Some were found rolled up and stuffed into odd nooks and crannies; others had been cut to shreds, suitable only for the ragbag. Two holes were cut in a feather bed. Dishes and pans disappeared.

  The month of December 1871 seems to be close to the beginning of the Lynch family troubles, although much of what happened before stories began appearing in the newspapers is conjecture and second-hand information.

  One of the few eyewitnesses who left a record was that young hired man, Jim Snodie, who spoke in detail sixty years later to his grandnephew, Dick Owens, about what he termed the “happenings.” Much of what he relates, though quite detailed, is astonishing in retrospect.

  On the same day Snodie was attacked by the broadax, he told Owens, Elizabeth Lynch hosted a quilting bee for several local farmwomen. The women were sitting in a circle admiring their handiwork when a pair of shears, which had been used to cut the cloth squares, leaped into the air and slashed the quilt to pieces.

  As the other women watched in disbelief, Elizabeth screamed, prompting her husband to come running. He got to the room in time to see the cutting shears ripping up the last of the quilt before falling to the floor. Understandably, the women quickly gathered up their belongings and left.

  Snodie said the Lynches were “highly disturbed” as they grimly picked up the pieces of quilt and put them in an old carpetbag.

  Many of those early episodes in late 1871 and early 1872 seemed to center upon cloth, quilts, or clothing.

  Once after Richard Lynch had returned home from town with dress fabric for his wife, she put the material away in the bedroom. Several days later when she went to fetch it, the cloth was gone. They found it in the barn, rolled into a bundle with the cutting shears inside. From the cloth had been cut the skirt and sleeves for a dress to fit ten-year-old Mary.

  A second bolt of fabric also vanished, only to be discovered weeks later rolled inside a hanging wall map Richard had in the house. A perfect bib-type apron had been cut out.

  The family was successful for quite some time in confining knowledge of the events to family, a few hired men such as Jim Snodie, and some neighbors. However, an afternoon of hay cutting in August 1873, some eighteen months after Jim Snodie’s run-in with the broadax, ended in several disturbances so astounding that they eventually attracted the attention of the regional press.

  A neighbor, Frank Duffie, had volunteered to help Richard Lynch cut the hay. Side by side the men worked, swinging their scythes in the sun-washed field at the hem of the forest.

  At about four o’clock, Mrs. Lynch screamed
from the house. The men raced into the cabin in time to see chairs jumping to the ceiling and crashing to the floor, tinware and cooking utensils flying across the kitchen, and then, just through the open doorway, slabs of boards and scraps of iron sailing through the air.

  Lynch and Duffie thought that somehow they could catch the culprit if they stationed themselves at two corners of the house so that together they had a full view of all sides of the house. Mrs. Lynch stood nearby.

  They waited.

  Suddenly, a large pine box leaped into the air and landed ten feet away on the porch. An old horseshoe that had been hanging on a peg in the milk house arced through the air and came to rest beside the box. Instantly, a commotion rocked the empty house. Duffie and the Lynches ran back inside, but everything movable had been piled high into one corner.

  Later that day, an ax that had been rammed into the end of a log struck the side of the cabin’s doorway and bounced several feet into the front room. Mrs. Lynch took it to the milk house, wedged it inside a wooden crate, and then piled wood planks and a bag of salt on top. But no sooner had she returned to the house than the ax reappeared, this time clattering onto the porch. Her husband grabbed it, took it a short distance into the yard, and pushed it inside a hollow log. There it remained—at least for the rest of that day.

  Although a few neighbors had known of some of the earlier incidents and kept the news relatively quiet, gossip about the flying furniture and farm implements spread like wildfire. Area newsmen began showing up on the Lynches’ doorstep to witness the supposed poltergeist’s activities, then vied with one another in sensationally recounting what one reporter called “the most absurd capering of some supernatural agency.”

  Strangers’ imaginations were then sparked by what they read. They converged by foot, horse, or wagon, winding their way along narrow forest trails.

  By one estimate more than three hundred visitors descended on the Lynch family within a six-week period; by another, closer to a thousand.