Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  Most of the Big Woods were cleared long ago. A county road crosses about where the Lynch house once stood. Lush farm fields stretch to the horizon, while silos dwarf the scattered farmhouses. The once-thriving village of Hatchville is a forgotten memory. There is little to remind the visitor of those years when this little corner of Wisconsin drew international attention to events that still tantalize and mystify.

  Confirmation

  All the young teen was thinking about was that he had to go to the bathroom. He jumped out of bed and headed toward his bedroom door. But the boy never made it to the bathroom. Instead, he got the shock of his life.

  An apparition hovered in the hallway less than ten feet away from the doorway where he had stopped cold in his tracks.

  The transparent object hovered in the air a couple of feet off the ground. He could see that it had a head with some hair, perhaps even a pair of glasses. The face itself was featureless. As much as he could see led him to believe it was female. It had, he said, a maternal bliss, a kindness about it.

  The pale, billowing mass seemed to undulate as if a gentle breeze swept down the hallway. There were no discernible legs or feet. It filled the space between the two walls.

  “Where the arms would be there was a bit of a bulge, like its arms were crossed or it was holding flowers or something. But I couldn’t see its arms. It seemed to be turned in my direction, looking at me. I didn’t sense any hostility. It didn’t move toward me or away from me, it just stayed where it was,” the boy, now an adult, remembers.

  The boy could not think of what to do. What he wanted to do, of course, was get to the bathroom, but to do that he needed to get past this thing. The boy really, really did not want to go down there.

  “I remember seeing moonlight coming in from one side of the hallway, and I remember wondering if that could be moonlight bouncing off the mirror at the end of the hallway and coming back and creating a reflection. But I looked at it and decided that no, that was not possible. It couldn’t be a reflection off the mirror because it wouldn’t look like that. That’s when I decided I’d have to stay in the bedroom for the night. I dropped to the floor, stretched my arm out, and closed the door. I went back to bed and stayed there.”

  Suddenly a young boy’s physiological needs were of far less urgency than trying to figure out what in heaven’s name loitered in the hallway just beyond his now firmly closed bedroom door.

  It wouldn’t be until much, much later that an answer came. Long after he’d left that house in which he grew up, long after he had left the town of his youth and gone on to make his way in the world—it would only be then, decades later, that he would realize the figure he saw on that night had probably been his own grandmother comforting him, saying good-bye to him.

  The young boy’s name is Tom Blair* and the small Wisconsin community in which he grew up and where his parents still live in that split-level house provided him with a fairly typical childhood. He went to public schools and then attended UW–Madison, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a double major in German and geography.

  That youthful encounter with what some would dismiss as a figment of teenage imagination or a particularly disturbing dream might be expected to be forgotten or even laughed at as young Tom entered adulthood and put away the fantasies and nightmares of childhood. That would be the natural reaction to a story like this, but Tom Blair is no ordinary witness to ghostly encounters, nor did he ever forget what he saw on that night so long ago.

  Dr. Tom Blair is a scientist—specifically, a soil biochemist, with a master’s degree in geography and a PhD in soil science from the University of California. His curriculum vitae lists nineteen refereed journal articles, seventeen book chapters and published proceedings, and five manuscripts either submitted for publication or in preparation.

  He worked for eight years as a consultant and visiting scientist for an international rice research institute in the Philippines before taking his current position in Iowa as a soil scientist for the federal government. Blair’s formal education and fidelity to the scientific method make him a particularly credible observer of matters supernatural. But that doesn’t mean he entirely understands, even now, his experience of three decades ago. It is an event that will stay with him for the rest of his days.

  “I didn’t tell anybody about this,” he said of that floating figure in the familiar hallway of his comfortable home. “Being a bit of a scientist even then, I suppose, I knew I couldn’t explain it. I wasn’t sure what it was. And of course you don’t want to be laughed at for seeing something that other people wouldn’t understand. So I filed the experience away, sort of put it under my ‘not explained’ file hoping that someday I would be able to explain it first to my own satisfaction, and then to other people.”

  He knew full well that he had not imagined the entire incident, and yet didn’t know what it was he had seen.

  “When I woke up in the middle of the night, I wasn’t having bad dreams. Nor had I ever had any ghostly experiences; I hadn’t seen a scary movie the night before. I just needed to get to the bathroom. That’s all I was thinking about.”

  What he eventually yearned for, Blair said, was some outside corroboration that this sort of vision was possible. Even though he trusted his own eyesight, the doubter in him kept pecking away at his subconscious.

  “I needed confirmation and replication before I would believe it myself. And I didn’t want to discuss it unless I had adequate confidence in it,” he noted.

  Blair didn’t know that the vaporous woman in white would linger in his mind’s “unexplained file” for so long, tugging at the back of his mind, and that it wouldn’t be until he took a research position on the other side of the globe that he found that what he saw in a small Wisconsin town was remarkably similar to experiences people had in the Philippines and throughout Asia.

  In Asia, she is known as the white lady, and stories of her appearances, according to Blair, are amazingly similar to what he saw: billowing figures with absent or indistinct arms and legs who dwell within a limited geographic area.

  “Shortly after I moved to the Philippines, I began meeting people who would tell me stories about the white ladies they encountered. I asked what these ladies looked like and my friends gave me the exact same vision, the same description—of something floating off the ground, a white, transparent being, usually a female.”

  They had heads but no distinct faces. The more Blair heard, the more he thought they were describing the same being, the same type of experience he had years before.

  Blair told the story of a Filipina friend who attended a school in which a stairwell was reputedly haunted. Several teachers were said to have died there. Blair’s friend was running up those stairs one morning when she saw a white lady hovering near a landing.

  “As in my case,” he said, “the white lady there seemed to be looking at my friend with a benevolent air, maybe ‘kind’ is the right word. Like an older lady would have for a younger child.”

  The idea of a warm, caring, motherly being keeping watch over a family or a place she loved also helped Blair identify who his “own” white lady might have been:

  I hadn’t thought about that [the identify of the ghost] for many years, but then in the last couple of years I began to . . . I realized that the figure matched quite closely my grandmother. She was a relatively large lady and this figure I saw in the hallway was not a thin being at all. My memories of my grandmother are quite distant, but she had hair like the figure did and she wore glasses. My grandmother died when I would have been about twelve years old.

  I don’t really remember her well. My memories of her are as an older lady, but I hear from older relatives that she was a very kind human being, very people oriented, very devoted to her family. My mother is the same way; her life really is her children.

  While he was not unusually close to his grandmother, Blair said his family was quite close, usually spending any holidays with his mother�
��s family rather than his father’s. His grandmother spent her final years in a nursing home.

  If indeed Tom Blair did see the ghost of his grandmother, why was he chosen for that singular experience and not his own mother or one of his siblings?

  “I don’t know,” he conceded. “My mother was the baby of her family. I think she was quite close to my grandmother. It could have been that [my grandmother] was trying to get close to my mother, not necessarily to me, and I just happened to be there at the time.”

  But Blair believes it may be something more, something almost intangible— his willingness to look at the world in new and different ways:

  Throughout my life I’ve had, every once in a while, a very brief experience that I think could be related to my mind being relatively active. Suddenly thinking of somebody while I’m walking down the street, for instance, and then a few seconds later that person drives past and honks his horn at me. I talk to anyone, I listen to anybody’s opinion, and I don’t assume anyone is wrong until they’re proven wrong. So I guess I might have been a receptive audience for this vision on this occasion.

  He has never told his parents about the apparition, although he related the story to his brother and sister. Both of his siblings said they had not had any similar sorts of experiences, yet they were quite accepting of their brother’s experience.

  While he worked for eight years in the Philippines, Tom Blair traveled widely throughout Asia and came to some conclusions about the appearance of ghosts or apparitions in the United States and other cultures:

  The countries I’ve lived in and traveled through are slower than our culture is. We’re by far the fastest paced country I’ve ever lived in. We don’t have time to slow down and open ourselves up, I would say. The thoughts of people in Asian culture are more toward people, their families, their relatives, their neighbors, whereas we spend more of our time focusing on work, [on] production, on buying things that we think we need for our lifestyles. We’re more work- and progress-oriented. This would just be a guess, but maybe these [spirits] are more likely to appear to people who are more . . . receptive . . . you might say. These things do appear in our country, there are reports of them, but perhaps they are just not as common.

  Blair cannot remember the precise date of his youthful ghostly encounter and thus doesn’t know if his grandmother had passed on by then. That does not necessarily rule her out as the ghostly figure.

  Blair cites Asian examples of appearances by people miles away from where they live. The spirits looks like the real people, let themselves be seen by people they know, and perhaps even speak; but usually they are seen far from where they would normally be expected. Perhaps the person is from a different part of one’s life, childhood for instance, or lives in a different country or continent.

  “If you see them in passing that’s a sign that they are going to die soon,” Blair said of this type of apparition. “Two Nepalese friends told me in separate conversations that that’s quite well-known in Nepal, that if you see somebody out of place, that means they’re going to die soon.”

  A close Filipina friend told Blair an unsettling personal experience of this very sort. Blair recalled:

  On the same day her brother died he appeared to a very close friend on the street in a different city. He also appeared to his aunt in the town where their family lived. The aunt reportedly saw him walking down the street. He looked completely normal. They even stopped and talked. My friend’s brother told his aunt he was staying with his grandmother. It was a normal conversation. Then later that day, the aunt went to the grandmother’s house to look for that young man. The grandmother said he wasn’t staying there and then they got into a big argument. My friend then arrived on the bus to tell her aunt and her grandmother that her brother had died earlier that day in another city.

  Tom Blair the scientist doesn’t hesitate if he is called upon to defend his role looking into paranormal experiences skeptics say are impossible:

  One has to recognize what we understand and what we don’t understand. Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That’s a common mistake even among scientists who say that if you can’t prove something conclusively then your whole idea is wrong. That’s simply not true.

  Blair said that we must recognize the limits of technology, the limits of our understanding:

  Something happened, I saw it, I know it happened, and if I can’t explain it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That means we need to learn more, that there are parts of our universe we may never understand. These beings we see, ghosts, fit into the idea that we have spirits inside of ourselves, that we have a soul. When you die, your soul may linger on and perhaps that becomes what we call a ghost. I think when you consider the fact that so many countries around the world with so many religions all report ghosts that [the soul] may be part of us. When you’re born you have a spirit inside of you. Who knows where it comes from or what it is or what happens to it after you die, but given the fact that these same experiences happen to people all around the world means that it’s a part of us.

  The Paulding Light Mystery

  Ezra Zeitler first heard about the Paulding Light when he was a high school student in Minocqua.

  “On Monday mornings students would come back and say they had seen the Paulding Light over the weekend and it was real scary and mysterious,” Zeitler recalled.

  Despite the captivating stories, he didn’t make the 120-mile round trip to the Paulding area, just over the Wisconsin border in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for several years.

  Ezra’s younger brother, Micah Zeitler, heard similar stories. He eventually made the trip because his friends “guaranteed” him that he would see the mystery light. He was impressed with what he saw and heard, including that the spirit of a dead trainman produced the light.

  “I told everyone I’d seen a ghost.”

  Micah and Ezra, however, eventually went one step further once they got to college in River Falls. They shared the tale of the Paulding Light with their geography professor. The three of them set off to uncover the truth about the light. Their results may once and for all reveal the origins of this particular mystery light, at least for those willing to accept something less than a paranormal explanation.

  The Zeitler brothers certainly are not alone in their interest in what has alternately been called the Paulding Light, the Watersmeet Light, the Dog Meadow Light, or, simply, the Mystery Light. For decades, thousands of visitors have made the nightly trek north out of Eagle River, Wisconsin, on U.S. 45, through Watersmeet, Michigan, to a point about a dozen miles from the Wisconsin state line.

  The visitor turns off on an old gravel road about four miles north of Watersmeet, drives up the hill, and parks. If it’s a “good” night, a dim, glowing orb of white light will appear in the far distance. The light may vanish for a period of time, only to reappear moments later. Sometimes other lights appear with it. During winter and early spring, the light may appear only infrequently.

  Theories abound as to what causes the light. Some believe it must be supernatural. To these folks, the light glows from the lantern of a long-dead trainman, or maybe a slain dogsled musher. Some have even attributed it to passing UFOs draining energy from some nearby power lines.

  More earth-bound observers maintain the light might be produced by methane gas escaping from a fissure in the earth. Others say the phenomenon is nothing more than the reflection of lights from boats on Lake Superior or cars on a distant highway.

  Tourism officials quickly recognized the allure of the light. One vacation brochure calls it the Watersmeet Mystery Light and includes it in the same sentence as a local trout hatchery. Another brochure listing “Things to Do” in the Watersmeet region gives the phenomenon its own paragraph:

  The “Light” appears almost every night after dark on a lonely old gravel road and has defied explanation for years. It appears to arise from the horizon, glows like a beacon, splits, changes color
and mysteriously disappears as quickly as it came.

  But how did the legend of the Paulding Light come to be, and what will one see in that pocket of wilderness?

  Despite the insistence of some locals—and tourism promoters—the “mystery” of the light is usually traced no farther back than the mid-1960s, when a carload of teenagers stopped one clear evening on a gravel road near the swampy area known as Dog Meadow. Suddenly, the teens claimed, brightness filled the car’s interior and lit the power lines parallel to the road. They were so frightened they fled back to town and reportedly told the sheriff what they had seen.

  Another of the earliest documented sightings came from two Wisconsin men, Harold Nowak and Elmer Lenz, who told a newspaper reporter that they parked their car on the gravel road and the light appeared in the distance—a bright spotlight shining directly at them. The light moved closer, backed away, and even appeared at an angle from time to time. Lenz grew up near a rail yard and he said the light looked just like a locomotive headlamp.

  The men said a smaller light appeared below and slightly to the right of the large, white light. “The two, at times, seemed to move together, then part, one or the other disappearing, then showing again,” Lenz recalled. The smaller light was red, though they claim to have also seen a green light.

  Their description fit with one of the legends of the origin of the Paulding Light, that one night in the early twentieth century a railroad switchman with lantern in hand was crushed to death between two rail cars while attempting to signal the train’s engineers. Another account holds that a trainman was murdered along the old railroad grade where the light appears.