Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  A third tale has it that a mail carrier and his sled dogs were mysteriously slain at Dog Meadow, below the vantage point from which the light can best be seen. The modern road through the region was built on the Civil War–era military road from Fort Howard in Green Bay to Fort Wilkins at Copper Harbor. Men driving dogsled teams delivered the mail to isolated communities along the old trail. The light, it is said, is the lantern held by the mail messenger looking for the men who murdered him.

  Harold Nowak and Elmer Lenz were skeptical of supernatural explanations when they decided to investigate the phenomenon. They bravely got out of their car and walked toward the light. As they approached, it seemed to disappear down over the next rise but continued to cast a bright glow on the horizon.

  The two men hiked for another half mile, finding nothing that might explain the mystery. As they walked back, the lights reappeared behind them over the rise. When they got back to their car, other observers at the site told them that in the men’s absence they’d seen a large red light above a small white one in the middle of the road a short distance ahead of them. If the reports were accurate, the lights would have been between Lenz and Nowak and their car.

  The men drove on for some distance, parked, and turned off the headlights. The mysterious light reappeared with a smaller one beneath it shining down the middle of the road. A minute later, the larger light vanished, and the smaller light, according to Lenz, “seemed to touch down and burst into three [orbs].” The outer two lights disappeared, but the third remained about two hundred feet away. Nowak snapped on the headlights but the light in the road didn’t move. Minutes later, the men claimed this single light rose in the air four or five feet and vanished.

  Later, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Harry S. Pease described what he saw for the newspaper’s now-defunct Insight Magazine:

  We had chosen the hill above Dog Meadow because it’s easiest to find in the dark. You just drive north from Watersmeet on [ U.S.] 45 about four miles, turn left onto the town road and stop on the high ground. Our eyes and ears sharpened with the passage of the minutes. We could hear cars a long way away on the highway. We could see a dimness . . . as we looked ahead down the road and the power line that ran beside it. Then we saw the light. Right ahead of us, it began as a diffuse glow and then condensed into a hard knot of brilliant white. You had the feeling that maybe it was moving, but you couldn’t be sure you weren’t moving your head instead. It could have been big and distant or small and close. There was no way to tell. The silence remained unbroken.

  The appearance of so-called mystery lights is not an uncommon phenomenon. In states as diverse as North Carolina, Missouri, Texas, and Colorado, dancing, pulsating, or glowing spheres of light have been described by thousands of witnesses. While supernatural explanations are the most unusual reasons given for these lights’ existence—and often involve murdered train engineers or mysterious UFOs—many scientists have also taken an interest in them.

  Some research indicates, for instance, that mystery lights are more likely to occur in earthquake-prone regions, or where unidentified faults in the earth could trigger visible atmospheric lights when escaping gases, such as methane, mix with oxygen. Another scientific explanation holds that the shifting and grinding of rocks deep below the earth’s crust generates electrical charges in the atmosphere. The shifting charges can make any light produced seem to act in an “intelligent” fashion. This explanation has been used to account for the Hornet Spook Light in Missouri, for instance, since it appears near the famous New Madrid, Missouri, fault line.

  However, the Paulding Light may be the result of much more mundane activity. It’s an explanation that has been offered by many observers, including reporter Harry Pease twenty years ago, but one that seems to be disregarded by those who want to believe there is some supernatural or extraterrestrial “intelligence” behind this light—or those who think unsolved mysteries are good for tourism.

  At the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, Micah and Ezra Zeitler met geography professor Don Petzold and told him about the light. He became intrigued by the mystery.

  Petzold recalled:

  I was immediately skeptical. Were these lights seen before cars were around? Before the highway was built? When was the first viewing made? I found out someone said it dated back to Indian times, but of course it wouldn’t be associated with the ghost of a wrecked train because there weren’t any trains then. And who could document that it dates back that long? I was determined at some point to see the light.

  So Petzold and the Zeitlers assembled a set of good topographic maps and set off for the Upper Peninsula to see if they could solve the riddle of the Paulding Light.

  The three men drove to the site one Saturday night in summer. “When we pulled up, there were about ten or fifteen other vehicles there,” Ezra remembered.

  The three men took out a pair of binoculars and walked over to a fence, near where the gravel road ended. Petzold and the Zeitlers noticed that a power line right-of-way extends in the northerly direction from which the light appears. Then they saw the light itself.

  “It was in the right-of-way,” Ezra said. “It did look like it was hovering around. A red light appeared. I can’t remember if I could identify them as moving up and down, but it looked as if they were hovering.”

  Complete darkness had not fallen, so the men could detect the skyline in the distance. It didn’t take them long to realize what they were looking at.

  Car lights.

  “I could tell they were headlights of cars, taillights of cars,” Ezra explained. “After that we kept passing the binoculars among us. Each of us agreed.”

  It was not as easy to accurately pinpoint the distance of the light.

  “We had a gazetteer with us,” Ezra said. “We figured it was probably U.S. 45 that had the traffic on it because there aren’t many other roads around that would have so much traffic.”

  Because the lights were miles off in the distance, the highway itself was not visible.

  “There’s a straight line of sight right down the cut for the power line,” noted Petzold:

  The highway is very straight, with one short exception. We thought the light appearing must have had something to do with cars coming up and over a hill that’s about a mile beyond Paulding, but that’s a distance of about seven miles from the viewpoint. The white light does appear as one large light, but over a seven-mile distance the headlights converge because of refraction and temperature differences in the atmosphere to look like one large light. Then as the cars come down the hill, it gives the appearance of coming closer to you, but then all of a sudden it disappears at one point. But that’s when the light dips below the trees or some lower elevation. As a climatologist, I attribute the movement of the lights to refraction in the lower part of the atmosphere. I think it would really be quite different if the car lights producing this effect would be closer.

  The red lights, Petzold said, are occasional taillights going north up the grade outside Paulding, known locally as Cemetery Hill. “Sometimes you can see the red lights when the white lights are there and approaching and other times you see the red lights alone. And there are two red lights. We looked through the binoculars and you could see the two red lights.”

  To confirm their theory, Petzold and the Zeitlers got back in their car and headed north on U.S. 45.

  “On the other side of Paulding,” Ezra Zeitler said, “the highway goes up a gradual incline on a long, straight hill. Toward the top of the hill I could see in my rearview mirror the headlights of the cars that were stopping at the viewing point. That’s when we really knew that seeing the Paulding Light was not a real mystery.”

  Ezra even flashed an S-O-S with his lights, but didn’t get anything in reply from drivers who had pulled off the gravel road to watch the “mystery” light, which at this point was being produced by three geographers.

  The trio headed back to the viewing area to let people know of their discovery. The
response was less than enthusiastic.

  As Micah Zeitler recalled, “There was a local guy who said Ripley’s Believe It or Not had been there and it’s been on Unsolved Mysteries. I asked him if he’d ever gone seven miles up on U.S. 45, on that long, gradual hill. I told him those are car lights. He didn’t believe me.”

  Petzold said the man was quite adamant. He said he saw them every night. Apparently he visited on a regular basis to check out the lights. Whatever the geographers said would not sway his beliefs.

  Not everyone watching the lights that night was such a true believer. As Micah was telling the local man about their discovery, another observer leaned in to Ezra and asked, “Is that true?” When Ezra confirmed that it was, the tourist turned to his buddy and said, “You owe me ten bucks!”

  For Petzold, an understanding of the Paulding Light was not difficult to arrive at: “I said we can’t possibly be the first people to have looked at a scale map and said, ‘Aha! This is a pretty straight road and there is this gradual incline . . . ‘ It would be neat to stop traffic for a period of time and go up there with headlights and flash a signal.”

  There is an equally simple explanation for the light’s supposed irregularity— uneven traffic flow in one of the more isolated regions of the United States. Micah Zeitler first visited Paulding late on a Thursday night in early spring. “It took fifteen or twenty minutes for the light to come out,” he said. “Now I know why.” There’s not much late-night traffic on any Upper Peninsula highway during the early spring. But it’s a different story on a Saturday night during the height of tourist season.

  Another reason people who have seen the lights may not consider U.S. 45 as part of the answer is that motorists must turn left off the highway, which seems to mean they would be looking west to the lights and into the wilderness. In reality, the gravel road veers around so that one is looking north toward U.S. 45. The long hill north of Paulding is at Maple Hill Cemetery, some seven miles from where the Zeitlers, Petzold, and countless others watch the lights. The cemetery is at 1,315 feet above sea level, while Paulding, south of it, is in a depression. Thus, observers pick up the lights going up or down Cemetery Hill and then lose them as cars descend into Paulding. The village itself emits a soft glow in the sky that may account for some reports that the bright lights are followed by radiance as they disappear from view.

  The rational explanation Petzold offers does not diminish his fascination with the Paulding Light.

  Since his visit, Petzold has tried to find a duplicate convergence of lights over a great distance at other locations. “I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s in my mind fairly constantly to check that out. It’s not often that you can see traffic for seven miles.”

  Petzold found the light “mesmerizing,” even during a second visit later on:

  It was right at the point of sunset and we were able to see it, but not as distinctly because there was still some daylight. It was also a rainy day. If you stare at [the light], you can imagine that, well, here comes the train and there’s the conductor with his red lantern trying to flag it down before it crashes again. You can believe that if you want. Because that’s exactly what you see . . . in a sense.

  Rational explanations, however, will not deter those who prefer to believe otherwise. Even the government has gotten in on the act by erecting a sign on U.S. 45 giving the “history” of the Paulding Light. Tourism officials have found the light to be good for local businesses. On a warm weekend summer night it is not unusual for several dozen people, some sitting in lawn chairs, digital video cameras at the ready, to watch the lights dancing in the distance.

  Ezra Zeitler takes friends to see the light. “If they want to go there, I’ll take them. I won’t tell them anything. I want to see their reaction.”

  Micah Zeitler noted that a campground is near the best viewing point. He said the camp was probably built because someone “saw the light.”

  But another observer pointed out that if one turns west on the county road before the mystery light, he passes another geographic landmark: Sucker Lake.

  Do Not Disturb

  Old Teddy King grunted and sweated as he dug into the Knapp cemetery plot that held his mother’s coffin. With each swing of his shovel, Teddy slowly cleared away nearly thirty years of dirt and stone so that he could move his mother’s remains to another graveyard nearby.

  It was late August 1936. St. Croix County officials had ordered the graves moved: a new road was going to be built and the county needed the cemetery as part of the right-of-way. Most of the remains had been transferred earlier in the month. Mrs. King was the last one to leave.

  The old man wrestled the moldy casket into a makeshift wheelbarrow and set off down the country road.

  Watching all this was one Lloyd Owens, a young man who was working that summer at the Al Larson farm, just crossways from the cemetery. Curiosity is a compelling affliction of the young. That’s what persuaded Lloyd to cross the road to Mrs. King’s empty grave. He shivered as he looked down into the damp hole. As he poked around in the fresh dirt with the toe of his boot, something shiny caught his eye. Lloyd picked it up, cleaned it off, and held it up to the fading sunlight. It was a pink glass handle.

  Maybe it came off Mrs. King’s coffin, he thought. I’ll just give it to Teddy next time I see him in town.

  He stuffed the object in the pocket of his bib overalls and trotted back to the Larson house and on up to his room, where he put the handle on the top of his dresser.

  Lloyd didn’t sleep well that night. Although houses were often sweltering during those summers before air-conditioning, his room seemed cool, yet twice he found that he had kicked his sheets and bedspread to the floor.

  Early the next morning, the boy got up quickly, dressed, and was about to leave the room when the dim morning light struck something on the floor. The pink glass handle was leaning upright against the bedroom door. He carefully picked it up, put it back on the dresser, and hurried out the door without so much as a backward glance.

  The day passed, evening chores were completed, and Lloyd again climbed those stairs to his room, this time a little more slowly than usual. He couldn’t get that odd morning incident out of his head.

  Lloyd pushed the door open but, as it moved, something scraped across the floor. He struck a match and lit the carbide lamp on the wall just inside the doorway. The pink glass handle again lay on the floor, tight against the bottom of the door.

  Lloyd snatched up the handle and again put it back on the dresser, just where he was certain he had left it that morning. A cold breeze blew through the room. The carbide lamp flickered. Lloyd did not close his eyes that night.

  Just after dawn, Lloyd packed his small suitcase and left the Larson farm for his own home a few miles away.

  He asked his older brother, Dick Owens, if he would take his place for a couple of days. He said he was very tired from the heavy work schedule and needed a break.

  Dick was only too happy to oblige. Several times in the past, he had helped out at the Larsons’, and even replaced his brother when the younger boy had wanted some time off. In those Depression years good jobs were hard to come by, and Al Larson was good to his hired help and his wife served wonderful meals. Lloyd did not tell his brother anything more than that he needed some “rest.”

  Dick moved into Lloyd’s room that same morning. But he nearly stepped on something in the doorway. He bent down to pick it up—a small pink glass handle. Dick put it on the dresser and unpacked his clothes. A light breeze blew across his neck.

  A full day of farm chores nearly erased Dick’s memory of the morning’s incident. By nightfall he was more than ready for a good night’s sleep.

  As he lit the carbide lamp, a sudden breeze blew through the window on the far side of his bed. It was strong enough to make the gas flame flicker. In the semi-darkness he stepped around the bed to close the window. It wasn’t open.

  The gas flame steadied and the coolness subsided. Dick relaxed.r />
  But that’s when he noticed the glass handle in the doorway. He must have stepped over it when he came in the room.

  Dick again picked up the handle and put it back on top of the dresser. He climbed into bed and fell asleep, but awoke only a few hours later with a chill. He reached for the blanket but it wasn’t there. He jumped out of bed and found his covers in a heap on the floor. He flung the covers back on the bed, jumped in and pulled them over his head.

  He half-dozed for the rest of the night. Several times Dick woke up feeling an iciness swirling around him. His rising time of five o’clock did not come soon enough. But as he swung his feet out of bed, his right foot landed on the glass handle. It had again landed on the floor. He tossed it back onto the dresser and rushed out the door. Milking cows never seemed such a pleasant chore as it did on that morning. Dick Owens said he was the most frightened teenager in the entire county at that moment.

  But it would be another two days—and nights—before Lloyd returned to resume his job. It was then that he explained to his brother the origin of the glass handle. Dick in turn told Lloyd about his own troubling nights. Lloyd apologized for keeping it all a secret, but that did little to relieve his brother’s anxiety.

  That’s when the boys decided the wisest course of action was to return the glass handle to the graveyard. Lloyd ran up the staircase but stopped short at the top. Now the glass handle was on the floor outside his open bedroom door. He grabbed it and with his brother ran to the cemetery, stopped just inside the gate, and then pitched the casket handle as close as he could to Mrs. King’s now-empty grave. They hightailed it back to the Larson farm, where Dick packed his clothes, wished his brother luck, and bolted for home.

  Lloyd told his older brother he had no further troubles in that bedroom. Dick wasn’t curious enough to go back and find out if he was telling the truth.