Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  A Flame in the Window

  Joan Lecher was afraid of the dark. She slept with the lights burning. But when Joan moved her family into a house she said was haunted, for the first time in her life she wasn’t fearful.

  Joan was content and at ease in that tall, white house on the north side of Wisconsin Rapids. Built before the Civil War, it is a sturdy, comfortable dwelling, spacious enough even for Joan’s family of six children.

  It was Christmas, Joan remembers, when the idea first presented itself that another boarder shared her house. Joan and her former husband were sitting on the living room couch when she caught sight of a shadow passing by. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it go into the kitchen. Five minutes later a second shadow seemed to flit by. Her husband saw it, too. The couple got up and walked into the kitchen and then looked in the combination den and laundry room behind the kitchen. They checked the doors and windows: closed and locked. They had no idea what they had seen.

  A few days later, Joan’s daughter, Kathy, stood in the kitchen combing her hair in front of a large, old-fashioned mirror. An elderly man’s face appeared as a reflection in the glass from just behind her shoulder, staring intently at her. She spun around but found herself quite alone in the room.

  During that same holiday period, a young girl temporarily living with the Lechers was staying in a small bedroom off the kitchen. She was asleep one night when she awoke with a start. An old man stood in the doorway watching her. It was no one she had seen before. Too frightened to scream, she pulled the covers up over her face and hoped he’d go away. He did.

  Later, when the two girls compared notes, they discovered striking similarities between the two figures.

  In an attempt to discover the identity of the apparition, the Lecher children and several friends gathered around the kitchen table for a séance. Someone asked the “ghost,” if present, to manifest itself in some way. A coffee cup slowly rose in the air. The amateur psychics scrambled from the room.

  On another night, the intrepid gang gathered again. Nothing happened, though several of the youngsters claimed to have heard sounds like the sawing of wood coming from the attic. Joan had begun remodeling the old house. She thinks perhaps the ghost—whoever it was—might have been helping, although no evidence of its handiwork was ever found.

  Sometimes months or years would pass by without any additional evidence of a haunting. Then, suddenly, there would be a new reminder that the family was not alone. That’s what happened to Joan’s son, Lance, one night as he babysat his younger brother. He heard distinct footsteps upstairs; someone was striding back and forth in the hallway and through the bedrooms. Lance was certain that someone, somehow, had broken into the house. When his older brother, Kim, arrived home shortly thereafter, he went upstairs to investigate. No one was there and nothing had been disturbed. Little Joe had slept downstairs all through the excitement.

  The footsteps persisted. Joan heard them, too. On at least one occasion, the footsteps came from a room in which several mattresses covered the floorboards.

  “Somebody’s here keeping an eye on me,” Joan remembers thinking, adding that the footfalls became such a routine in the house she no longer investigated the noises. She decided the spirit was friendly and was taking care of her. One winter’s evening, Joan sat in an archway between the living room and the kitchen. She faced the tall living room windows that looked out upon the street. In the bottom left-hand corner of one window a small flame suddenly appeared; it was a bright, single image that glowed for several seconds. The flame was pure white.

  Joan particularly sensed the mysterious resident when she was troubled. Her children took to calling the ghost H. B., the initials of a previous owner of the house, an old bachelor who had been found dead in bed, apparently of a heart attack. Yet Joan had first seen two shadows. H. B. had taken care of his invalid mother in the house before she entered a nursing home.

  For her part, Joan Lecher believes her own senses and those of her children, yet she can offer no rational explanation. She is certain that whoever or whatever watched over her and her family was there for protection against the vagaries of life.

  There Goes Mamie!

  Grandmothers come in many shapes, sizes, and dispositions. But they all have one thing in common—grandmothers want to be remembered by their families. One way in which they can be certain they’re not forgotten is by coming back in the afterlife to check up on their loved ones.

  Grandma Mamie did that.

  On a crisp fall night some years ago, Pat Orcutt, of Whiting, Wisconsin, curled up in bed with a good novel. At about ten o’clock she happened to glance up from the pages. Her grandmother was standing beside the bed. There would have been nothing odd about that, except that Grandma Mamie had been dead for many, many years and was buried in Elmira, New York.

  Oddly enough, Pat recognized her immediately even though the apparition was that of a young woman dressed in turn-of-the-century attire. A “feeling of warmth and benevolence” filled the room as the ghost smiled down at Pat and nodded. Pat called out to her husband, but the ghost vanished before he came into the bedroom. He contended that she had been dreaming. She insisted she had not. Suddenly all the window shades in the room snapped up noisily.

  “Well, there goes Mamie,” her husband said with a chuckle, remembering that his wife’s grandmother had been a bit mischievous with a colorful personality. Perhaps Pat had not been dreaming.

  Pat believes her grandmother materialized at that moment to “see” her first great-grandson, Pat’s baby, who had been born recently. An earlier miscarriage had caused her grandmother deep concern. She herself had cared for Pat as an infant and Mamie remained close to Pat’s family through the years.

  Grandma Mamie’s ghost returned again several years later when the Orcutts lived in Wisconsin Rapids. Pat had painstakingly transformed a den wall into a sort of family museum, with old wedding licenses and ancestors’ portraits in an assortment of frames. One day Pat found a frame—containing pictures of Mamie, her husband, and Pat’s other grandparents—face down on the floor. The glass was not broken; the hanger was still attached to the plaster wall.

  Pat re-hung the picture but several days later found it again face down on the floor. This time the hook had come out of the wall. She found a sturdier hanger and put the picture back up.

  But the picture and its hanger continued to fall. Sometimes it was on the floor early in the morning; at other times, Pat found it there after coming home from shopping.

  Pat’s husband thought the picture either fell because of some vibrations or that one of the family’s cats knocked it down. Yet that picture was the only one of the many wall hangings disturbed.

  One of the Orcutt sons had a different opinion.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he suggested to his mother that Grandma Mamie had come back because she didn’t like being in the same frame as her in-laws! For a time the family joked about that possibility.

  When Pat’s parents came to visit, she told them about the falling picture.

  Her mother offered another explanation.

  In her later years, perhaps due to dementia, Grandma Mamie set out to destroy all photographs of herself. She had thrown away every photograph that she could find, and even cut her own image out of all the group pictures in the family albums. Pat had never known about that.

  Pat had no idea whether Grandma Mamie really was continuing her crusade to erase photographic proof of her existence even after death. Perhaps she was and perhaps she eventually gave up. Grandma Mamie was not heard from again.

  Uncle Otto

  Aghost can make itself known in a number of ways. The poltergeist, or “noisy ghost” to translate from the original German, allows its presence to be known through clamorous behavior—flying dishes, overturned furniture, clattering footfalls on the stairway.

  The origin of the poltergeist can be similar to that of most supernatural beings. When a person dies, as many experts speculate, an im
print much like that of a photographic negative is left behind. That imprint may take on physical properties and become a force of its own. If that negative behavior is powerful enough, the poltergeist, or in some cases an apparition, manifests itself to onlookers. Thus, we might find ghosts haunting homes to which they had a strong emotional or physical attachment during life.

  The ghost of Otto Wolf * in Prescott, Wisconsin, was just that sort of poltergeist. In life, Otto had been a kindly man, blind since childhood. He lived in a rambling two-story house on Walnut Street with his brother and sister-in-law, Carl and Marian Wolf, and their son, George.

  Uncle Otto, as he was called by one and all, including his own brother, had attended college and traveled the world, but in his later years his blindness and frail health prevented him from venturing far from his modest room on the second floor of the house. His favorite pastime was to sit in an old wooden rocker as he quietly sang the German folk ballads he’d learned as a child.

  Carl and Marian Wolf bought the house shortly after they’d married. Carl was a businessman and local politician. His wife worked as a registered nurse at the local hospital. Otto moved in with his brother two years later and remained with the family until his death.

  After Otto Wolf passed away, the first in a series of bizarre events convinced the Wolfs that the kindly old man’s ghost had returned to the family he had loved so much in life.

  George Wolf was a young adult in that summer when Uncle Otto first let his presence be known. Late one humid August night, as George lay awake listening to the usual symphony of tree frogs and crickets coming through his open bedroom window, the nightly chorus was joined by a new sound. He listened intently. What he heard made the small hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Slippered feet scuffed back and forth over the creaking floorboards of Otto’s old room directly next to George’s. He had gotten used to the old man’s nocturnal pacing when sleep eluded him. The shuffling pace he heard now was slow and steady just as it had always been.

  George’s curiosity got the best of him. He crept down to his uncle’s old room. He paused briefly, swallowed hard, and opened the door. He need not have worried: nothing disturbed the gloomy quiet.

  Maybe he imagined the entire episode, he thought. At breakfast the next morning, Marian Wolf scolded her son for walking around in Uncle Otto’s room! George protested his innocence and insisted it wasn’t his doing. At least he knew now that he hadn’t imagined the whole episode.

  Nearly every night for days on end the footfalls came and went. George knew that somehow the old man was still in the house. Even though Marian had heard the footsteps, she still thought George was pulling some sort of prank. His parents scoffed at the idea of a ghost, but later events would convince them otherwise.

  Surprisingly, George was not at all upset with the nocturnal ramblings. His uncle had been a kind and gentle soul during life, so he reckoned that the ghost, if indeed it was one, meant no harm to the family.

  Nothing in Uncle Otto’s room had been disturbed or changed since his death, including the old cane-bottomed rocker that had been his favorite resting spot. A few months after the pacing was first heard, George was walking down the hallway and noticed the door to his uncle’s room was ajar. To his bewilderment the rocker was moving slowly as if someone had just gotten up. For many nights thereafter George heard the pacing during the night, followed by the soft creaking of the rocker. And each time he looked in the room, the rocker would be slowly swaying back and forth, back and forth.

  George thought perhaps an errant squirrel or mouse, or one of the family’s cats, had jumped off the rocker but escaped detection. He decided to play detective by scattering white flour on the floor around the rocker, looking for small, telltale footprints. His theory collapsed, however, when he rushed into the room after hearing the familiar creak but found no signs of beast—or ghost—in the carpet of flour.

  There are many cases of poltergeist activity in a home beset by crises such as an emotional trauma or sudden tragedy. The Wolf family soon discovered that Uncle Otto’s appearance might have been a harbinger of sorrow.

  Carl Wolf developed the arteriosclerosis and diabetes that would cause his death at an early age. Within only a few years of Otto’s death, his cherished family was experiencing hard times as a result of the financial drain of a serious illness. When Marian Wolf subsequently developed rheumatoid arthritis and thus the family faced an even deeper crisis, the poltergeist activity increased.

  A winter soon thereafter was particularly trying for the family financially, medically . . . and in the more erratic behavior of their nocturnal visitor. The nightly walks and the swaying rocker had become a part of the family’s daily routine. Marian and George Wolf had long ago accepted the unnatural source of the activity.

  As George looked back on the events of that time, he believed Uncle Otto was trying to register his concern over the family’s unhappiness. He knew the family was in trouble.

  George was out of college and looking for his first job when he noticed that Otto’s activities were increasing in intensity and duration. The footfalls could be clearly heard at all times of the day and night, quite unlike earlier years. Even Carl Wolf, nearly an invalid by this time and the last one to accept the presence of a ghost, admitted to his son that he often heard the footfalls when he shaved in a bathroom next to the haunted bedroom.

  Then early one morning George was shaken out of bed by what sounded like a giant handball being batted against the wall in Uncle Otto’s room. His parents also heard it. Together they ran into the bedroom but as usual found nothing. Up until that time, the ghost had been almost gentle in his behavior, but this turn of events put the Wolfs somewhat on edge.

  The following December the family’s financial plight worsened. They were forced into bankruptcy and had to sell the house and many furnishings to pay debts. Uncle Otto’s ghost was not pleased. The disturbances grew in severity, coming now from his old room and minutes later from other parts of the house.

  Within a month, as the family prepared to move to a smaller house, Uncle Otto tried to convince them otherwise in a most spectacular way. The family returned home one evening to find every light on, with light even streaming through the window of a storage room from which all the electrical fixtures had been removed.

  George quickly unlocked the front door and raced up the staircase. He opened the door to Uncle Otto’s room. It was dark.

  In that final winter, and frequently before that time, the Wolfs’ Siamese cats acted strangely when they were anywhere on the second floor. One cat had even been accidentally locked in Uncle Otto’s bedroom overnight. The next morning, Marian Wolf found the cat crouched in the middle of the room with its fur standing on end. With a screech, it raced out of the door and never again ventured up the staircase.

  Two cold spots in the house also mystified the Wolfs. One was in Uncle Otto’s room and the other on a rear stairway. Passing through them, George remembered, was like walking into a crypt.

  George and his mother said that in early spring, a few weeks before the family moved out, they witnessed the most terrifying incident in their eight years of living with a ghost.

  George was in his room reading. Midnight neared. The house, and most particularly Otto’s bedroom, had been unusually quiet. Suddenly the roar of splintering wood shattered the stillness. George launched himself out of his chair and threw open his bedroom door. The solid oak door to the haunted bedroom was being pulled slowly from its hinges. George saw no one near it. Marian Wolf arrived at the top of the staircase in time to see the door being tossed into the middle of the hallway. Two large hinges hung limply from the shattered frame.

  “My God! What’s gone wrong?” George screamed.

  His mother didn’t answer.

  Mother and son knew that nothing human could have pulled that door from its frame.

  The next day George moved into a vacant downstairs bedroom.

  Despite the terror of that night, no one
in the family had ever been physically harmed or even touched by the ghost. That changed a few days after the door was torn away and shortly before the family moved away.

  George awoke to a soft, gentle stroking of his face. It was the caress of a human hand on his cheek, reassuring in its touch. Then it was gone. In the dim light, he saw one of the cats sitting in an old chair, its back arched rigid. Its eyes followed the progress of someone moving slowly across the room.

  George Wolf knew then that Uncle Otto was apologizing for his outlandish behavior. And saying good-bye.

  Don’t Mess with Elmer

  In the hardscrabble Depression years of the 1930s, when a person’s economic security was often determined by luck or resourcefulness, tempers sometimes flared over small injustices, whether real or imagined. At least that’s how it was in northern Wisconsin between bachelor farmer Roy Nelson* of rural Cumberland and his neighbor Elmer Pederson*.

  The men shared a hay crop on some jointly rented acreage. One day the men had an argument over the arrangement. No one today remembers what caused the disagreement, only that it led to a perplexing series of events between the two men.

  Soon after the argument, Roy began complaining about a “ghost” on his property—a prankish sprite that left barn doors wide open day and night, filled feed troughs to overflowing with water, and pounded on the walls of Nelson’s house all night long.

  Roy named Elmer Pederson as the culprit. Neighbors were anxious to preserve harmony in the community. They didn’t dare take sides. That and the pair’s naturally ornery disposition led many to fear a lawsuit for slander should either one be publicly criticized. Secretly, they attributed Roy’s wild tales to the eccentricities of living alone too long.

  But the neutrality didn’t last long. When the disturbances at Roy’s farm continued, the neighbors got involved. After all, they reasoned, Roy was basically a good man always ready to welcome a visitor with a hot cup of coffee. He kept his Bible open on the kitchen table and paid his help well.