Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  The farm reverted to Mrs. Jacob Hahn of Delafield, Wisconsin, one of the three surviving sisters. Over the next decades a cloud of disaster hung over those who lived in the great old stone farmhouse.

  Mrs. Hahn sold the farm in late 1918 to H. S. Kuhtz. The Kuhtz family built a milk house and enlarged the barn. But Kuhtz went bankrupt in 1927 and Mrs. Hahn took the farm back.

  From 1927 until 1929, a young couple whose names have been lost to history rented the house. They too suffered the Hille curse. Two of their children died of crib death.

  After 1929 no one lived on the farm for nearly twenty years, but that didn’t prevent the curse from working its evil. In 1932 a man named Pratt was killed while dynamiting stone in a farm pasture.

  On a clear, bright, beautiful morning in September of 1948, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Ransome first saw the bittersweet sight of the stone house standing abandoned amid weeds as they drove slowly down River Road. The Ransomes owned several health spas in the Chicago area and were looking for property on which they might retire someday. As Dorothy Ransome gazed at the house sitting in a grove of thirteen massive oak trees, she knew it was the house for her family. The couple walked around the yard and peered into the dimly lit rooms through dust-encrusted windows. Mrs. Ransome was determined to find the owner. Incredibly, the house was still in the possession of Mrs. Jacob Hahn, the last surviving Hille sister. The octogenarian agreed to sell the house only after the Ransomes promised to return the home to its original splendor.

  Various architects said it would be extraordinarily expensive to restore the house, but Dorothy Ransome insisted that it be saved since she had promised Mrs. Hahn to do so.

  The roof was removed and the interior of the house gutted and rebuilt. The only part of the house to remain intact was the eighteen-inch-thick fieldstone walls. The Ransomes lavished vast sums on the house’s rebirth. Stained glass from an old funeral home was fitted into several windows; a marble fireplace, which has been the centerpiece of a New Orleans mansion, went into the living room. Crystal chandeliers from the old McCormick mansion in Chicago were wired into the dining room and parlor. At last, the house stood proud and beautiful, surrounded by spacious lawns and clipped hedges. Work on the restoration had taken four years.

  In 1953 Anita Ransome, the Ransomes’ only daughter, met and married young Andrew Kennedy while they were both students at Northwestern University. The couple moved to the farm that same year, while the Ransomes continued their business obligations in Chicago.

  Meanwhile, they began to hear about the tragedies connected with the old farm. Neighbors warned them that terrible things happened to anyone who lived at the old Hille house. Tear it down, the neighbors told them, or dynamite it, but don’t live on that farm! The Ransomes were to learn they were not immune to the curse.

  The first calamity in the Ransome family was not, however, directly connected with the farm. During a family outing, their grandson, seven-year-old Philip Kennedy, drowned while swimming in Lake Mendota. Nine years later the farm would claim its next victim.

  Ralph and Dorothy Ransome retired and moved to the farm they called Ravensholme, adapted from the original English spelling of Ralph Ransome’s last name. By then, their daughter and son-in-law had separated. Their son, five-year-old Ransome Kennedy, was living with his grandparents on the farm, enjoying the delights and distractions a young boy can find in the country. But on a March day while the young lad was playing in the barn he fell into an auger and was crushed to death. The curse had struck again.

  Dorothy Ransome first saw the ghost of the man on her driveway when on several occasions she would be sitting at the kitchen table stringing beans or reading. A furtive, fleeting shadow slipped across the backyard and approached the kitchen door. Yet when she reached the door to meet the visitor no one was ever there.

  At first she thought it simply a shadow cast by a passing cloud on a sunny day. But it persisted. She saw it cross the backyard and later move quickly up the driveway toward the house. She came to believe it was John Hille wearing an old black coat and a crouched hat. The coat rode high on his back but hung down in the front. On each occasion he came to the kitchen door, the entrance the Ransomes believed he used most often in life. Dorothy said he arrived at different times of the day but never at night, always moving briskly with his arms swinging at his sides as if he were in a hurry. Often her cat sat up and stared at the back door at about the same time she saw the figure crossing toward the house.

  Dorothy Ransome didn’t fear the ghost. She only wanted John Hille—if indeed that’s who it was—to be happy and pleased that his old farm has been well cared for.

  Why would John Hille haunt his old farm? Because, Dorothy Ransome reasoned, he put his whole being into the farm. “He built this house with his own hands, cleared all the land, too. His family was raised here. I think he loved it so deeply and it meant so much to him that his spirit is still around. The neighbors are scared to death of this place. But I have nothing but love for it.”

  Mrs. Ransome did not, however, understand the tragedies that afflicted her home. “The neighbors still say there is a curse on this farm. We laughed at it at first. But there has been a constant stream of tragedies… . It’s always been the same.”

  Perhaps it always will be.

  Marie

  The old two-story, brick house in the sixteen-hundred block of Milwaukee’s National Avenue looks out of place in a neighborhood of undistinguished apartment buildings, light industrial firms, and small businesses. The place is easy to miss—lofty buildings on either side seem to cast it in perpetual shadow. Sitting rather forlornly as it does atop a raised yard, the house looks every bit its age of a century and a half. But even so there are indications of its once grand appearance—little touches of filigreed wood trim and some decorative patterns in the brick facade around the narrow windows.

  Thousands of Milwaukeeans pass along that block every day, ignoring this house just as they would most any other inner city dwelling long past its prime. Certainly Gerald Cummings was in that category. A retired trucking company executive, he lived only a few blocks away.

  But for the man whose friends call him Jerry, all of that changed late one September night. As he drove down that block of National Avenue, his attention was suddenly drawn to a young woman standing in the street frantically gesturing to passing traffic. She appeared to be in some sort of difficulty. Jerry stopped to see if he could help. The young woman jumped in the van without a word and silently pointed down the street.

  What occurred next will stay with Jerry for as long as he lives. He believes he picked up a ghost. Not just any ghost, mind you, but a revenant known as Marie who haunts that particular house on National Avenue. Although Jerry Cummings isn’t entirely certain it was the ghostly Marie he encountered on that late summer night, his bizarre experience raises intriguing questions not easily answered.

  The story of Marie, and the one that Cummings would eventually learn, began a quarter of a century earlier when two men—the late Paul Ranieri and his partner Jeff Hicks—found the perfect house to which they could apply their considerable restoration abilities. They’d looked for nearly a year before discovering what was reportedly the oldest brick home in Milwaukee still on its original foundation. Built between 1836 and 1840, about a decade before Wisconsin became a state, the house had at various times been a private home, an inn, a restaurant, and, its last incarnation before Ranieri and Hicks bought it, a rooming house. But during the summer of 1977 when the men found it, the house was unoccupied, neglected, and in desperate need of repair. Although it had been scheduled for demolition, the pair saw its architectural and historical value. After negotiations with the owners, Ranieri and Hicks bought it in August.

  Within just a few weeks, it became apparent that along with the house came a ghost who called herself Marie, a young, attractive lady the men eventually suspected may have lived in the house decades earlier and, according to some records, had either committed suicide or
inexplicably disappeared without a trace.

  Marie was not shy about making it clear she loved the house, even carrying on a conversation about renovation plans. More often than not, however, Marie was an unseen presence, a hovering custodian whose arrival was signaled by a sudden, sweeping coldness in a room, as if all the windows had been thrown open on a January day.

  Over the ensuing months and years, Ranieri and Hicks became, if not entirely comfortable with Marie, at least tolerant of her infrequent forays into the corporeal world.

  The condition of the house was such that the men knew they could not move in for some time after their purchase. However, a separate, two-story, attached apartment at the rear of the house was in good condition and could be leased out.

  Donald Erbs was the renter. He was the first person to “meet” Marie. “I didn’t see her come in,” Erbs recalls of his first, startling experience of seeing an attractive young woman unexpectedly sitting in a chair across from him. “I don’t know if she appeared … but all at once she was there.”

  He wasn’t frightened. For a few brief moments, he thought there was a perfectly natural explanation for her being in the house: an outside door was not far away, and she had simply wandered into the second-floor living room of his apartment, which was separated from the rest of the house by a long hallway with separate doors to his living quarters, the main house, and the street. Perhaps she had somehow slipped quietly up the steps to his room.

  He tried to ask her questions but she didn’t answer, although she stared at him with what he described as a kind of dreamlike expression on her face. It was also that face, however, that seemed out of sync with the rest of the room. There was a glow about her, Erbs said, “like she was giving off a light. As if somebody had a spotlight on her … almost overexposed and much brighter than her surroundings.”

  She was barefoot beneath a sort of simple, flowing, ankle-length dress with lace at the sleeves and neck. Her long brown hair fell around her shoulders.

  Then she surprised him by beginning to talk about the house.

  “She told me a little about who built the house, which section had been built when, and why certain remodeling had been done,” Erbs said. Just exactly how she came to know all of this he couldn’t figure out and she didn’t explain.

  She then got up and walked out of the room. Erbs followed, but she was gone as abruptly as she had appeared. He reckons she was out of his sight for no more than a few seconds. Although she appeared to be quite real, Erbs said there is no earthly way she could have gotten away so quickly.

  “A ghost, or spirit. Of that I am sure. She picked me to talk to for some reason. I don’t know why.” Although she appeared as a solid form, Erbs couldn’t figure out how she could be a living person with the comments she made and the manner in which she acted.

  Erbs gave details of his nocturnal visitor to Paul Ranieri, who confirmed that no one had been given permission to be in the house, nor did he know of anyone who matched this woman’s description. He was as puzzled about the visit as Erbs.

  On the following Saturday the new owners spent the day stripping yellowed wallpaper from the plaster walls and preparing the hardwood floors for refinishing. Erbs also put up a small shelving unit he’d brought from another apartment. After he was done with the job, he walked over to the main part of the house to help Hicks and Ranieri. A crash came from the room he had just left. The shelf had fallen to the floor, but a plant that Erbs had placed on the shelf was sitting intact on the floor a few feet away, as if it had been removed from the shelf before it fell.

  It had been, Erbs discovered later that evening as he watched television. Without warning, the same woman appeared in a chair next to him.

  Less startled than the first time, Erbs asked her if she had anything to do with the falling shelf. Yes, she allowed, but it was an accident. She had been looking around his apartment and had bumped into it. The plant she’d managed to catch as it slid off the shelf.

  Erbs was satisfied with her explanation. But he wanted to know who she was, and so he asked her.

  “Marie,” the woman replied. She assured him she meant no harm. In fact, she was very happy that the house was being fixed up. She even told him her father was a carpenter and might be of some assistance.

  Just as before, the conversation ended abruptly when the woman he now knew as Marie got up and walked out into the quiet of the night.

  Paul Ranieri himself was the next one to see Marie. It was in September, after long and tiring hours of renovation. He sat in the still-unfinished front room. As he mulled over the day’s work, Ranieri had the impression of being watched, of knowing in some way that he was not the only one in the room. Glancing toward the staircase in the front hallway, he drew back as the lucent form of a woman suddenly materialized, brushed past within inches of where he sat, glided through an archway, and then seemingly melted into a wall. She said nothing, nor did she look toward him.

  He realized the woman was remarkably similar in appearance to the person Donald Erbs had encountered, including the dark hair and long gown.

  “I wasn’t really afraid,” Ranieri said, adding that for a few seconds, almost echoing Erbs’s first impression, he thought she was an unexpected visitor. But there was one significant difference: Erbs had described Marie as a solid figure whereas Ranieri quickly realized the person he watched was a ghost—walls and the few pieces of furniture were visible through her.

  However, Erbs’s next encounter with Marie, about ten days later, seemed to confirm that both men had seen the same woman.

  It was about ten thirty in the evening when Erbs climbed the steps to his bedroom. When he reached the top landing, he glanced into the small living room where he had first encountered Marie. He jumped when he saw a transparent Marie standing near the door. He quickly backed away. She vanished, perhaps frightened away by his behavior.

  A few weeks later, Erbs was again visited by Marie in his apartment shortly after Ranieri and Hicks had started probing around the earthen-floored basement, which was, as in many old houses, damp, small, and cramped by today’s standards. It was sectioned off into several rooms with rough-hewn doors connecting them. Broken dishware, musty jars, and old furniture lay scattered about. The men wondered if it might be useful to conduct a more formal survey of the basement debris, considering the history of the house. They contacted an urban archaeologist at a local university who agreed to take a look. In the meantime, they suspended their work.

  That’s when Marie paid her next visit to Erbs. She was concerned that the men weren’t working in the basement anymore. He gave the reason, but it didn’t seem to satisfy her. She asked him to follow her and guided him down to the basement. Once there she pointed to a wall. Puzzled, Erbs walked over to take a look. He couldn’t see anything interesting, but when he turned to ask her a question she had again departed.

  Erbs, Ranieri, and Hicks took a more careful look at the wall the next day and discovered that a section was newer than the rest. They knocked out those bricks and started digging in a tight crawl space beyond. They found pottery shards, pieces of jewelry, and bones, later determined to be from a dog that had apparently been buried there.

  Those aged dog bones may explain two other odd events during the house’s early renovation. Late one night as Ranieri lay in bed reading, he noticed his pet cat cowering under a chair on the far side of the room. As he leaned over the edge of his bed to calm the cat, Ranieri came eyeball to eyeball with an aged bull terrier that looked decidedly unfriendly. Yet the only dog in the house was a Siberian Husky, and it was downstairs.

  Jeff Hicks also had an encounter with a ghost dog. It was near the end of October as he worked late one evening in the basement. He heard what he thought were metal tags on a dog’s collar coming up from behind him. Thinking it was their Husky, he turned around but saw nothing. The door leading upstairs was shut.

  Although Hicks was the only one of the three who did not see Marie, he thought he felt her
presence in another way. He had discovered a door in the basement wedged open. He tried unsuccessfully to close it but could move it only a few inches, as it stuck fast on the uneven floor. About a week later, he discovered the door completely closed. From that point on he was able to open and close the door at least halfway before it became stuck again. Earlier Marie had told Donald Erbs that her father could help with the restoration.

  There was also the matter of the basement lights. They seemed to have a mind of their own. As often as eight to ten times a week, Ranieri or Hicks found the lights down there ablaze. The pair were doubly puzzled: not only had no one been downstairs, but three separate light switches had to be flipped on and that can only be done from the basement itself.

  Jerry Cummings knew nothing of these decade-old events when on that late September night he stopped to help what he thought was a young woman in distress. And even if he had known the house’s haunted history, it’s doubtful that would have fully prepared him for his experience.

  A lifelong Milwaukee resident who once had a tryout with the Green Bay Packers, Jerry is an unassuming retiree who lived quietly with his wife Audrey less than two miles from the house on National Avenue. He graduated from a Catholic boy’s high school and went directly to work for his father’s appliance delivery trucking business on South Ruthton Avenue. He worked there all his life, eventually assuming ownership of the business after his father passed away. He retired after selling the business to his son-in-law.