Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  Two days later Dr. Chauncey C. Robinson, a prominent physician of the city who had taken an interest in the girl and wanted to question Mrs. Giddings about the strange phenomena, took her back to the house. The family and the boarders were eating dinner; the moment Mary and the doctor entered the room, knives and forks flew off the table.

  According to news accounts, Mary was finally taken into the home of a well-known physician in the Seventh Ward.

  Was Mary the source of the upheaval? Parapsychologists believe that neurotic conditions are factors conducive to poltergeist activity, and it was the consensus of the time that Mary was neurotic at least; today she would likely be diagnosed with multiple disorders. Did her neuroses and somnambulism facilitate the unconscious release of paranormal powers? Was it mass hallucination, or was it simply fraud?

  Because all normal explanations for the outlandish incidents seemed preposterous, the poor little servant girl attracted international attention. The late author Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit investigator of psychic phenomena, included the story of Mary Spiegel in his book Ghosts and Poltergeists. He referred to it as a “remarkable American case.”

  House of Evil

  Violent death is often the catalyst for the appearance of a ghost. Those who die at the hands of a murderer or take their own lives are frequently said to leave behind strong energy impressions that may manifest in the activity of a ghost or poltergeist.

  Present-day Milwaukee residents passing the corner of Twelfth and State are unaware that they are within a few feet of the location of one of the city’s most famous haunted houses. The brick building is gone now, but its sinister reputation persisted for many years. It belonged to one Major Hobart. He departed the earth too soon and his house, which was never the same again, came to be known as the “house of evil.”

  Hobart, a former army officer, calmly hanged himself for unexplained reasons one afternoon. He was found swinging from a chandelier in the large two-story home. After Hobart’s demise, many families lived in the house, but not many remained for more than a few months. The terrified residents reported doors opening and closing without human assistance, footfalls clattering up the staircase when all were in bed, groans wafting from various rooms, and chains being dragged across the floors.

  When the house was vacant—which was often—neighbors would notice lights through the dusty windows, solidifying the house’s reputation for evil.

  After several years, no realtor could sell the brick mansion, so infamous had its reputation become. At last it was razed, and with it was lost the last, unearthly traces of Major Hobart, late of the U.S. Army.

  Face on the Bedroom Curtain

  Early one Saturday morning in September, Milwaukeean Mary Tubey died. Although the circumstances of her death were not unusual, her youth made her passing especially poignant to her friends and family.

  A block away, on Hill Street between Seventh and Eighth, her stepbrother, Dan Connell, had finished his lunch and was sitting in the front room, silent and alone with his grief. The door to the bedroom was open, and from where he sat he had a clear view of the curtained window in that room. Suddenly he saw Mary’s face appear on the curtain. The longer he looked, the clearer the face became.

  Connell called his wife, and she too saw the strange likeness. They tried to divert their uneasiness by keeping busy in the house, but their curiosity impelled them to check the curtain several times during the afternoon. The face was always there—shimmering, smiling—in exactly the same place. Had Mary returned to say good-bye, or were the Connells, in their sorrow, imagining her presence?

  We don’t know precisely what it was the Connells saw that led them to believe Dan’s stepsister had made a stop at their home, but later that day the story got out, and neighbors by the dozens swarmed through the front and back doors of the small, brown cottage. Some glanced at the curtain and, seeing nothing, held in their laughter until they got outdoors; others were profoundly moved by what they believed they saw. A policeman who visited the house that afternoon said later that he had never seen anything plainer in his life.

  When the size of the crowds became unmanageable and the Connells were chilled to the bone from the cold air blowing through the open doorways, they barricaded the entrances and refused to admit more visitors.

  The next day, Sunday, the crowds swelled into the hundreds, including several reporters drawn by stories they’d heard on the streets. The doors were opened again and the curious callers filed past the window curtain. At dusk the face vanished but the visitors did not. From all parts of the city they came, and many were deeply disappointed upon learning that there was no longer anything to be seen.

  The following week, a local reporter called on Mrs. Connell and also interviewed a number of neighbors who claimed to have seen the face on the curtain. Some said emphatically that they could not have been deceived, and all cross-questioning failed to shake them. That group was so solemn about the affair that the reporter decided it was foolish to tell them their imaginations may have gotten the better of their judgment.

  The Restless Servant Girl

  Dr. Gerhard Bading and his wife lived in a rental house on Upper Wells Street between Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Streets, on Milwaukee’s west side. It was a large clapboard house with double stairways typical of the era. One staircase connected the front of the house to the upstairs hallway; the other descended from the same hallway to the kitchen in the rear. Rear staircases often led to a sleeping room for the maid or cook and were used by that staff to reach the kitchen without going through family rooms. The hallway and both stairways were carpeted. That year, the Badings decided to take a short trip, and, not wishing to leave the house unattended, they asked their friend Dr. E. J. W. Notz to live there in their absence.

  Notz moved in on the appointed day and that night went upstairs to bed and promptly fell asleep. Shortly after midnight he was awakened by a thundering crash followed by footsteps in the hallway. He sat up in bed, then he thought he heard someone going down the rear stairway. He felt certain he was not alone in the house. He got up quickly, turned on lights, and searched the attic, second floor, first floor, and basement. There was no one anywhere, nor could Notz find evidence of anything else that might have caused the disturbance. Satisfied and much relieved, he went back to bed and fell asleep, until …

  A sudden crash, then hurried footsteps across the hall and down the stairway awoke him again. He got up, searched the house for the invisible prowler, but again found nothing.

  The commotion erupted a third time before morning; the same sequence occurred during Notz’s second night in the house. When the Badings returned, Notz told them of his experiences, but they showed no surprise. They said they had heard the same thing so often that they weren’t greatly disturbed by them.

  Later, Notz learned that people in the neighborhood believed the ghost of a servant girl who had committed suicide on the premises haunted the house. She had been sent to the house early one autumn day to open it up and get it ready for its owner, the proprietor of a resort hotel in the Waukesha Lakes area. The girl was apparently suffering from depression and, upset at not being able to complete her work, killed herself. It was her restless ghost that roamed the hallway and staircases, terrifying each family who has lived there ever since.

  Ghostways

  The gentle rise in Dane County’s Burke Township—known to locals as Ghost Hill—was most appropriately named. For years on end, and at the stroke of midnight, a lean figure clad in white appeared astride a pale horse racing across the top of the knoll going in the direction of Blooming Grove. Neither the harshness of the weather nor the darkness of the night kept the horseman from his appointed rounds. He, or rather it, could be seen plainly, a white cape fluttering in the breeze like some sort of spectral streamer.

  Early Burke Township residents could not recall the origin of the mysterious specter—called that since there was general agreement it was not of this earth. Ghost Hill itself was
on the former Messerschmidt farm in the northeast corner of Section 19 on the old road from Madison to Token Creek.

  Some witnesses thought the horseman was the angry spirit of an early pioneer who had been robbed and murdered near the hill. The man’s ghost was condemned to wander through the night, seeking revenge for his brutal death.

  At least one effort was made to identify the ghost—or at least verify its existence. George Armbrecht of Madison told a newspaper reporter in 1936 that he and several other brave companions camped on the hill one night to see the horseman for themselves. Midnight arrived, but unfortunately on this occasion no ghost appeared.

  The hill was partially excavated when a quarry opened to supply stone for the Dane County airport. With the changes to Ghost Hill, the legend of the horseman slowly faded from memory.

  Madison Sheriff Van Wie held the kerosene lamp high as he made his last rounds on that late November day of 1873. The nine prisoners were either fast asleep or resting on their beds. All seemed well. Sheriff Van Wie returned to his own quarters in another part of the jail complex and went to bed.

  A wild shriek slashed through the silence. Wie leaped out of bed in his night-shirt, grabbed a lantern, and raced to the cellblock. Two young prisoners named Foster and Sheevy were thrashing about in their bunks, their eyes wide with fright.

  Wie unlocked the cell door and demanded an explanation. The men said they’d just settled down for the night when they heard a noise in the doorway at the far end of the corridor. The sound increased in intensity, then it seemed to move through the iron bars of their cell. As the noise surrounded them, a blindingly strong light filled the cell. Then, they claimed, an ill-defined form screamed and brushed against their beds.

  Wie thought the men had obviously concocted the tale, but he conceded the young men seemed genuinely frightened. They demanded to be moved. Wie refused. He said the men could work out their own salvation.

  The next night came and the disturbances continued. But this time Wie remained snug in his bed. Foster and Sheevy did get their chance, however, to tell their tale to a reporter. They claimed the light had again filled their cell. To escape both it and the wild wailing, they dived onto their bunks and wrapped their heads in their blankets.

  Wie thought Foster had had a hand in the commotion. Young Foster had been accused of setting fire to several of Madison’s flourmills. Sheriff Wie was convinced that Foster spent his time behind bars planning pranks to frighten the wits out of Sheevy, apparently quite a superstitious man. Yet both men seemed genuinely frightened by the experience.

  The episode—and the men—gradually faded from the news. There was no follow-up investigation, so it will never be known whether it was an attention-getting device on the prisoners’ part or truly the vestige of a long-forgotten prisoner sentenced to roam forever the cold, gray halls of Madison’s old jailhouse.

  Albert J. Lamson was a farmer who lived near Lake Wingra in Madison. On one particular dark and starless spring night early in the twentieth century, Lamson stepped out onto his front porch and heard the unmistakable thwack of an ax—the clear, ringing, rhythmic swing of an expert woodsman at work.

  As Lamson listened, he was certain the sound was coming from Bartlett Woods, later known as Noe Woods, on the southwest side of what is now the University of Wisconsin Arboretum.

  Lamson couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to fell a tree in the middle of the night. Yet he knew he was not mistaken. He heard the blade bite repeatedly into the trunk, pause on occasion, and then resume its steady rhythm.

  The next morning, Lamson’s curiosity got the best of him. He climbed a fence near the present-day Curtis Prairie and the Arboretum Administration Area. Though he searched the area, he could not find any recent ax marks on the trees, nor wood chips anywhere on the ground.

  Several nights later, he again heard the sound of wood being chopped. He summoned his hired man—who also claimed to have heard the axman at work—and together the pair hiked into the woods to investigate. But again, they could find no evidence of recent timbering. Lamson questioned his friends and neighbors. Several said they also heard the noises and some, like Lamson, unsuccessfully searched the woods for its source.

  Periodically during the summer and fall, the mysterious sound returned. Travelers who heard the story avoided the “ghost road” that ran by the woods. A search party with lanterns was finally organized to go into the forest at night to locate the woodchopper. But after several faint-hearted volunteers dropped out, the hunt was called off. Lamson was too superstitious to go back into the dense woods after dark.

  The woodchopper—or whatever it was—finally abandoned his nightly encroachment. His identity and the purpose of his endeavors remain a mystery to this day.

  There is more than one “ghost road” in Madison. Seminole Highway is now a mostly residential street of homes and wooded acreage crossing the Beltline near the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. The only ghost one is likely to see here is a young child costumed for Halloween. But when the highway was known as Bryant Road, tales were spread that unearthly apparitions appeared to teamsters and pedestrians alike.

  Most described the ghost as a luminous white vapor that would appear suddenly from the brush on either side of the road, follow the unsuspecting wayfarer for a short distance, and then vanish as quickly as it had appeared.

  A few others claimed the vapor was in the shape of a Native American astride a pony, and that he would walk his horse behind them for a little way, and then disappear. Sometimes late at night people fancied they heard the clatter of a pony’s hooves as the ghostly rider charged up and down Seminole Highway in pursuit of an unseen quarry.

  The phantom never harmed anyone. Nor was his identity learned. Some said he was a Native American who had been killed in battle and was seeking revenge. Others thought he was a man who had been buried in the cemetery near the old Bryant barn at the east end of the highway. But if that’s the case, no one knew his name or why he had returned.

  By the time the horse and buggy gave way to the Model T, the troublesome ghost had disappeared, leaving stories of Madison’s “ghost road” alive only in the memories of the older generation.

  Terror in the Night

  Darkness wrapped the old clapboard farmhouse near Cedarburg on that early March night in 1975. Barb Yashinsky lay sleeping. The late winter day had been long and exhausting after her family’s move into the rural home they had just purchased. At two o’clock in the morning Barb was jerked awake.

  “I thought it was a cat fight,” she later said of the noise, noting the time on the bedside alarm clock. “And you know what they sound like.”

  Barb was now listening intently. She decided the sounds were more like those of a weeping child. She wondered if her daughter, Kate, had awakened and become frightened by the strange surroundings. Barb got up, crossed the darkened hallway, and opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom. The two-year-old was sound asleep.

  Then Barb thought she heard a woman’s voice blending with the crying. More curious than frightened, she walked downstairs and looked around the house. Everything seemed in order. She even fetched a flashlight and went outdoors to look around the yard.

  Satisfied that there was nothing amiss, she returned to the house. But the muffled crying and indistinct voice persisted. At times they seemed to be coming from a closet in the bedroom she shared with her husband, Michael, who was sleeping soundly. No more than twenty minutes later, the sounds subsided and Barb drifted back to sleep. She decided not to tell her husband about the episode.

  Within less than two years, Barb and Michael would finally come to grips with what their brains told them was not possible—that they had moved into a haunted house.

  The house was well over a century old when Barb and Michael Yashinsky moved in. There was still much work to be done to convert it into a comfortable and cheerful home. Barb was eager to get the remodeling underway. They had bought the house from a man who restored rundown ho
mes for resale, yet he had made only minimal cosmetic changes to this place. Barb and Michael had bought it “for a song,” as they described it, after it stood empty for nearly a year. New wiring and central heating had been put in before their arrival, but there was still a great deal of painting to be done outside and in. It would be a busy spring and summer. Barb was a schoolteacher and planned to return to work in the fall, so she was most anxious to complete work on the house.

  But the hard days of painting and cleaning did not bring the anticipated rewards. Unaccountably, Barb was nervous and restless during those early months.

  “I was never satisfied with anything, which isn’t like me. I couldn’t find enough to keep me occupied. [ I thought] what I was doing was boring. I found lots of reasons to yell at the baby for no reason at all, but I thought I just needed to get back to work.”

  The couple was able to finish most of the necessary work on the house by late summer. Barb returned to her classroom job on schedule. Michael was a chef who worked night shifts and cared for their daughter during the day. Barb’s mother, Margaret, filled in for an hour or two on those days when her daughter wasn’t able to get home before Michael left for work or on those evenings when Barb had a school function. Yet a return to the classroom did little to alleviate Barb’s self-described “nervousness.”

  One night in November, Kate awoke crying with what her mother thought was only a nightmare. It was odd in that she had always been a sound sleeper. Barb went into her room to see what was the matter.

  “I felt the closing in of fear and apprehension, which I was to experience many times,” Barb remembered. She took her daughter into her arms. Kate asked if “the man” would come again. Barb didn’t know what she was talking about and shrugged it off as the figment of a young child’s lively imagination.