“Who’s there?” cried Dora.
There was no answer.
“Hello?” she called again.
Jacob reached toward her and clutched her hand in his. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
A new noise replaced the frightful giggles: a low, guttural growl that came from within the nearby bushes.
Jacob heard Dora begin to cry. He squeezed her hand. “Just relax, act normal, and walk toward the car. Don’t make any sudden moves, and we’ll be fine.”
Together, they backpedaled, never turning their eyes away from the spot where the sounds had originated.
Three minutes later, they were safely inside Jacob’s vehicle, on the road away from the haunted park—away from Hell’s Playground.
The Ridgeway Phantom
It was the legend of Wisconsin’s most famous ghost that brought Christopher Mann to Iowa County. He had heard for years about the Ridgeway Phantom, which apparently haunted the region in the mid-1800s. And while some reports suggested that the ghost left town atop the cowcatcher of a train engine more than a hundred years ago—never to return—other rumors had it that the old ghost still lingered in the woods outside Mineral Point.
The story of the devious spirit could be traced back to 1840, when the town of Ridgeway was the site of a grisly chain of events. A team of thugs gruesomely murdered a teenaged boy by tossing him into the fireplace at a local saloon. Understandably, the victim’s companion, another young man, tried to escape from town. But the cold Wisconsin weather overcame him, and the fourteen-year-old soon died of exposure.
Due to these two deaths, the infamous phantom was born, and Christopher, who fancied himself as something of a ghost chaser, had high hopes of finding the shape-shifting specter.
Along with his colleague, Nathan Stober, Christopher spent several days exploring the 25 miles of road between Mineral Point and Blue Mounds. It was this stretch of land on which the Ridgeway Phantom had terrorized travelers more than a hundred fifty years ago.
“This spirit changes forms, right?” asked Nathan.
Christopher nodded. “It’s been seen as the ghosts of an old woman, a young woman, a headless man and even a few different animals.”
“How are we going to know it when we see it?” said Nathan, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Christopher smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ll know.”
He remembered reading about the reputation that the phantom had gained by attacking passersby so many years ago. Some accounts also held that the specter haunted several locations within the county. From hotels and saloons to churches and private homes, the Ridgeway Phantom seemed to be everywhere.
Panic had gripped the area for nearly three decades during the 1800s. In fact, most travelers refused to enter the phantom’s domain alone, in the dark or unarmed.
Before long, practical jokers got in on the act. Their deeds—perpetrated in the name of the phantom—added to the mythos and heightened the population’s fears.
Christopher chuckled to himself, thinking of the gags he would’ve pulled, given the chance.
“What’s so funny?” Nathan asked.
Suddenly Christopher stopped laughing. “Shhh,” he whispered. “Look at that.” The ghost chaser pointed toward a shadowy cluster of trees adjacent to the road.
A glowing white orb hovered in the distance.
“What in the world...” gasped Nathan.
The ball of light rocketed toward the two young men, moving almost too quickly to comprehend—like the fastball of a professional pitcher. Christopher and Nathan barely had time to react, flinching their heads in instinctive fright.
An instant later, the ball of light was gone.
Catching their breaths, the companions suddenly found themselves laughing hysterically. After days of searching, they were finally convinced: The Ridgeway Phantom remained.
The Murdered Mistress
It was a shining example of American architecture, but it was also the site of a gruesome Wisconsin crime. Emilie Martins couldn’t shake the details from her mind as she explored Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s old estate near Spring Green, so she decided to share them with her kid brother, Tyler.
“In 1909, Wright separated from his wife and, in scandalous fashion, moved to Europe with Martha Borthwick Cheney—the wife of a client. When he came back to the United States, he retreated from his hometown of Chicago and moved here.”
Tyler shrugged. “What’s the big deal about that?”
“Be patient. I’m getting to it.”
Tyler shrugged again. “Oh, okay.”
“Ms. Cheney moved into Taliesin too, and while her ex-husband, Edwin, kept custody of their kids, they were visiting her on August 15, 1914, the day of the murders.”
“Murders?” exclaimed Tyler, his interest now piqued.
“Ms. Cheney and her children were eating lunch in one of the mansion’s dining rooms, when Julian Carlton, a thirty-year-old servant from Barbados, snuck inside, playing the part of a dutiful house worker. He killed them with a hatchet right in the middle of their meal.”
“He did? Why?” asked Tyler.
“No one really knows,” said Emilie. “But, unfortunately, he wasn’t done. The murderer moved to a second dining room, where six other guests were also eating lunch. Carlton poured gasoline under the door and started the room on fire. He used his hatchet to finish off anyone who tried to escape.”
“That’s really disgusting,” noted Tyler, his face bearing a horrified expression.
“No kidding,” Emilie agreed. “By the time he was done, seven of the nine people there, including Ms. Cheney and her children, were dead. They were brought to the cottage up ahead, called Tan-Y-Deri.”
As the siblings approached the small home that stood on a hill beside a towering windmill, Emilie heard one of the workers complaining.
“It happened again,” the short, muscular man explained to his colleague. “Last night, I closed up the cottage and locked the doors myself. But this morning, everything was wide open.”
The lanky man next to him nodded. “That’s nothing. Sometimes the lights turn on and off when nobody’s in there. And a couple of people told me they’ve seen Ms. Cheney’s ghost wandering around—inside and out of this house—wearing a long, white gown.”
“Is that true?” Emilie interjected, stepping between the two workers.
Their wide eyes and gaping mouths revealed that they had not seen her coming.
“Oh, no,” the shorter man corrected, scratching his cheek and desperately trying to avoid eye contact. “We were just telling a few tall tales.”
But it was too late.
“Yeah, right,” said Emilie, already convinced that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin was haunted.
The Bray Road Beast
“That’s one strange-looking dog,” Scott Bray muttered, as he gazed onto the field of his Elkhorn dairy farm.
He stared toward the heavily built animal that lingered in the distance. It was larger than a German shepherd, with pointed ears, and it had long, shaggy, gray and black hair that covered its entire body.
As the peculiar animal wandered near Bray Road on that September day in 1989, it licked its lips greedily, ready to cause trouble.
“You’re not getting near my cattle,” the farmer yelled in challenge to the creature.
The “dog” glanced in Bray’s direction. Then it casually turned and jogged off the other way. The Elkhorn man, however, was not convinced that it would leave his cattle alone. He followed its oversized footprints to a rocky outcrop, and it was there that he lost the critter’s trail.
Unbeknownst to the dairy farmer, he had just become the first of many area residents to encounter a monster that would terrorize the region for years to come—a monster that came to be known as the
Bray Road Beast.
Roadside Stranger
Lori Endrizzi tapped the brakes to slow her car. The rural area along Bray Road was dark, but she had still managed to spot the stranger who knelt beside the ditch.
She rounded a curve in the road and slowed even more to ensure that the man was okay. But as she peered out the passenger side window, she gasped in fright.
“That’s not a person!” Endrizzi exclaimed.
Instead, she found herself staring at a human-sized beast. The creature, sitting less than six feet away, met her gaze with its glowing, yellow eyes. It bared its fangs, which glimmered at the end of a wolf-like snout.
Before she sped away, Endrizzi noted that the monster appeared to be holding road kill in its hands—a late-night snack that it had been devouring!
The young woman floored the accelerator and didn’t stop until she had safely reached her house. It was only later, when she saw an illustration at the local library, that Endrizzi was finally able to name the beast she had spied: a werewolf.
A Similar Encounter
Mike Etten had been out on the town long enough. It was March of 1990 (just a few months after Endrizzi’s run-in with the monster), well past 2 a.m. It was time for Etten to get back to his dairy farm.
“Would you look at that?” the man said to himself, as he drove along Bray Road, not far from the Hospital Road intersection.
He had spotted a dark-haired animal sitting near the ditch. The beast was larger than a dog, and it was holding something in its front paws, eating it. As the car passed beside the creature, Etten noticed the beast’s thick features and long snout.
The werewolf looked up at him and snarled.
“What kind of weird-looking bear was that?” muttered Etten under his breath, as he continued home.
More than a year later, when the other sightings were made public at the end of 1991, Etten realized that he had probably seen the Bray Road Beast.
Run for It!
Heather Bowey was wet and cold, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t having fun. The eleven-year-old girl had been sledding with a few of her friends near Loveland Road—not far from Bray Road. And now, just before sunset on that snowy December day in 1990, she and her companions were on their way home.
“Hey, look,” said one of the children. “There’s a big dog walking through that cornfield.”
Heather glanced toward the stream and, sure enough, saw a silvery brown animal strolling beside the frigid creek.
“Here, puppy!” one of her friends shouted.
A few others joined in. “Here, puppy, puppy, puppy!”
The creature looked at them quizzically, tipped its head sideways and then—to the children’s horror—slowly and methodically climbed onto its hind legs, standing upright as a human does.
The frightening monster took three lumbering steps toward the children, and then it dropped back onto all fours and charged.
Heather screamed, as did most of the kids who were with her. She spun on her heels and ran as hard and as fast as she could.
By the time she and the other children reached her house, the werewolf was gone.
Not surprisingly, the encounter led Heather’s mother to contact animal control. While the eleven-year-old described the bizarre tale—with the other children corroborating her story—the county humane officer concluded that Heather had probably seen a coyote.
Halloween Horror
It was October 31, 1991, a perfect night for a scare. But as Doris Gipson drove along Bray Road—near Hospital Road—a confrontation with a real-live monster was the last thing on her mind. Distracted by her car’s radio, the teenaged girl leaned forward to change the station.
Thump!
Her right front tire surged up then down. Doris gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, glancing behind her to see what she had hit.
The road was empty.
Fearing that she had injured someone’s pet dog—or worse—she climbed out of her vehicle and peered into the cold darkness.
“Hello?” she called, if for no other reason than to break the eerie silence.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a muscular, hairy form leapt onto the road and dashed straight toward her.
Thud, thud, thud.
The scurrying sound of the would-be-attacker’s heavy feet grew louder, and Doris retreated to her vehicle. She jumped inside, slammed the door closed behind her and quickly locked the doors.
Clang!
The creature greedily clutched the trunk of Doris’s car.
The teenaged girl screamed and, pressing her foot against the gas pedal, she shifted the car into drive.
Behind her, she heard the sharp whistle of claws scratching against metal, as the beast—unable to maintain its grip—fell backward.
Later that evening, Doris returned to the scene, this time driving with a girl she had taken trick-or-treating.
“You would not believe what happened to me a few hours ago,” said Doris. “I hit a bear, and it tried to maul me right here in this spot.”
“No way,” replied her young passenger. “Really?”
“Wait,” whispered Doris, suddenly afraid to speak at full volume. “The bear’s still here.” She gestured up ahead, toward a large form on the side of the road.
“Let’s get out of here, Doris.”
“No argument from me,” she said.
As Doris accelerated away from the beast for the second time that night, her passenger peeked outside the window. When they were safely away, she turned to Doris and said, “I don’t think that was a bear.”
Media Frenzy
The next day, Doris shared her strange encounter with a neighbor and showed the scratches on her car as proof. Word began to spread among the locals, and soon some of the other witnesses stepped forward with their own bizarre werewolf tales.
The reports led a local newspaper writer named Linda Godfrey to write an article (and eventually a book and a screenplay) about the strange sightings. Her story was first published on December 29, 1991, and it soon became a national sensation.
The saga of Elkhorn’s Bray Road Beast was picked up by larger media outlets, and the witnesses became victims of practical jokes and ridicule.
Tourists began cruising up and down Bray Road, in hopes of glimpsing the lycanthrope. And, of course, werewolf-themed souvenirs and parties became commonplace in the Delavan and Elkhorn areas.
Where’s the Wolf?
Eventually, the sightings and the hype died down, but the story never fully ended. In the months and years that followed, everyone from in-flight magazine writers and tabloid reporters to politicians and Hollywood producers found their way to southeastern Wisconsin. Each hoped to capitalize on the werewolf sensation.
Nowadays, fresh eyewitness accounts are rare, but they have not ceased all together. From a young girl who was trapped in a tree for hours—just out of the beast’s reach—to the occasional travelers who spot the monster crossing in front of them, tales of the werewolf continue to be told. Whether these yarns are true, are the results of overactive imaginations or are told by attention-seekers wishing to become a part this legend is anyone’s guess.
The Highway 12 Hitchhiker
Karri Daniels didn’t need a map. Highway 12 would take her all of the way from Hudson, southeast, skirting Madison and eventually down to her grandmother’s place in Genoa City. Still, she wished she knew exactly how far she was from the next town. After all, the gas tank was almost empty, the sun had set and she still hadn’t eaten.
She drove onward, daydreaming about eating a chicken burrito but guessing that she would not find a Chipotle in Baraboo.
Suddenly, in the beam of her headlights, she caught the glimpse of something on the s
ide of the road. It startled Karri into alertness, and she instinctively hit the brakes.
Deer!
An instant later, she loosened her grip on the steering wheel. To her relief, the young woman saw that she was not about to clash with a creature of the forest. The shape she had seen was actually the silhouette of a hitchhiker.
Karri knew better than to stop, but she got a good look at the man as he tried to thumb a ride. The tall stranger had messy black hair, a thick beard, and he was wearing a green jacket. His expression was blank, hopeless, as if he knew the car wouldn’t stop but it was worth a try anyway.
Karri passed the man and accelerated back up to the speed limit—her version of it, anyway. But, coincidentally, about a mile later, she came upon another hitchhiker.
She slowed a bit, glided a few feet into the left lane to give the man his space, and she took a peek at him.
He, too, had messy black hair and a thick beard.
And a green jacket.
And a blank, hopeless expression.
“What in the world?” exclaimed Karri. “How can that be? It’s the same man!”
A few minutes later, at a Baraboo gas station, the young woman shared her bizarre encounter with a chatty, middle-aged attendant.
Upon hearing the tale, the friendly woman laughed. “You just saw the Highway 12 Hitchhiker.”
“Who’s that?” asked Karri.
“It’s not a ‘who.’ It’s a ‘what.’ The Highway 12 Hitchhiker is a ghost.”
Hotel Hell
“Have you heard all of the stories about this place?” Tracy Samuelson asked. She was standing before what used to be the Maribel Caves Hotel, better known as Hotel Hell, just outside the town of Maribel.
“Yes,” said Candi Balster. “But none of them are true.”
The college-aged women had made the half-hour’s drive southeast from Green Bay to see the old lodge, which had burned to the ground in June of 1985. All that remained were the structure’s skeletal rock walls.
Ghostly Tales of Wisconsin Page 4