That is the factual beginning of Alice’s ten years in the Lake Michigan dunes. There is still much that we do not know. The first public notice of her occurred in the popular press of the day in the summer of 1916, but much of what was written was simply made up by reporters in pursuit of a sensational story. Adding to the complications is that Alice herself exaggerated or lied to curiosity seekers and reporters about her own personal background and intentions, probably to keep them from pestering her. She often did not tell visitors her real name.
At first Alice lived on the fish she caught or netted by hand and the wild fruits that grew on berry bushes sprouting among the dunes. She had a gun with which she reportedly bagged the ducks that flew overhead and was proclaimed an excellent shot. (If she was such a good shot, that would seem to be at odds with the belief that her move away from Chicago came about because of failing eyesight.)
With her hair chopped short and uneven (she had no mirror), shod in stout boots or often barefoot, and wearing formless khaki clothing, she trudged miles to the nearest communities to buy essentials and, extremely important to her, check out library books. People who spoke with her said she was shy but always kind and courteous, an eloquent speaker with a masterful vocabulary. She could converse on a wide range of topics and advocated forcefully for preserving the dunes’ wild habitat, a conservation effort gaining support at the time.
So a well-educated, independent woman had turned her back on civilization to lead a solitary, Thoreau-like existence in a sandy wilderness less than an hour away from downtown Chicago. That must have been an exciting subject of speculation to those who lived in the area and who first encountered her.
Here was a woman who defied all sorts of boundaries to live “off the grid” in search of personal fulfillment.
Rumors and stories about this strange woman and her unconventional lifestyle soon reached the ears of reporters in Gary, Michigan City, and other regional newspapers anxious to track her down, and that they did.
First those local newspapers sought her out, then the Chicago press sent reporters in search of her. Within a few weeks, newspapers from California to New York carried scores of stories about this unconventional “female hermit,” as some called her: “Diana of the Dunes Loses Fear of Men,” “Diana of the Dunes Dissects Soul in Diary,” “Mystery Still Hangs about Hermit Woman,” “Woman Hermit of Sand Dunes Tells Sad Tale.” (Female, most certainly. Hermit, hardly.)
The stories exaggerated her looks (a “beautiful nymph,” though pictures show her to be quite plain) and her lifestyle (“takes her plunge [into the lake] like a goddess of the wave,” when that was how she bathed) and treated her as possibly deranged and sometimes “hostile” or “hysterical” (who wouldn’t be toward strangers nosing around one’s domicile?).
A Chicago newspaper was the first to label her “Diana of the Dunes,” after the Roman goddess of hunting, in the summer of 1916. That’s the name that stuck—it is even chiseled above her birth name on her Gary, Indiana, cemetery marker.
Newspapers ran outlandish stories of this female “discovered” like some runaway from a lost civilization. Much of what was said or implied was wrong. Some newspapers simply reprinted the news item, adding their own spin whether it was true or not.
At first she tried to ignore the pack of newspeople (mostly male; there was at least one female reporter on her story) looking for her but in time she relented, perhaps realizing they would never give up. While she tried to promote conserving the dunes, most of the reporters were after a sensational story about her unconventional lifestyle.
In the modern era of social media, we would say the story of Diana of the Dunes “went viral.” It was everywhere. Tourists and curiosity seekers showed up to talk to her. Front page stories followed her every move.
The attention caused her to question her decision to settle there, but in time she seems to have become comfortable in using her fame to help protect the dunes from encroaching civilization. She was even a speaker at a large gathering on the subject at Fullerton Hall, the Art Institute of Chicago, in April 1917.
In 1918 Alice’s life alone ended when a twenty-six-year-old drifter who called himself Paul Wilson came into her life. Alhough he claimed to be from Texas (he may have served in the army there), he was actually Paul George Eisenblatter, born and raised in Michigan City, a ne’er-do-well and minor criminal. But for reasons still hard to fathom, Alice fell in love with him.
He was a man with a hair trigger temper, constantly picking frights with neighbors and visitors to the dunes, and was continuously in trouble with law enforcement. Shortly after they met he began serving a six-month sentence for petty theft. They corresponded regularly during his incarceration.
Whatever his background, he was tall, strong, and resourceful. One newspaper called him her “caveman.”
He improved Driftwood immeasurably, peddling the fish he caught, selling his handcrafted driftwood furniture, and even building small boats by hand. At some point they found new lodging in a larger cabin (Wren’s Nest) at Ogden Dunes. By most surviving accounts Paul was devoted to her. He even told a reporter sometime later that they had gotten married, though they probably had a common-law marriage. Their finances improved, Alice was content. Perhaps she had at last found someone with whom she could share her distaste for societal norms and her desire for solitude and independence.
She could not know that violence would destroy this promising new life.
In June 1922 a dunes hiker found the grisly, charred remains of a man close to Waverly Beach. The coroner was unable to identify the victim. Although the remains were some distance from Paul and Alice’s cabin, suspicion settled almost at once on Paul Wilson and by extension Alice. He was known for his hot temper, his great strength, and his strong dislike of strangers. Newspapers did term him her “caveman.” She was still viewed with suspicion by many dune residents.
Newspapers jumped on the story, headlines screaming: “‘Diana of Dunes’ Being Sought in Slaying Mystery,” “Husband of Diana Gives First Clue,” “Original ‘Diana of the Dunes’ and Mate Flee as Civilization Intrudes,” “Diana’s Cottage Broken into by Curiosity Seekers.”
The stories generally focused on Paul Wilson’s “criminal” background and all but convicted him in print. They claimed both Paul and Diana were seen near the scene of the crime. There was no evidence of that.
Reporters, police, and curiosity seekers made life miserable for the couple.
Alice Gray was livid at the accusations.
When Eugene Frank, a deputy hired to guard dunes cottages and a purveyor of rumors about Paul Wilson’s guilt, confronted an angry Alice and Paul, a fight broke out. Frank shot Paul in the foot and fractured Alice’s skull with the butt of his pistol.
Police arrested both Paul Wilson and Deputy Eugene Frank. Alice was transported to Mercy Hospital in Gary, where she hovered near death.
Someone vandalized the shack while the couple was gone, taking many of Alice’s books, diaries, and other writings.
Meanwhile, Wilson insisted that a stranger committed the murder. No one fitting Wilson’s description was ever found. Perhaps he was the victim? If not, whose charred remains were these? And why was he slain?
The body was never identified, the case never solved, Paul Wilson never charged in the murder.
Alice was discharged from the hospital, but she never fully recovered her physical and emotional health. It had taken a toll that put her on a downward spiral.
To make matters worse, within a short time progress—in the form of automobiles and people—closed in on Alice Mabel Gray and Paul George Eisenblatter Wilson. The solitude and independence both cherished were growing more elusive.
With the completion of the Dunes Highway (U.S. Highway 12) through northern Indiana, parts of Lower Michigan and north through Illinois, city residents from Chicago and elsewhere were vacationing there or even putting up homes. The same man who owned the property with Wren’s Nest on it was developing a
new beachfront housing development at Ogden Dunes. His name was Samuel Reck. He told the couple they could stay in their cabin for the time being.
But it all seemed to be too much for them. Angry and upset with encroaching civilization, the accusations of murder against them, and the newspaper inaccuracies that continued to be published, they made plans to “escape” by taking an open boat Paul had rebuilt down the Mississippi River. Maybe he would hunt rattlesnakes in Texas. He had done that at one time, or so he said.
Yet within only a few months, their flight south ended and they were back at Wren’s Nest . . . with Samuel Reck’s permission this time.
Part of the reason for the return may have been connected to what they did next: they brought a libel lawsuit against several newspapers for the alleged falsehoods written about them. After eight years! Alice and Paul filed the federal lawsuit in the Hammond, Indiana, federal court in June 1924 asking for in excess of $100,000 in damages, a significant sum in those years.
Alice never got her day in court.
Alice Mable Gray Wilson became desperately ill in the shack they called Wren’s Nest in early 1925. Despite Paul’s frantic pleas, she did not seek treatment from a doctor or go to the hospital. After a week or more of a worsening condition, she fell into a coma on February 8. Paul found Samuel Rock and together they took Reck’s car to fetch a doctor from Gary. He diagnosed uremic poisoning (kidney failure) and prescribed hot water bags and “stimulants.” Neither that remedy nor the additional medicine worked. Alice died in the early morning hours of February 9, 1925.
Knowing she was dying, Alice asked to be cremated, her ashes scattered from Mount Tom, the tallest of the dunes. But cremation was a rare and expensive burial procedure then. Paul had no money to speak of and her own family would not allow it. Paul wanted to build a funeral pyre on the beach to perform the cremation himself, but the authorities refused.
Paul Wilson was nearly crazed at Alice’s funeral because he would not be allowed to carry out those final wishes of hers. He packed a handgun at the funeral and threatened anyone who attempted to bury her. Authorities jailed him until the funeral was over
Alice’s remains were interred in Gary’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Her marker reads simply
Diana of the Dunes
Alice Gray Wilson
Nov. 25 Feb. 9
1881 1925
There is some irony that today, as with most mortuaries, Oak Hill offers the services of a crematory.
Within days, news of the death of Diana of the Dunes made the pages of newspapers from coast to coast. The New York Times devoted seven paragraphs to the story: “‘Diana of the Dunes’ Dies of Privations; Chicago Woman Who Took Up the Primitive Life in 1916 Refused Hospital Aid”; while the Helena (Montana) Independent took a more ethereal, albeit erroneous, approach that may have helped formulate the ghost story: “Diana of Dunes Is Dead, Dancing in Moonlight on Sands of Shore at End.”
What of Paul Wilson? He married again—this time to a wealthy Wisconsin native who owned dunes property and with whom he had two children, got into frequent trouble with the law, and at some point ended up in California.
Alice and Paul seemed to have shared an unconventional life with each other. Her death nearly drove him mad. Newspapers for a while were curious about how Diana’s “caveman” was going to cope without her. Not well, it seems. One story published two months after her death (in a Fresno, California, newspaper, of all places) described Paul as saying Diana’s ghost haunted him because he was not able to carry out her final wishes . . . She came to him as he sat at Mount Tom and watched for her.
It was that tender image that helped spread the ghost stories of this beautiful Diana haunting for all time her beloved dunes.
The press eventually stopped writing about Paul until news of his death came in 1941 in Bakersfield, California.
There are dozens of variations told about all aspects of Alice Mabel Gray’s colorful life, many of them propagated by Alice herself, her husband, her friends, people who had never met her, and, most frequently, the newspapers of the day. But in the end all that we do know is that Alice Gray was an independent woman perhaps decades ahead of her time in advocating for conservation of this natural treasure, brilliant and nonconforming, who only wanted to be left alone in peace during life and united with her beloved dunes in death. Sadly neither would come to pass.
Is it any wonder then that stories of her ghost are such a part of the dunes lore? And beyond. There is the Mabel Gray Restaurant in Hazel Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where “everything is handmade from scratch.”
So it is not so hard to believe that by the light of a full moon, Diana of the Dunes stands silhouetted on the beach, perhaps near Mount Tom, giving thanks for the glory of the night and the peace and solitude it brings to her.
The Haunting of Hannah House
Indianapolis
Are ghosts naturally attracted to empty houses where they are less likely to be disturbed? Or do they occasionally prefer the livelier company of the living?
Stories of ghostly activity in the Hannah House, a stately, nineteenth-century, red-brick mansion in Indianapolis, began after it had sat empty for several years in the 1960s. Since then, eyewitnesses have described a mysterious man in a frock coat who wanders the hallways, sickening smells of decaying flesh wafting through the air, crashing unseen glassware, pictures falling off the walls for no apparent reason, and encounters with sudden, numbing cold spots.
The history of Hannah House certainly lends itself to colorful legends and absorbing stories. Built three years before the American Civil War, the twenty-four-room mansion is part of the legacy of Alexander M. Hannah, an Indiana state legislator, postmaster, sheriff, and clerk of the circuit court. When it was first built, it was supposedly used as a way station on the Underground Railroad. Hannah used the basement to hide the African Americans escaping slavery in the Southern states. One tale is that a lantern tipped over in the basement one night and the subsequent fire killed many of the slaves awaiting their journey north. They were buried in rude caskets in the basement.
From all outward signs, Alexander and his wife, Elizabeth Jackson Hannah, whom he married in 1872 when he was fifty-one years old, lived a peaceful life in the lovely Italianate-style home on Madison Avenue. The couple may have had a stillborn child, but they certainly did not lead the sort of tragic lives that often beget unhappy specters.
Alexander Hannah died in 1895 and four years later, Roman Oehler, a prosperous Indianapolis jeweler, bought the house. His daughter, Romena Oehler Elder, inherited the mansion upon her father’s death. In 1962, with all the children gone, Romena moved out and left the care of the place to her youngest son, David. The house remained empty for six years.
David Elder was the first to suspect that the vacant Hannah House was “occupied” by otherworldly beings.
He was working alone there one bleak and rain-soaked day in the late 1960s when the distinctive crack of breaking glass came from somewhere in the basement.
Elder investigated the noise but found nothing disturbed. Interestingly, the jars Elder suspected had somehow fallen and broken were stored in the area where it is suspected the slaves had been buried more than a century before. So far as is known there was no attempt to unearth and rebury the remains.
From time to time, the odor of rotting flesh seemed to emanate from a second-floor bedroom, a smell so strong that it sent more than one visitor reeling out the front door. Attempts to eradicate it with cleaning solutions, bleach, perfume, and other potions failed. However, at other times a much more pleasant rose fragrance was produced. But there were no flowers kept in the room; normally it was locked up and used for storage.
In addition, the door that opened from the aromatic room into the hallway seemingly possessed a will of its own—it swung open even when the handle was securely locked. Once it opened, an increase in other unexplained activity in the house would occur, including strange noises, footsteps, cold drafts, and v
oices mumbling in shadowy passages.
Lynn Dohrenwend, an Indianapolis psychic, once insisted that she “saw” a pregnant woman in that room, a woman obviously in severe pain with abdominal cramps apparently caused by the child she was carrying. The child had later been stillborn, said the psychic.
There was no official record of any child having been born to the Hannahs. However, a later investigation at Crown Hill Cemetery, where the Hannahs were interred, revealed a third, smaller tombstone next to their own. No name was on it. Some speculate it was the grave of that stillborn child.
Gladys O’Brien and her husband, John Francis O’Brien, operated an antique business in the house from 1968 and 1978 and lived there part of that time. During their stay, the couple said they were subjected to an array of strange incidents.
Early one evening, Gladys O’Brien caught a glimpse of a man in a black suit walking across the upstairs hallway. She thought a customer had somehow ventured onto the second floor, which had been closed to visitors. Yet by the time she reached the top of the stairs, the mysterious visitor was gone.
On another occasion, a painter sprucing up the interior claimed that he became the unwitting target of whatever it was that haunted the house. Doors would swing open as he walked by, and pictures slid from their moorings. In the most bizarre event, a spoon Gladys had placed on a tray flew across the room. The painter fled.
The O’Briens’ son volunteered to finish the house-painting job. An uneasy feeling of being watched made him very uncomfortable that first night. So the next evening the young man’s wife and two daughters accompanied him to the house. His younger daughter, Cheryl, played on the stairs while her father, mother, and sister worked in an adjoining room. Soon, he heard Cheryl talking to someone.
“Hi, Dad,” the girl said. That was the affectionate name the children used not for their own father but for their grandfather, John O’Brien.
Haunted Heartland Page 8