Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  Louise raced downstairs to find the dishwasher. Had he just gone upstairs for some reason? No, he had not left the kitchen.

  Louise went back up, cautiously switched on the banquet room lights, and checked around. Nothing was disturbed. By the time she returned to counting the money, the dishwasher was finished and called up the stairs that he was ready to leave.

  Louise remembered: “I counted very fast and put everything in the safe, made sure the back [fire escape] door was locked, turned off the light in the office, and made sure all the upstairs lights were off. [We] walked out the door together and he got in his car and left. I got in my car, locked all the doors, and backed the car up. I looked up and the office light was on. I know I’d turned all the lights off and I wasn’t about to go back in. So I went home and woke Tim up. I had to tell him what happened.”

  Neither one returned to the restaurant that night. When they did the following morning, the office light was off.

  Louise said her father had a similar experience while filling in at the restaurant when Tim and Louise were out of town. Charles Grachan finished counting the money late one evening, put it in the safe, and turned off all the lights. While walking to his car, he looked up and saw the office light burning. He went back inside and the light was off.

  The incidents continued. One Friday night, Tim and Louise and four of the employees were talking in the kitchen when they heard distinct thumping noises overhead.

  “Stop talking for a minute!” someone shouted. Heavy footsteps crossed the upstairs hall as if to enter the banquet room.

  On a fall night in 1983, Louise witnessed a second disturbing incident. She was upstairs when the fluorescent lights in the office flickered but did not go out. Then Louise heard a tinkling noise. On the back of the office door is a rack holding lightweight metal clothes hangers.

  As Louise turned from the safe, she noticed the wire coat hangers swinging back and forth, including one that held Tim’s shirt.

  “It was as if somebody had brushed past them,” she said.

  “I went home and told Tim that the ghost was here again,” said Louise.

  In time, the Mulderinks searched for a possible identity to their ghost . . . or ghosts.

  Wendell Nelson, a Portage County historian, provided the couple with background information on the house and its residents. Louise also gathered information from customers familiar with the place. The only person confirmed to have died in the house was a two-day-old infant.

  However, all the families who had lived in the house were Methodist teetotalers, especially the Pierce family, who owned it from 1903 until 1945.

  James W. Pierce was a Plover grocer. The church deacons and the men’s club met in the house, and Mrs. Pierce regularly entertained the ladies’ sewing circle.

  Louise thought the Pierces might be offended by the transformation of their homestead into a restaurant. Especially after she and Tim unwittingly converted Mr. Pierce’s old bedroom into the bar.

  “He’s probably just having kittens over that,” chuckled Louise.

  If it is the ghost of James Pierce that roams the house, he might have been there long before its transition into a restaurant. The Mulderinks believe the house has been haunted for at least twenty-five years. The last residents before the Mulderinks, the Sowiaks, who owned it from 1957 to 1982, also witnessed strange phenomena, which a member of the family related to the Mulderinks.

  The rear portion of the upstairs banquet room was once a Sowiak son’s bedroom. (Tim and Louise removed the wall between two bedrooms to create a private banquet dining space.) The Sowiaks had a fearless yet friendly dog who refused to go upstairs. It would stand at the foot of the stairway and bark and howl. Once, the Sowiak son pushed the dog up a couple of steps, but it came right back down.

  The son married and moved to Chicago. Each time he and his wife returned to visit his parents, they slept in his old bedroom. But they got little rest. The couple heard someone come into the room and walk over to the bed. It was as if a parent were coming in late at night to check on a sleeping child. But no one was ever there.

  After a few such nocturnal checks, the Sowiaks’ daughter-in-law refused to sleep in the room anymore. Her husband stuck it out until one night when something awoke him. He refused to say what had frightened him.

  A few sensitive patrons of the Sherman House may have suspected that someone invisible was watching them in the oak-trimmed bar or in one of the comfortable dining rooms. But luckily, since the bar glasses shattered, there were no further incidents involving customers.

  They also knew that the front door, secure as it seemed, might open mysteriously at any time, that someone prowled the banquet room upstairs, and that the mantel clock in the bar could not be depended on to chime the correct hour. And that the woman who lived next door might greet Tim and Louise in the morning by asking, “Did you know your office light was on all night?”

  Charles Grachan, Louise’s father, believed in ghosts and did not worry about who or what might be sharing space with him.

  Of the ghost, Grachan said, “He’s just a nice, friendly guy.”

  The Mulderinks eventually sold the Sherman House. The space is now home to the Cottage Café, which capitalizes on the building’s haunted history, hosting psychic readings and other paranormal-themed events.

  The Nodolf Incident

  Platteville

  Southwestern Wisconsin abounds with unique geographic formations, such as its deep valleys called coulees, the towering river bluffs, and unique limestone outcroppings. There are pockets of wilderness virtually untouched by the outside world, picturesque villages, and isolated farmhouses recalling a way of life more suitable to the nineteenth century.

  The community of Platteville is one of the region’s larger cities. It served as an early trading center for the nearby lead miners, the badgers who gave the state its nickname. Today Platteville is a thriving small city that savors its ties to pioneer history.

  Just outside of Platteville is a towering rock bluff known as the Platte Mound. Today, the Mound has the distinction of bearing the world’s largest M, first placed there by students at the Wisconsin Mining School (now the University of Wisconsin–Platteville) in the 1930s. Before there was the M, however, the mound had already gained local distinction as being the site of a bizarre incident in the nineteenth century involving a German immigrant family. Those familiar with the case call it “The Nodolf Incident” or simply “the strange night.”

  In the mid-nineteenth century, Carl Nodolf, a German-born farmer, moved into a sturdy, two-story house on a large swatch of land near the base of the Platte Mound.

  Carl had left his bride-to-be in Germany when he immigrated to the United States. Like many other men creating a new life in an unfamiliar land, he wanted a measure of success before he married and raised a family. The deep, rich black soil, the spectacular view of the rolling countryside from the house’s windows, and the dramatic mound towering above it would surely appeal to his betrothed as it had to him. No doubt he had simply fallen in love with the region.

  Carl prospered and returned to Germany in the late 1860s. When he arrived, he found tragedy—his sweetheart had died in a diphtheria epidemic only a few weeks before his arrival.

  Anguish replaced Carl’s optimism. Only two of his fiancée’s family had survived: her mother and another daughter, sixteenyear-old Louise. Gradually he realized that his dream of a farm and family in Wisconsin could still be fulfilled. He would ask Louise to come with him to America. Louise accepted but did not want to rush into such an important event. She suggested that her mother join them, with the marriage taking place after they arrived in Wisconsin.

  So both Louise and her mother accompanied Carl back to Platteville, and Carl and Louise were married soon after. Their first child, a daughter named Minnie Louise, was born three years later. Louie, their first son, was born two years after that.

  Louie was two years old and Minnie had just turned five when
“the strange night” began. All day a wicked storm moved closer and closer to the Nodolf farm. Near dusk, the blackened clouds loomed directly overhead and the wind increased to gale proportions.

  Carl and Louise tucked their two children into an upstairs bedroom, then securely locked each bedroom window shutter. Downstairs, Carl slid the shoulder-high bar across each outside door. They shuttered each window tightly against the storm.

  Still they hesitated to go to bed. Lightning ricocheted across the night sky. The wind howled more like a November blizzard than a June thunderstorm. An occasional wolf howled near the house. Too near, Louise thought.

  Shortly after midnight, Carl finally decided the house was secure, and, with Louise leading the way up the stairs with the lantern, they checked on the children and tucked the blankets around their shoulders. Only then were they ready to retire for the night.

  A few hours later, a deafening explosion of thunder awoke Louise. At the same instant, she heard little Minnie’s voice crying for help. Louise quickly lit the lantern and ran into the children’s bedroom.

  The beds were empty.

  By this time Carl was at his wife’s side. Together they searched.

  “Carl, they must have become frightened and gone downstairs,” said Louisa.

  The couple called for the children as they rushed down the stairs. No voices answered. When they reached the front room, they stopped, straining to hear.

  Between the cracks of thunder and pounding wind, they heard faint voices—coming from outside the house.

  Carl threw off the heavy bar securing the door and swung it open. On the steps, shivering in their nightwear, stood Minnie and Louie. Carl scooped them up in his muscular arms.

  “Wrap them up,” said Louise. “I’ll get their dry . . .”

  Her husband stopped her.

  “Louise, you don’t have to get dry clothes. The children aren’t wet!”

  Despite the heavy downpour, battering even now against the stonewall exterior, neither Minnie nor Louie had as much as a drop of rain on them. It was as if they had been standing in some invisible shell on the doorstep of the house. Handing the children to Louise, Carl checked each shuttered and locked window and the bolted doors. All were secured from the inside.

  “How did they get out there? That is not possible,” said Carl, shaking his head.

  When their parents asked them what happened, neither child could answer. Stuttering badly, they tried to recall the last few hours but could not. The children stuttered for the rest of their lives, the only two of the eight Nodolf children to do so.

  Friends and neighbors offered many theories to explain the strange evening.

  Perhaps one of the parents was a sleepwalker and picked up the children and put them outside while under the influence of some strange dream.

  Others with more vivid imaginations suggested that gypsies, known to frequent that neighborhood, broke into the house, snatched the children, and then were scared away, leaving the youngsters to be found on the front doorstep. But that does not explain why the doors and windows were still locked from inside. Or their dry clothing.

  For decades after the incident, scores of curious visitors found the old stone house, crumbling and vacant, standing forlornly at the base of the mound. They sometimes paused as they crossed the expansive lawn, perhaps in the shade of one of the towering oaks, and wondered: What really happened on that strange night so very long ago? There did not seem to be a rational explanation.

  The Nodolfs have not been forgotten.

  A choral composition based on the episode and written by Wisconsin composer Heidi Joosten had its world premiere in Plateville on October 26, 2015. With funding from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Platteville Community Fund, Joosten was the composer-in-residence for the public schools’ sixth through twelfth grade choirs. Over 160 vocalists and musicians performed the composition at school assemblies, and for the general public.

  Joosten titled her work “The Strange Night.”

  Indeed. And not one to be forgotten.

  Return of the Hanged Man

  Mineral Point

  The Walker House in Mineral Point is one of Wisconsin’s oldest inns. With exterior stone in its walls dating to the 1830s, the solidly handsome, three-story building, with its newer two-story addition at one end, has a decidedly early American frontier elegance.

  Tucked into a hillside that was among those producing the lead ore once mined in the region from the 1820s, the Walker House could have been a nobleman’s hunting lodge transplanted to Wisconsin. Inside, massive stone fireplaces and heavy, rough-hewn beams, with tree bark still on them, gave character to the original ceilings of the main-floor rooms. A massive bar and walls adorned with hunting trophies dominate an upstairs tavern.

  From its very earliest years, the Walker House did a brisk business. Wisconsin’s territorial officers were sworn in at Mineral Point, and the little village teemed with politicians traveling between the state’s temporary capital at nearby Belmont and their home communities. Cornish miners, frontiersmen, and speculators poured into town, eager for the riches that the lead and zinc deposits promised. At night, the men crowded into the village bars and lodgings, including the Walker House, jostling one another for drink, food, and perhaps a bed for the night.

  But on the morning of November 1, 1842, a “customer” of a different kind patronized the Walker House. He was a murderer who would hang later that day from a scaffold erected in front of the inn. His name was William Caffee and he had been convicted of shooting and killing a man during an argument in the community of Gratiot several months before.

  A crowd some estimated at over four thousand turned out for the execution. Men crowded the narrow streets and mothers with children and picnic baskets camped on the hills ringing the town, all jostling for a view of the condemned man swinging from a rope. That was not usual “entertainment” on the rough American frontier.

  The execution was a macabre affair from some reports. Caffee sat astride his casket and beat out the rhythm of a funeral march with two empty beer bottles. Such a carefree and contemptuous attitude toward his own death brought him a sort of posthumous fame, even in this rough and tumble mining region. No one who witnessed his execution would ever forget him.

  Just to make sure his memory would be preserved in this place where he so nonchalantly met death, Caffee is alleged by some to have settled into the Walker House as a ghost. If true, the Walker House would be one of the oldest haunted buildings in the United States.

  The ghostly appearances attributed to William Caffee became widely known to the public sometime after 1964. In that year, Ted Landon and several partners bought the old inn. It had closed its doors and stood vacant for seven years, ruined by neglect and vandalism. Landon, an Iowa County social worker and local artist, could not bear to witness further destruction of the historic building. He and his associates wanted to transform and restore the Walker House into a restaurant and perhaps a bed and breakfast.

  Landon’s restoration was extensive. He hired crews of young people to dig out dead trees, replace some eight hundred window panes, and build a massive fireplace of native stone in what they called the Pub. Oak planks from an abandoned barn became the Pub’s walls. It took several years, but in time one dining room had been refurbished, and the Walker House opened for business, serving Cornish-style luncheons and dinners to honor the region’s original settlers from Cornwall. The next year, another dining room was opened, and in 1974, a second-floor tavern was ready for guests.

  In 1978 Landon and his partners sold the Walker House to David F. Ruf, a medical doctor from Darlington, Wisconsin.

  At the time Ruf took over, a student from Madison was living in a second-floor apartment at one end of the building, above the office.

  What happened to him may have been the first incidence of a possible haunting.

  The student complained the doorknob would turn this way and that at night. He heard other unidentifiable noises t
hat did not seem “natural.” After countless sleepless nights, he moved out.

  Walker Calvert understood the student’s fear. Calvert, a distant relative of the inn’s early owner, had been hired by Ruf as a manager and chef, and almost immediately he began to witness curious incidents.

  In the main dining room, adjoining the office, a small wooden door covered a rectangular, floor-level opening concealing water pipes. When it was removed, one could peer inside straight up to the second floor. One day Calvert said he saw the door slide along the wall and drop down a few inches to the floor. He said it was just like someone had taken it in hand and slid it across the floor, out of the way. He saw that happen several times, as did a few of the waitresses on staff.

  The main dining room presented its own head-scratching incidents.

  On three different occasions, Calvert said he found himself talking to someone only to find that no one was there.

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a real person,” said Calvert.

  In the kitchen, the banging and clanking of pots and pans sometimes created a din, except that no pans were being used at the time.

  One of the older staff members became so frightened she refused to work alone in the kitchen. Calvert understood.

  “When I was in there, I thought someone was following me around,” he said.

  Several of the waitresses told Calvert they would fix drinks, turn around, and seem to bump into something solid, like a person, but no one was ever there. At other times a sort of white haze floated in the air across the room.