They peered into the darkness. A glimpse of the fiery creature would provide ample fuel for a lively tale once they reached home.
Not far away, the will-o’-the-wisp was hovering and pulsating. It moved toward them. Ulrick’s father slowed the horse to a walk for a closer look at the mysterious object. Alfred didn’t appreciate his father’s curiosity. The young boy didn’t say anything, but his stomach was tied up in knots.
As the object continued to close the distance, Ulrick’s father brought the horse to a stop. In a matter of seconds, the will-o’-the-wisp was only a few yards away. That was young Alfred’s limit. “I think my body was covered with more goose pimples than a chicken has feathers. Seconds seemed like hours. I know I stopped breathing.”
His father evidently felt the same dread, for he urged the horse homeward. They didn’t stop until they reached their farm. Did the will-o’-the wisp follow them? They don’t know; neither one ever looked back.
Sailors are familiar with a phenomenon called St. Elmo’s fire, which has been likened to will-o’-the-wisps. This round flash of light often appears around ship masts during stormy weather. We know it is an electric charge, which actually does look like a flame. St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors. It is also not unusual for St. Elmo’s fire to appear on land around church steeples, airplanes, and other objects when weather is unsettled.
In early Wisconsin, St. Elmo’s fire was often mistaken for the phantom-like will-o’-the-wisp by those who saw it. Such was the case of K. F. Peabody in Star Prairie.
Automobiles were still a rarity on early country roads, but travelers often ventured out after dark with the aid of strong spotlights. On one particular night Peabody was guiding a horse and rig through a light drizzle. It was late and the road was quite muddy. Suddenly a bright light surrounded the open buggy. Thinking it was someone coming up from behind, Peabody pulled to the side of the road and turned around. Nobody was there.
Where was the light coming from? Peabody lowered his umbrella. There, on the metal tip, was a bright, shimmering flame. He quickly furled the umbrella. The flame jumped to a whip in a bracket next to the seat. As he gazed at the flame, he recalled reading about St. Elmo’s fire and realized that this must be the explanation. He removed the whip and looked more closely at the flame. It was brilliant, white, and similar to the flame of a candle, but it gave off no heat and, in fact, was quite cold.
Peabody finally drove on. The flame stayed with him to the top of the ridge. As he descended the other side, the flame gradually receded and eventually disappeared when he reached the bottom.
Whether it danced across a meadow, followed pioneers to their doorsteps, or hitched a ride in a buggy, the will-o’-the-wisp is a unique part of Wisconsin lore. To the superstitious pioneer, the wisp’s appearance was usually a source of awe rather than fright. Today we understand that those lights pulsating over that dank swamp in the dead of night were simply the products of swamp gas.
Don’t we?
No Exit
Carol, we’ll be done in a few minutes so you can come down and lock the gym doors,” the daycare teacher said, sticking her head through the open doorway. She was in charge of a rambunctious group of preschoolers during their playtime in the college building’s old gymnasium. The daycare center was nearby. The teacher was talking to Carol Matara, the custodian in that part of the building, sitting in her small office on the first floor, directly above the gym. Carol smiled because she had no trouble whatsoever hearing the kids’ happy cries echoing up through the floor beneath her feet.
“Okay, fair enough,” Matara replied. She always knew when the kids were being rounded up for lunchtime—the floor seemed to reverberate with even more noise because they didn’t want to stop playing. At those times Matara found it difficult to concentrate on completing the occasional paperwork required of her.
A few minutes later, when the silence below told her the kids had gone off to lunch, Matara made her way down the stairs and around the corner to the gym door. She pulled it open and looked around.
“Anybody here?” she called out. All was quiet. She locked the door and went back upstairs. She was about to sit down at her small desk when what seemed to be an old rock ’n’ roll song coming up from below made her stop short.
“Wait a minute. Is that from the gym?” she asked, half to herself.
“I thought, okay, why is that [radio] on. It was loud. And on top of that I could hear someone bouncing a basketball.”
“Aha,” she figured, some little kid outsmarted one of the teachers and was getting some extended playtime. But the music . . . well that was different.
Back downstairs she went. At the gym door off the hallway she grabbed the handle and was surprised to find it unlocked. She was certain she had locked it earlier.
But that wasn’t her last surprise. When she opened the door, a blast of unbearably hot air hit her in the face. And the lights were back on.
Oh my God, she thought. What’s going on here?
The Ames Teacher Education Building and Lab School opened in 1962 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. For the first few decades of its existence, Ames housed an elementary school with kindergarten through ninth grades, which provided teacher education students with practical experience in the classroom. After the lab school closed in the early 1980s, various university offices, the College of Education faculty, and classrooms occupied the building along with a university-sponsored daycare and preschool program. The building itself was razed in 2004 to make room for the campus’s new University Center.
Carol Matara liked the Ames assignment because she thought it would be interesting to be in a building where college students were learning to be teachers. Among her daily tasks was to keep the gym locked if it wasn’t in use by the preschool classes or others.
Matara clearly remembered that morning in early May as anything but unusual. “(She) came to me and said she’d let me know when they were done in the gym and I could lock up. You could always tell when they were ready to wrap it up because the kids wanted to stay and play some more.”
When she opened the gym door to investigate the music, however, and was almost knocked back by the heat and puzzled by the mysteries of the unlocked door and bright lights, that ordinary day would become just about the most unusual day of her life.
Her attention was quickly drawn to the far end of the gym by what seemed to be someone dribbling a basketball. Three young men wearing baggy gym shorts and dark emerald green jerseys trimmed in white scrimmaged beneath the basket. One young man—they all seemed to be about college age—wore a number eight on his jersey. Matara remembers because her daughter’s birthday is on July 8.
“What are you doing in here?” she called out.
The young men glanced in her direction but continued with their pickup game. The player dribbling the ball drove toward the basket for a layup and leaped. As the ball cleared the hoop, the players suddenly vanished.
“Just like that,” Matara said, amazed even now at the suddenness of it all. “It was so scary and frightening. I could feel the hair rising on my neck. I thought, wait a minute, this can’t be happening to me.”
Not knowing what else to do and shocked at what she’d seen, she quickly switched off the lights, ran back out the door, and slammed and locked it behind her. She scampered up the stairs and sat down at her desk. There she took a few minutes to collect her thoughts and catch her breath.
“I was scared to death. I’d never ever seen anything like that before.”
Matara said the event was so remarkable, so disquieting, that she couldn’t forget the details etched vividly in her mind even today. It seems, she said, like “it happened yesterday.”
And then it all started up again.
Music from the gym below filtered up to where Matara sat, then she heard raucous laughter and a basketball bouncing against the floor below.
“I really didn’t want to go back down there,” she said, but
at the same time she knew she had to, if for no other reason than to make sure some real students somehow hadn’t gotten in.
She warily approached the gym door, listening to the faint music from inside and to what seemed to be a couple of people laughing. She was reaching out to try the door handle when it all stopped. No music, no laughter, no dribbling. “Dead silence,” Matara called it. Nothing could have made her open the door. Better to leave alone whatever or whoever inside that gym seemed to be having some fun at her expense.
In a final incident a few days later, Matara accidentally dropped a sheaf of papers on the floor outside the locked gym doors. As she bent down to pick them up, a gust of frigid air swept from under the door into the hallway and across her hands. “It felt like I was going to get frostbite,” she said.
Although she continued as the Ames custodian, Matara was reluctant to go back into the gym. She eventually did, and each time without problems.
Carol Matara knew she had to tell someone what had happened. It seemed reasonable that she would report the curious incidents to her supervisor. Custodial staff members were obliged to report building irregularities or issues that may raise safety or health concerns.
“I was shaking so bad when I told my supervisor [about seeing the ghostly basketball players]. I thought he’d laugh at me,” Matara remembered. He neither laughed nor expressed doubt. In fact he told her he had his own odd encounter in the attic area of an even older university building. He said that early in his university career, as he reached for the pull chain on an overhead light, something icy cold swept by and touched him on the shoulder.
As word got around about Matara’s extraordinary experience, she met with some skepticism but a lot of understanding. Another custodian who’d worked in Ames for two decades said nothing even remotely similar had ever happened to him. And he was to some extent jealous. A biology professor asked her if what he’d heard about her was true and begged for all the details.
The Ames building was torn down in 2004 to make way for a dramatic new University Center, which sits on the site. Some architectural pieces from the old building have been incorporated into the new center, including several stone benches and an ornamental support beam that now holds a sculpted teacup near one of the center’s entrances.
Once the University Center opened in 2007, Carol Matara was assigned to its custodial crew. She wonders if two separate incidents in the new center might mean that something else transferred itself into the new building as well.
“When we moved in we had to clean the building after the construction guys left. It was a mess,” she remembers. So she and the other custodians moved from floor to floor cleaning and making the center ready for occupancy. That included such mundane tasks as cleaning restrooms and filling dispensers with toilet paper.
“We were on the third floor to put toilet paper into the women’s bathroom. Now to get the dispensers open you need a key to lower the housing onto the [toilet] seats,” she said.
On this day, Matara lowered the dispensers in all seven stalls and left to get the toilet paper. As she did so, there was a rush of warm air and then a woman’s giggle from inside the restroom.
“And then this clank. I thought, could it be possible? In every stall, the [dispenser] lid was back up in place. That was impossible! I thought, well, they’ve followed us into this building.”
Matara didn’t return to that restroom for a month.
Later, a somewhat similar episode in a second-floor women’s restroom made Matara think that she had somehow become the unwitting object of another spectral practical joke.
Matara found the first stall door locked but unoccupied. She was not pleased. All she could think about was that she’d have to crawl under the door to get it open. She figured a broom handle might help so she wouldn’t have to wiggle herself all the way under.
She had started out the door to find a broom when from that locked stall came the clink of the latch bolt sliding back. The door swung open.
“I asked my boss, ‘What’s going on? Why me?’” Matara added, shaking her head at the memory. She has yet to get an answer.
On a wall of University Center, a campus artist has created a mural depicting the exteriors of several venerable campus buildings. The vanished Ames Building is among them, but with one interesting addition. The mural artist included a small, ghostlike figure staring out of a window, recalling Carol Matara’s singular encounter with the phantom athletes.
Aghost of a different sort may have made at least one appearance at another venue on campus, Davis Theatre, inside the Kleinpell Fine Arts Building.
It was on a late summer night that director Jim Zimmerman found himself writing notes in one of the theater’s comfortable seats. Rehearsal had wrapped up for a summer theater production of The Music Man, and Zimmerman wanted to jot down a few observations while they were still fresh in his mind. Cast and crew had left the theater and he was alone. Or so he thought.
Zimmerman didn’t know how long someone had been standing up on the stage, only that he sensed a movement. “I looked up and there he was. I didn’t know where he came from,” he said of the casually dressed man. He thought he might have come out from the right-hand side of the stage. He appeared to be of medium build and height, somewhere in early middle age with longish blond hair. He wore a red, short-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. Though the work lights from above the stage were on, the stranger’s face was cast in shadow.
In any case, Zimmerman didn’t recognize him.
“Can I help you?” he called out.
The man didn’t acknowledge the question or change expression. He stood frozen still, staring out toward the puzzled director and the otherwise empty theater.
As a veteran of both professional and college theater, Jim Zimmerman was used to breathless tales of theaters haunted by tragic, suicidal actresses or murdered stagehands. So imbedded is the lore that a lamp is always kept lit on otherwise dark stages, ostensibly to keep actors and crew from tripping over cables or props. However, it is called a “ghost light,” so its functions may be wider than assumed. At any rate, little did Zimmerman realize that on this night he would add his own bit of ghost lore to the world of theater.
The stranger’s unexpected appearance didn’t disturb Zimmerman at first. Though it was after ten o’clock, he could be a campus visitor who’d gotten lost trying to find his destination. It happened sometimes—the building was usually open quite late.
Zimmerman closed his notebook and was about to speak again when the stranger, who had been standing near center stage, suddenly strode to stage left, looked around for a few seconds, and then ducked behind the rear curtains. Zimmerman still wasn’t too concerned. However, when he neither heard nor saw the man come back out on stage, he became uneasy. Perhaps it was someone intent on doing mischief.
The only people using the theater that summer were company members or university personnel.
“I knew them all, and I didn’t know this guy,” Zimmerman said. “Here he is at ten o’clock at night, walking around, not answering my question.”
Zimmerman walked up on stage and looked around. The only way out was through a rear doorway that let out into a hallway. A large set of steel “barn doors” between the stage area and the scene shop were shut. A spiral staircase backstage led to a storage room for props beneath the stage. The stair light was off.
A quick look backstage proved fruitless. Then it occurred to Zimmerman that whoever this was must have left through the backstage door. But outside the door, Zimmerman found two members of the acting company sitting in the hallway feeding each other lines from a script. Both told him they hadn’t seen anyone come out the door since rehearsal ended some time before. They seemed a bit puzzled at his question, especially when he described what the man was wearing.
If the man had left the stage it would have to have been out that door. Yet he hadn’t. Zimmerman had no reason to doubt the actors’ words.
“I didn’t know w
here he went. It’s that simple.”
Simple, perhaps. Comprehensible, no.
“When I first glanced up, I thought it was an actor who’d stuck around after rehearsal and maybe wanted to talk to me. But I didn’t know him and I didn’t recognize that he was anyone [else from] the university.”
The other oddity is that Zimmerman didn’t hear any footsteps.
The wood stage flooring squeaked a bit under someone’s weight, and in the quiet of the theater Zimmerman thought he would have heard the man walking around.
Zimmerman spent a few more fruitless minutes looking around for what he still thought was an intruder. Eventually he locked up, went home, and pushed the event to the back of his mind.
Zimmerman related the story a few days later in a conversation with a colleague, talking about it in terms of security. But that’s not how his colleague reacted. The latter said that from the description—middle aged, slight build, blue jeans, tousled blond hair—the intruder seemed to fit the description of Sanford Syse, who had assisted in designing the theater complex back in the early 1970s, cofounded the summer theater, and taught theater courses. A straightforward explanation, it seemed. Except for one thing: Sanford Syse died years before Zimmerman’s encounter. Maybe, Zimmerman’s colleague said only half in jest, he’d seen Syse’s ghost.
Zimmerman hadn’t put the label “supernatural” on the event. He was thinking only that perhaps the theater and the building needed better security. His thoughts didn’t stray any further because the man in the theater that night was, as Zimmerman emphasized, “as real as you or I.”
“Here was a stranger walking around on stage and he could get hurt, or rip us off,” Zimmerman said. “I told [my colleague] I didn’t know where this man had gone or how he got away or who he was. The person I was talking to made the connection to Sanford Syse.”
Syse taught theater at UW–River Falls for ten years until his death from cancer in 1974, shortly after the fine arts building opened. Today, a smaller experimental, “black box” theater adjacent to Davis Theatre is named after him, as is a drama scholarship awarded each year.
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