Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  Zimmerman had never crossed paths with Sanford Syse. “I wish I would have known [that night] what he looked like because I might have recognized him,” he said. It wasn’t until later that Zimmerman saw a picture of Syse. He thought the man he had seen looked like Syse, but because the stranger’s face was shadowed he wasn’t entirely certain.

  But even with that it took him a long time to reconcile with the idea that perhaps what he had seen was a ghost.

  “I never thought it was a ghost at the time,” he mused. “He looked absolutely real. I wasn’t looking for the theater ghost, and to this day I don’t know if it was a ghost. I do know it was a bunch of anomalies that I can’t answer.”

  Zimmerman believed his predecessor did a good job in designing the theater complex. “For a space built in the 1970s, it’s still functioning pretty well today.”

  Perhaps that’s why Sanford Syse checked in that night. He wanted nothing more than to take a look at the theater, his legacy, and to make a brief, albeit unforgettable, acquaintance with one of his successors.

  The young drama major relaxed in a theater seat, idly passing the time until her next class. Suddenly she had the eerie sense that someone stood nearby watching her. She glanced back, toward the main door. An “iridescent glow” stood in the doorframe. Within seconds it silently vanished. She had met Raphael, a ghost that dwells in the Ripon College theater.

  This particular theater ghost’s origins are murky, but apparently he made his first appearance when the school’s Red Barn Theater burned down in 1964. No cause for the fire was ever found, leading theater folks to put the blame on “the ghost.”

  After the fire, the theater department used an old church on the edge of campus where Raphael was held responsible for leaving lights on, locking students out of the building, and ringing the former church’s bells, still in the belfry.

  Perhaps the most famous tale involving Raphael originated during a production of Mary Chase’s classic comedy Harvey. The play centers on Elwood P. Dowd and his giant, albeit unseen, rabbit friend Harvey. But during the play’s run in the converted church, Raphael was “cast” in that role. Whether he actually made an appearance or initiated any shenanigans isn’t clear.

  No one seems to know why the ghost is named Raphael. Instead, people prefer to recount doors opening and closing of their own accord, mysterious footfalls in different parts of the old church, and other eerie sounds, especially late at night.

  When at last the old church was demolished and the theater moved to Rodman Center, the question became whether or not Raphael moved with it.

  According to researcher Bev Christ, he did.

  Students say electric plugs left in wall sockets are found lying on the floor, as if to conserve energy, yet locked doors are found ajar, with lights on in the rooms beyond.

  As theater ghosts go, Raphael is a benign, prankish, hard-to-spot fellow, but that doesn’t matter to theater folks at Ripon College. Alumni, students, and faculty are quite possessive of him. Bev Christ called Raphael “our” theater ghost.

  The Pendant

  Her name was Jan. She was a pretty girl. Gold-tinged hair framed a cameo face. Her large, gray-green eyes held the sunlight of today and the dreams of tomorrow. She fell in love; she fell out of love. She knew joy and despair. She studied art in college. During the summers of her young womanhood she loved to swim, boat, and picnic at her parents’ lakeside home near Spooner. Although shy and sensitive, she had the restless, searching mind that longs to know the world, to hold it close. Those who knew her hoped that all good things would come to her.

  At age twenty-eight she was dead, the loser in a three-year battle against mental illness. Her life had ended at the moment when doctors said that complete recovery was within sight, when bright tomorrows were again within her grasp. For her parents, Marion and Dick Stresau, and their other children, the tomorrows were filled with the particular sadness that attends the death of one who has been taken too soon.

  But that sadness was overshadowed by a series of puzzling incidents that began to occur in the Stresau home—events that, in time, changed the lives of every member of the family.

  It was Marion who had the first experience. Less than two weeks after her daughter’s death, she had been sound asleep when she was suddenly awakened. She glanced at the clock. It was just after three in the morning. Then she felt it—a soft touch upon her arm. She was certain that she hadn’t been dreaming. Her husband, deep in slumber, lay beside her. Drifting into sleep again, she felt once more the light touch upon her arm. A spider perhaps. Although by now fully awake, Marion was surprisingly unconcerned. She felt only a strange sense of peace and relaxation. She drifted back toward sleep, but her husband had awakened and wanted to know what was troubling her. After she muttered something about a spider, Dick got up and turned on the light. Marion got up also, and both searched the bed, but found nothing.

  Many months later, on a trip east, Marion was to learn that her mother had also been awakened on that same night at about the same time to see an oval blue mist float slowly across the end of her bed. The older woman, who had been close to her granddaughter, was convinced that the mist was Jan.

  Later on that morning of Marion’s experience, Dick was not able to go back to sleep. He awoke his wife with his restless squirming. “Hey!” he shouted. “There’s something moving under my arm!”

  Both leaped out of bed, pulled the bedding, pillows, and mattress off the bed, and examined everything thoroughly. Dick had been sleeping on his side. Had he had a muscle cramp? Had his arm gone numb? No. He was positive that something had been crawling under his arm. Unable to find a logical explanation, they put the matter out of mind and never discussed it again. Marion kept to herself the strange feelings she had that both episodes might have something to do with Jan. Was that possible?

  That likelihood strengthened a short time later when a friend sent Marion a pamphlet with her sympathy note. Although Marion was not one to be consoled by what she calls “commercialized words of comfort,” she was intrigued by the author’s statement that sometimes the personality of a deceased loved one seems to make contact with the living in the form of a touch. Was Jan really trying to communicate with her parents? Or was Marion merely the victim of “fantasies of a mind recovering from grief,” as she wrote in her personal diary? Neither she nor her husband gave credence to psychic phenomena or superstitions of any kind. Yet there was that persistent feeling that someone was trying to communicate with them, a sensation that Marion thought had something to do with the circumstances of Jan’s death. She vividly remembered the details of that day two weeks earlier: that dreadful phone call from the mental institution saying that Jan had escaped, that she’d attempted to cross a busy highway and had been hit by a truck. It might have been suicide, as she had made previous attempts. Or was it a tragic accident? These were questions Marion could never answer.

  A few weeks later, only days before Christmas, Marion started to unpack the boxes of tree ornaments. Discovering the treetop angel that Jan had made many years earlier, Marion hesitated. Should she put it on the tree this year or would the memories be too painful? She noticed that the angel’s dress was soiled and rumpled and would have to be replaced if it were to adorn the tree. Instinctively she thought Jan would have made a new dress. But just as quickly, Marion, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of love and joy, understood that it was now up to her to make the dress. Family Christmas traditions are for tender keeping.

  In the morning Marion drove to town and bought the white tulle with silver sparkles that would reflect the tree lights. Back home, she worked all morning, carefully cutting, fitting, and sewing the dress. Just before noon, she stopped to prepare lunch. Suddenly a flash of blinding light filled the room. Marion dismissed it as eyestrain. On her way to the kitchen, the light flared again.

  On the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, the Stresaus’ thirteen-year-old son Steve set out to search the woods for a Christmas tree. Although
he had always gone with his father, Marion decided that this year he was old enough to go by himself. At dusk he returned, dragging a blue spruce with thick clusters of cones. Marion remembers that it was the most beautiful spruce she had ever seen. Steve told his mother an uncanny story. He said he had hiked a long way and couldn’t find any suitable tree. Then, when he was ready to give up, the spruce suddenly appeared before him “almost like in a dream.”

  He took the tree into the kitchen to cut off the lower branches. Marion was working at the sink, her back to her son.

  Suddenly Steve shouted, “What was that flash of light?”

  Marion wheeled around. She had said nothing to anyone about the flashes she had seen a few days earlier, but after Steve described a “very bright, white light,” she knew that they had both witnessed the same phenomenon.

  On Christmas Eve, the Stresaus’ third child, their daughter Pat, arrived home from college for the holidays. After a long, cold drive, she welcomed the cheerful warmth of the blazing fire on the hearth. She settled into the orange leather swivel chair that her mother usually occupied, and Marion sat on a hassock in front of her. The family was engaged in animated conversation, catching up on Pat’s news, laughing and talking, when all of a sudden Pat’s chair tipped over backward, coming to rest against a window ledge. Pat was thrown backward, her legs straight up in the air. Her parents helped set the chair up, but it tipped backward again almost immediately. Bewildered, Pat stammered, “I . . . I didn’t do a thing!”

  Marion, who had been facing her daughter, knew she had made no movement that could have upset the chair. The two women exchanged places and the chair did not move again. If other family members forgot about the incident, Marion did not. The episode was inexplicable. The chair had been the center of roughhousing for years by boisterous teens and never before had it tipped over.

  The next morning, Marion conducted an experiment. She found that the only way she could tip the chair back was by bracing her feet against the hassock and pushing. Yet Pat hadn’t had her feet on the hassock because her mother had been sitting on it. Again, Marion thought of Jan. Could she somehow have resented the fact that her sister occupied the chair usually reserved for their mother and indicated her displeasure in a physical way?

  Future events were more puzzling. Several nights after the chair incident, Steve spent the night with a friend. After everyone had gone to sleep, loud banging on the wall awakened Marion. There was a pause, and then the blows began again. The family’s dog began barking, but the blows continued intermittently for fifteen or twenty minutes. Marion reasoned that Pat must be doing exercises in her room, and was annoyed by her daughter’s lack of consideration. Dick, a sound sleeper, was not awakened by the disturbance.

  In the morning Marion spoke to Pat about her exercising at unorthodox hours.

  “It wasn’t me,” Pat insisted. “I haven’t done exercises for years. I was sitting up in bed scared to death! I didn’t move out of the bed the whole time the banging was going on.”

  The family searched outside the house. Their home did not have any shutters or loose siding or doors that might have banged in the wind, nor could they recall any neighboring homes from which the sounds might have come. Besides, Marion remembered it as a deeply cold, silent night outside. There were no footprints or animal tracks in the freshly fallen snow. Could the two women have imagined the noises? Perhaps. And the dog? Not likely.

  The strange events of a Christmas season. Marion pondered them often, and then one day she confided in Steve that she too had seen flashes of light. In turn, he told his mother that for some strange reason he had felt a warmth and goodness during the holiday season that wasn’t connected to anything materialistic. Both shared the tenuous thought that the mysterious happenings were somehow related to Jan, that she was trying to reach them, to share once again in the happiness of a special time. The closeness of Jan seemed a reality. Marion wished she could be sure.

  According to Marion’s diary, the next strange occurrence was on a date when Pat was home on her spring break from college. She, her little brother Steve, and their dad were outdoors on a Sunday afternoon when Marion decided to tidy up the living room. As she reached for the clutter of newspapers on the coffee table, she noticed a clipping—a picture of three young women skating at an indoor ice rink in Duluth. It had been so carefully torn from the paper that the sides were nearly scissor-straight. She read the girls’ names in the caption below the picture but knew none of them. Nor did she know why anyone in her family would be interested in such a picture. Puzzled, she put the clipping aside.

  When the rest of the family came inside, Marion asked them about the picture. Pat and her father recalled having seen it when flipping through the paper that morning, but that was all.

  The next morning, Marion threw the clipping away but later, on impulse, retrieved it. A few days later, she showed it to a friend who claimed to have some talent in the extrasensory perception field. The friend thought that the meaning of the picture was quite clear. She explained that the three smiling women holding hands were symbolic figures representing Marion, Pat, and Jan. The joining of hands symbolized the closeness and happiness they had always shared. Marion thought the symbolism made sense, but still it didn’t explain how the picture had been physically removed from the newspaper.

  On the following Sunday, just before noon, Marion and Dick arrived home from a short trip to find their son studying boat-building catalogs, excited about a particular small boat that he hoped to build that summer. Marion was immediately aware of the odor of glycerin and rosewater. As she moved closer to Steve the scent became stronger. The only thing in the house with that scent was a bottle of hand lotion that Jan had left. Then, as if reading his mother’s mind, the boy looked up and said, “What is that awful perfume smell? It’s been driving me nuts all morning. Must be some of Pat’s stuff.”

  Steve went off to check, and about that time a pajama-clad Pat came into the room. She hadn’t seen the bottle of lotion since her mother had given it to her several days previously, and no one had been in her room. Steve opened a number of bottles on Pat’s bureau, and when he found the lotion bottle that had belonged to Jan, he identified the smell immediately. But how could the odor have filled the room when no one had opened the bottle? Marion wondered if Jan was trying to make her presence known. Jan was the only one in the family who had ever used that particular lotion.

  About a year later, in the summer, Marion, Dick, and Steve had been talking about a book they had all read and enjoyed, and Jan’s name came into the conversation. Marion recalled, “There was a happy feeling of closeness among the three of us that evening.” When darkness closed in, Steve and his father left Marion reading a book. Their cat was curled up on the hassock. Soon Marion noticed that she seemed to be staring at something across the room in the partly closed door of the studio/writing room. The cat’s pupils were large and black but she didn’t act frightened. Marion followed her gaze, but she couldn’t see anything unusual, not even shadows as the room beyond was well lit.

  The family’s dog Tuffy, which had been asleep at Marion’s feet, suddenly jumped up and stared at the glass-paneled door that opened onto the porch. The terrier’s tail wagged as she trotted to the door. Marion was startled by the dog’s behavior because, like many small dogs, she was an excellent watchdog, accepting only the family and barking furiously at the approach of any stranger or animal. Yet her husband and son were still in Steve’s room. Marion could hear their voices.

  Perplexed, she got up, opened the sliding door, and let the dog out. Tuffy circled the area beyond the porch but evidently picked up no scent and bounded back inside. Several minutes later, Marion realized that the studio door was directly in line with the glass door. Whatever the cat had seen in the studio door might have been reflected in the glass door across the room. Could that be? It has been suggested that animals often have the ability to see discarnate entities invisible to humans. Marion concluded that Jan�
��s presence must be in the room and that the animals, recognizing it, were not afraid.

  The dog and cat eventually lost interest in whatever had attracted their attention, and wandered off. Marion resumed her reading. Suddenly, a clattering noise shattered the silence. It was as if something metallic had crashed to the floor, and the noise seemed to have come from the studio doorway. Marion got up and checked the room and both sides of the door. The cat, alarmed by the noise, ran into the studio and sniffed and pawed around. Marion found nothing that could have explained the commotion.

  The touch in the night . . . the brilliant light . . . the tipping chair . . . the banging on the wall . . . the newspaper clipping . . . the aroma of glycerin and rosemary . . . a presence felt only by the animals—were these only a series of unconnected events? The imaginings of a sensitive, bereaved family? Or had the ghost of Jan returned to brighten the lives of those she had loved? One classic theory is that the ghost of a person who has died an unexpected death often returns to familiar places. Another theory holds that ghosts of those who do not know how to proceed to further spiritual development after death come back to stay with loved ones. It’s all speculation, of course.

  But the Stresaus were not content to speculate. They wanted proof of Jan’s continuing presence. The long search was encouraging at times, disheartening at other times. It culminated in the family’s participation in a prayer group near Chicago. It was in this prayer circle that the Stresaus believe they received irrefutable evidence of Jan’s existence after death.

  One of the psychics, in a semi-trance, spoke of a pendant—teardrop shaped and edged with small seed pearls and filigree work. The pendant’s stone was described as being mottled in color. This information was not significant at first. Marion was certain that there was no pendant of that type in the family.