Then, one day about three weeks after the family had returned home, Marion decided that she could no longer postpone sorting through the boxes of Jan’s personal effects that had been sent on from the girl’s city apartment after she became ill. Although she had gone through everything earlier in order to send to the hospital the things Jan had wanted, Marion dreaded facing the sad task—making the difficult decisions about the final disposition of her daughter’s clothing, letters, jewelry, and other precious items that Jan had accumulated over the years. But it had to be done and one Friday morning Marion began the task.
In the bottom of a large packing box, she found her daughter’s green leather jewel case. The top tray held an undistinguished jumble of jewelry pins, loose beads including a collection of baby pearls, and a pair of filigreed gold earrings. Marion picked up a round glass bead and was about to toss it into her giveaway pile when she saw something moving inside the bead. She held it up for a closer look and, in doing so, nearly dropped it. The bead was not round at all; it was a teardrop-shaped globe. And something inside was moving indeed. Tiny, iridescent white chips floated in a liquid and, as Marion moved it, the particles changed position, flashing darts of red, aquamarine, and purple-blue. The pointed end of the globe was inserted into a four-pronged silver shaft to which was attached a ring for a chain. A pendant! Yet it wasn’t the one the psychic had described; it had no mottled stone.
Marion laid it aside and resumed her sorting. But, drawn irresistibly back to the pendant, she kept glancing over at it. Then she realized that, in looking at it from that particular angle of vision, it did appear to be a mottled stone, the chips motionless in the liquid. But there were no small seed pearls or filigree work that the psychic had “seen.” Of course! Pearls had surrounded the pendant as it lay in the case; the filigree must have referred to the gold earrings close by. Now deeply moved, Marion sat staring at the jewel in her palm.
The next day at the jeweler’s she bought a silver chain for the pendant. She learned that the iridescent chips inside the globe were cuttings from a flame opal suspended in glycerin. The jeweler added that she had never seen a floating opal so large and so beautiful.
The pendant on the silver chain became the family’s most cherished possession.
The Lady in Brown
Scores of ghost stories detail visitations to houses by the spirits of former occupants. Stories of people somehow “left behind” after death to watch over a home to which they had a strong emotional attachment weren’t unfamiliar to one young woman who lived near Durand. She knew all about such things.
Brenda Weidner lived for five years in a haunted house southwest of Durand. She, her husband, Robert, and the couple’s two-year-old son moved into the rented, rural, two-story frame home without the slightest indication the house was anything but what it appeared to be—a rather rundown farmhouse in a grove of elm and oak trees on a county highway, not unlike thousands of other homes across the Wisconsin countryside.
Everything seemed normal the first year. Robert Weidner drove each day to a factory where he worked the night shift. Brenda stayed home with young Derek. But the idyllic country life was shattered late one spring evening as Brenda waited for her husband.
It was that night when she first heard insistent pounding in the walls, gently at first, almost too faint to detect. Then the sound grew in intensity. The walls vibrated so much that the curtains shook. She thought at first it was someone outside with a baseball bat. It happened first on one living room wall and then on another wall, and then back and forth. It would go on for five or ten minutes, just like someone was trying to get out. When the hammering ceased, Brenda sat frozen on the couch, afraid to move and reluctant to search outside on a cold, starless night. Her husband fruitlessly searched the house and grounds when he returned home from work. The pounding continued periodically, but only for a few minutes shortly after ten o’clock at night. Brenda didn’t think it had anything to do with mice or squirrels trying to find a way out. The sounds were absent during the day and at other times of the night. Robert never heard the sounds, as he was most often still at work.
A few months later, however, Brenda learned she was not the only person to have heard the strange noises. A local teenager had been employed by the Weidners to watch over Derek when the couple went out for an evening, but the young woman became “unavailable” after only a short while. Brenda and her husband were perplexed.
The girl said it was nothing the family had done; it was the house that upset her. She said she couldn’t stand the pounding inside the walls, first behind a wood stove and then from across the room. That’s where Brenda had heard it as well. They had never mentioned it to the babysitter.
The pounding in the walls was not the only frightening experience the young girl had in the home. Brenda explained:
Every time she shut off the basement lights they would go on again and the basement door would swing open. She could shut off the lights and close the door and go back in there in five minutes and the lights would be on again and the door open. She couldn’t take it any more. Every time I called she would have excuses. I finally found out why. It was the house.
Young Derek provided the first hint as to an identity for what they came to believe was their unseen tenant. The boy’s bedroom was adjacent to the living room and only a few feet from the small kitchen. Brenda was preparing lunch one afternoon when she heard her son’s voice coming from behind the closed door of his room. The young mother walked over and stood outside the bedroom. She heard only her son’s muffled voice. He would say a few words, stop, and then continue. Brenda thought at the time the child was carrying on a conversation with someone. But only his voice was audible. For several minutes Brenda listened. At length the boy came out with a confused expression.
“Mommy,” he said, “I just talked to an old, old lady in my room.” Brenda glanced past her son into the small bedroom and saw no one. She asked him if he was positive. Yes, the child replied, vigorously nodding his head.
His mother said he wasn’t so much scared as bewildered by the experience. She would have dismissed the child’s report but for the earlier experience. Derek had never before made up imaginary people or playmates. Brenda began to wonder if there was a connection between this mysterious “old woman” and the knockings.
Other events reinforced Brenda’s belief that some unseen entity was at work in the house. She might hear moaning, or groans, in the kitchen area. It would come from behind, but no one else was in the house.
“It was like someone was in pain,” she said.
Brenda had never taken seriously the stories of haunted houses or ghostly apparitions. But now she began to wonder if there wasn’t some truth to those tales.
Determined to learn more about the house and its history, Brenda began questioning neighbors and the present owner of the house, the elderly son of the original family. Gradually she pieced together the story of Mrs. Gerda Biermann, the late wife of the house’s builder. Her entire life had been spent in the house; she died there in the 1950s. But what startled Brenda were two peculiar facts relating to the woman’s last days on earth: Gerda Biermann had died in the room now occupied by young Derek Weidner, and she reportedly had told a housekeeper that she would never leave that house.
A few months later, it seemed that Gerda’s vow was more than the idle ramblings of an elderly woman.
Brenda was sitting on the couch in the comfortably furnished living room shortly after midnight, watching a television program and waiting for her husband to arrive home. She expected him within a few minutes.
Suddenly Brenda heard the kitchen door swing open and then slam shut moments later.
“Robert, is that you?” she called out.
There was no answer. Surprised, she rose quickly and walked into the kitchen. The nearly transparent image of a woman wearing a brown dress hovered near the outside door. The specter hung motionless in the air, its vacant eyes staring past the frightened young wo
man. Brenda saw that although her body was perfectly outlined, a vaporous mist formed an aura around the figure. Several inches of space separated the specter’s feet from the kitchen floor.
Suddenly the ghost floated slowly across the room. Within seconds it disappeared into the pantry. Brenda walked over cautiously and peered in. The small room was empty.
Brenda was dazed. It was the first time a “physical” presence had presented itself to her. As she turned to walk into the living room, her thoughts raced back to all she had learned of the late Gerda Biermann. Yes, she realized, the specter in the kitchen did fit her description. The dress was plain and old-fashioned, her face haggard and old. Yet Brenda couldn’t grasp the possibilities of having just seen a ghost.
She certainly hadn’t dreamed the entire episode, and returned to the kitchen for a glass of water to calm her frayed nerves. But what she beheld didn’t help assuage her nerves: the pantry light was now on, the basement door stood wide open, and the basement lights were ablaze. She had just checked the pantry minutes before. And yet her eyes didn’t lie. She gazed down the rough, wooden basement steps, silently listening. She switched off the lights and closed the basement door. Now she understood the babysitter’s concern about the basement and its perplexing lights. What hand had turned them on? What fingers had encircled the basement doorknob and softly pulled it open?
Until the Weidner family moved out of the house, Brenda often found the basement door open and the downstairs lights switched on without reason. Brenda wondered if there was some significance to these odd happenings and searched the old, musty, and rather forbidding earthen cellar several times, but it contained nothing out of the ordinary as far as she could tell.
Other events were equally puzzling. A vase Brenda often filled with flowers would be moved from in front of a kitchen radio to beside it. She never saw it move, but would find it shifted even when she was home alone. Perhaps Gerda preferred the vase in a different position.
The Weidner’s dog, a German shepherd, also sensed a ghostly presence in the house. Brenda said that on numerous occasions the dog crouched down on her stomach. Brenda thinks at those times Gerda was around.
Shortly before the Weidners moved from the house, Brenda had her final, and in many ways most chilling, encounter with the ghost of Gerda Biermann. The late woman’s son had recently built a new porch onto the rear of the house. On a February afternoon a few days after the job was finished Brenda was in the kitchen fixing a meal; the dog lay at her feet while her son napped in his bedroom. From the new porch off the kitchen she heard a woman’s voice: “Look what my son has done to the house. He built this porch.”
The dog’s ears perked up and her fur stood on end. She started to growl. With a sort of low, articulated mumble, the voice from the porch then spoke in what sounded to Brenda like German, though she did not know the language. Brenda threw open the door. The voice stopped. Her dog ran out and sniffed at the corners, on the steps, even down on the ground. She knew someone had been out there. Snow was on the ground but there were no footprints or tire tracks. Yet there had been that voice. That was the last time Brenda Weidner ever heard from her elderly, live-in ghost. And for that she was grateful.
Psychic Sisters
Rachel Harper * and Diane Bonner * are sisters who shared a curious talent: the ability to act as a magnet for ghosts.
The first time a ghost visited Rachel she was laying next to her slumbering husband in the bedroom of their small frame home near Neillsville. Her husband and their two young children had been asleep for hours. But Rachel was still alert, gazing at the darkened ceiling, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.
Suddenly she felt a presence in the room. A third person was watching her. Rachel looked across the room and saw a man’s form pulsating in a fog-like haze.
Rachel recognized him—his name was Billy . . . Billy Fulham*—and he had been dead for nearly ten years. They had been high school sweethearts. But, as with many teenage romances, love withered and the couple went their separate ways—Rachel to marriage and homemaking and Billy to the army shortly after graduation.
No one knew precisely what happened, but Billy left his army camp one night without permission and was killed in an automobile accident. The young man who had died too soon was buried in the small town where he had grown to manhood.
Rachel couldn’t attend the funeral, but she often thought of Billy during the ensuing years. He had an intense love for the outdoors, and whenever Rachel gazed at a particularly spectacular sunset, or walked across a low hill after a gentle rain, or trod softly in a misty morning fog, she remembered Billy and how he would have reveled in these simple pleasures.
All these memories flooded back to her as he floated toward her in that night-shrouded room. Rachel could sense a deep sorrow, almost as if he wanted to be consoled over a great loss. And then Billy vanished as suddenly as he had materialized.
The next morning Rachel told her husband about the strange visit during the night. “It wasn’t a dream,” Rachel told him. “Billy was in that room.”
She had remembered her dreams before, as many of us do. But Billy was most definitely not the product of the fragmented experiences released in the eerie world of dreams.
Her husband scoffed at the incident. Rachel, too, was outwardly jocular over the “ghost.” Yet she was secretly distressed and puzzled by the visit. Rachel wanted to dismiss it as a hallucination or imagination . . . or something. On the following night, however, Billy came again. Just as on the previous evening, she though he was trying to communicate with her. Yet there was still some barrier between him and Rachel.
“There was this sadness, though, this deep depression. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.” Rachel also felt that Billy was trying to draw her away; he wanted her to join him.
For three consecutive nights Billy appeared and tried to make Rachel understand his sense of sorrow.
On the fourth night, Billy came as before. But this time Rachel left with him. There was no conscious movement, Rachel said, no action. She felt herself being lifted by the shoulders and suddenly accelerated to “a different dimension.”
Rachel found herself in a place of whiteness and such brilliant light that it seemed as if the entire world’s light grid had been turned on at once.
“It was cold. The beings I saw weren’t human and they weren’t three-dimensional. But, they had faces, and you recognized them as people but could only see faces.”
Rachel again sensed a suffering, an emptiness in the beings around her as though they needed to be released from some indefinable shackles.
The couple passed through this world of silence and moved into a void occupied by a single stone bench with intricate, etched scrollwork on the backrest. There was no talk. In fact, there was no sound at all.
As suddenly as she had entered this realm, Rachel was back next to her husband. She still wasn’t sure if it hadn’t all been a dream.
By the following day Rachel was afraid for darkness to fall. What was Billy trying to say? Why was he coming to her? Were these all dreams or something else entirely?
On Friday night, Rachel lay awake wondering if the pattern of the previous evenings would be repeated. She was not to be disappointed. Rachel saw him in the doorway, shimmering and beckoning toward her. He wore the same sorrowful countenance about him. But something was wrong. Rachel knew then that he was saying good-bye. Billy had been unable to reach her. He seemed to want to make her understand that something was wrong and that she had to look into it.
When Rachel awoke the next morning she was frightened.
She decided to telephone Billy’s mother. It had been years since they’d last spoken to each other, and perhaps his mother could understand the reason for his visits.
Mrs. Fulham answered after several rings and seemed delighted to hear from Rachel. Casual conversation followed. Rachel asked the woman how she had been.
“Well, all right, under the circumstances.” Mrs.
Fulham replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Rachel, my husband died last Sunday night.”
She froze at the words. So, that was it.
Billy first appeared the night after his father died. That was the sorrow he felt. Somehow, Billy knew that Rachel could tell his mother how sad he was and how much he wanted to be there to comfort her.
Rachel tried to tell Mrs. Fulham about Billy but the woman refused to listen. “I don’t want to hear about or talk about such things,” the older woman said.
But the puzzle had been solved. The final missing piece had been put into place. The visits of the ghost had not been a product of Rachel’s imagination.
As the months passed, Rachel gradually eased Billy Fulham from her mind. But she was not able to escape the ghost of Billy Fulham.
It was just past nine thirty in the evening nearly a year later. Rachel was propped up in bed reading a novel. Suddenly she felt Billy coming down the hallway. Rachel didn’t know how she knew, only that she looked up and fully expected to see him standing in her doorway once again.
But he was not there.
“You could just feel him though,” Rachel explained. “It was like electricity charging through the air.”
She spoke out loud and told him that she couldn’t go through the same experience again.
Rachel reached over to a bedside telephone and dialed Mrs. Fulham. She was in clear distress. “What has happened?” Rachel asked. Earlier in the day, Mrs. Fulham said, her bank mortgage had been canceled. She had been unable to make the monthly payments and would have to move within thirty days!
Two visits from a dead soldier, and two tragic events in the life of his mother. Perhaps it was a hand reaching out from the grave to console a grief-stricken parent. Rachel never again saw the ghost of Billy Fulham.
Haunted Wisconsin Page 14