Diane Bonner is Rachel’s younger sister by several years. She has encountered three ghosts and seen a vivid dream turn inexplicably into reality.
Diane moved with Rachel and their mother to Chippewa Falls when she was a junior in high school. On a particular Sunday night in August she looked forward to her new school starting the next morning. She and her sister were staying with their grandmother until a house could be found to rent.
Diane had gone to bed at about ten o’clock. How long she had been asleep she didn’t know. But she was suddenly awake and alert, sitting up in bed. Through an open window she saw stars shining in the hot, clear night.
Then she saw the upper half of an old man wrapped in a vaporous mist at the foot of her bed. He wore work trousers and a blue short-sleeved shirt. A bushy white moustache curled over his upper lip, and a full white beard reached down to his chest. His white hair was receded to nearly the middle of his head. His deep-set, extraordinarily blue eyes bore into Diane as she sat transfixed on the bed. A kind of light seemed to emanate from them.
Nothing was said and the old man did not move. As quickly as he had come, he was gone.
The next day after school Diane found her grandmother chatting with a neighbor woman. The young girl told the women about her visitor. Her grandmother scoffed at the tale, but the neighbor did not.
“Why, that sounds like old Mr. Banks*,” she said. “He died in that house about twenty years ago!”
A few years later Diane had an encounter with a ghost strikingly similar to her sister Rachel’s. It was shortly after Diane had graduated from high school. A good friend of hers, Tom Kearsley*, had been told that his headaches were the result of an inoperable brain tumor. He apparently had been born with it.
Kearsley was one of the most popular boys in Diane’s high school class. He was the type of boy nearly everyone respected and liked, always ready to help his friends. Selfless was the word used often to describe his outlook on life.
As the youngest child in his family, Tom was particularly close to his parents and especially his father, whom he idolized.
Diane and her boyfriend, whom she would later marry, were the only close friends to whom Tom confided the tragic news. Six months after the tumor was first diagnosed, Tom, Diane, her boyfriend, and a group of friends attended a party. The next morning Diane learned that Tom had been rushed to a hospital and doctors were preparing to perform brain surgery. Before the operation could begin, Tom Kearsley passed away.
Diane recalled, “About eleven in the morning I suddenly felt my skin tingle and I immediately thought of Tom. A friend called later and said Tom had died about ten thirty that morning.”
He was buried a few days later. The next night Diane awoke with a start at 11:30 p.m. She looked across the room and Tom was standing only a few feet from her bed. He looked as he did in life, as if he had never died.
Diane described what happened next: “There was no verbal communication between us, but it was almost as if I could read his thoughts. And he said, ‘Diane, I know everyone feels bad about my death, but please tell them not to worry. I’m happy here.’ And then he was gone.”
It was very difficult for his friends to accept Tom’s death.
Whenever they would gather, the conversation inevitably turned to Tom and how he was missed so very much. Diane accepted his death better than most of his grieving friends and relatives.
“He was only nineteen but he had a very good life. People adored him. What more could anyone want?” she would remind them.
Perhaps that’s why the ghost of Tom Kearsley came once again to Diane. It was about a week after his burial. Just as before she awoke in the middle of the night to see a vague form of a man standing before her.
“Please tell everyone to leave me alone,” the ghost told Diane. “I know everyone is still upset. But, please, have them remember the good times and leave me alone.”
Even after life Tom was concerned and moved by friends in distress. Diane carried out his commands, and the ghost was released from his earthly wanderings.
Two years later Diane had her third session with a ghost. By then married, she and her husband were in a century-old house on Elm Street in Chippewa Falls.
Shortly after the couple moved in, Diane was busying herself with makeup in front of a large mirror in the upstairs bathroom. She reached down for a brush, and when she glanced back into the mirror she saw two reflections! The disembodied head of an old woman was staring at her from over her shoulder. Her emaciated face looked like old leather, weathered and deeply etched with wrinkles, cheeks sunken, thin lips hardly distinguishable. Her long, gray hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and parted straight down the middle. Diane swung around but saw no one behind her. The old lady’s image had vanished from the mirror as well.
She never again encountered the old woman in the mirror, and she never discovered who the ghost might have been.
Diane Bonner’s last encounter with the unknown happened upon her father’s death. Her parents had been divorced, and Diane and Rachel lived with their mother. They rarely saw their father.
Diane clearly remembered the “dream” she had the night before she learned of her father’s death.
“The dream wasn’t about my father, but he kept appearing in it,” Diane recalled. “I don’t believe I’d dreamed about him since he left us.”
At the end of the dream, Diane saw herself at a table with a stack of large-denomination bills in front of her. A stranger was beside her. The money was hers, he said.
The next evening Diane’s mother called. She had somber news. “Well,” Diane replied, “if it has anything to do with money it has to be good news.”
Her mother was strangely silent. Then she told her daughter that Diane’s father had died. Further, her mother said, Diane would receive an inheritance from her father’s estate. Depending upon the settlement, she could receive as much as ten thousand dollars.
How had her mother known about the inheritance so shortly after her former husband’s death? Diane learned that her father had discussed his will with his former wife only a few weeks before, but he had made her promise to keep the terms of the estate confidential from his daughters until after he died.
In this instance, a dream turned out to be amazingly exact.
The Phantom Congregation
A few miles from Amery, down a winding country lane, past trim farmhouses and grazing cattle, perched atop a windswept knoll, there stands an old Lutheran church. Its profile juts out sentinel-like over the rolling fields, casting its shadow over the old church cemetery. The building, painted a brilliant white, is a plain structure, a large cross affixed to an outside wall near the main entrance the only decorative touch. A bell tower rises dramatically from the roofline, its spire visible for several miles in any direction. A modern, single-story addition housing offices and classrooms angles away from the main building.
Like hundreds of other country Protestant churches across the Midwest, pioneer Norwegian immigrants erected the building. Sunday worshippers first assembled there nearly 150 years ago. The old ways died hard: services weren’t offered in English until the 1940s.
But this church is very different from most other rural houses of worship.
For nearly fifty years, there have been reports that within its walls are trapped phantom worshippers speaking in muted tones.
And once, in that majestic steeple, the heavy iron bell tolled all by itself.
The people who have witnessed the peculiar incidents—including a former pastor—were all hardworking, practical people not prone to belief in ghosts, phantoms, or bells that ring without a human touch. Yet at least some of them would never venture into the church alone . . . at night.
The phantom congregants were first heard over forty years ago when Barbara Anderson* was the church organist. She had always been reluctant to enter the church at night, but never out of fear of anything unseen. Even in rural areas, women sometimes hesitate to travel
alone after sunset, or to enter isolated buildings. She therefore decided upon daylight hours as those in which to practice at the organ.
Anderson didn’t think anything peculiar could happen during the day. But then she heard the voices.
“It sounded like people talking, so loud I could almost hear what they were saying. The first time, it was just kind of a mumbling though. I didn’t bother to go downstairs where the voices were coming from. I thought it was somebody in the church [ basement].”
The voices continued as she tried to concentrate on her music. Her curiosity got the better of her. She decided to go downstairs to see who was there. The room was empty.
“I even went to the outside door to look into the churchyard because the voices had been so loud,” she explained. Except for the quiet old parishioners buried in the church cemetery, she was quite alone.
On two separate occasions Anderson heard clear, distinct conversations in the church. But at other times, on other days, the voices seemed distant, muffled.
And each time, Anderson packed up her sheet music and left for home.
She told no one of her experiences. Nearly fifteen years passed before she found out that another church parishioner also heard phantom voices there.
Sheila Larsen* was a volunteer who spent countless hours helping to operate the small country parish on a tight budget. One of her jobs had been to assist with the annual financial report.
On the first Friday of a December some years ago, Larsen and another woman sat in the small church office poring over ledgers and balance sheets. A small electric space heater warmed the room, while an electric mimeograph machine hummed in a corner, churning out pages of figures that would be discussed later that week by the congregation at its annual budget meeting. It was past ten o’clock at night and the two women were anxious to finish the job and return home to their families.
Ever so slowly, almost without a conscious realization of when it started, the women became aware of a low murmuring of voices coming from somewhere deep within the darkened church. They thought they had been alone; no one else had been scheduled to use the church that night. The voices grew more distinct as the pair anxiously stared through the open office door and down the dimly lit hallway. The murmuring voices seemed to be coming from the direction of the basement, where Barbara Anderson had noticed them, though Larsen and her companion had never heard the story. “You couldn’t hear what they said, but it was loud enough so that we thought a meeting was going on,” Larsen explained.
The mysterious conversation seemed to get louder, as if someone turned up the volume on some unseen radio. But there was no radio, nor any other possible cause for the voices.
Bravely, the women looked through the main part of the church. They even ducked down the basement steps and poked around the dark basement.
“Of course, there was nobody there. We came back up and went back to work. But the voices began again, just as before. We hurried up, got our work done, and left!”
The voices still drifted through the church as the women scurried out the door.
Sheila Larsen never could explain what happened to her that night. She tried to rationalize the experience. Was it the wind? No, the evening air was quiet and cold. Was it someone yelling out the window of a passing vehicle? Highly doubtful since the church office in which Larsen was working is some distance from the county highway and all the doors and windows were tightly closed. The nearest house was several hundred yards away, save for the parsonage across the road; and no one was at home there that night.
When Anderson and Larsen later happened to compare notes, they were struck by the similarity of their experiences: the voices always faded as the women neared the apparent source, the church basement; the voices seemed to be part of a rather large gathering; and both discerned men’s and women’s voices within the murmurings. However, neither could distinguish specific words or phrases, nor could they even be certain it was English they were hearing.
Then there is the church bell. It once rang—by itself.
The ponderous, cast iron object hangs in the church steeple, of course. A long, heavy cord twists downward from the bell to the bottom of a narrow stairway adjacent to the choir loft. The door to the staircase is usually kept locked to keep curious youngsters out of the musty, dimly lit tower.
The bell’s strange behavior took place on a day in June. Three people were in the yard of the parsonage across the street—Rachel Halvorsen*, Barbara Anderson, and the church pastor, the Rev. Elizabeth Robinson*, a young woman not long out of the seminary who was serving her first congregation in the Amery church. She and her husband lived in the church-owned house.
The trio had been talking only a short while when the clear, reverberating ring of the church bell echoed from across the quiet road. Anderson and the Rev. Robinson stared at each other, and then glanced over toward the bell tower. Though neither could believe what they had heard, they agreed that it had been the bell. The church was empty, or so they had thought. In a bizarre twist, the third woman, Rachel Halvorsen, heard nothing.
“I don’t know if it rang once or twice,” Anderson said. “Although the other woman with us didn’t hear it, we all decided to go over and see who was in [the church].”
They considered several scenarios, including the possibility that a youngster had been accidentally locked inside the church and was using the bell to summon help.
They unlocked the main door and checked through the basement, kitchen, bathrooms, every hiding place they could think of. They climbed up onto the balcony to see if someone was there.
“The door to the steeple was closed, and the rope was not moving,” Anderson recalled.
There was nothing that could move that bell save for a solid tug on the rope. Yet Anderson and her pastor heard the bell ring, a soft pealing, they said, as if someone had gently pulled the rope.
Could they have been mistaken? Might it perhaps have been a cowbell off in the distance?
Not likely. “Women in rural areas know the difference between a cowbell and a church bell!” the Rev. Robinson said emphatically.
And what she heard on that June day was most definitely a church bell . . . her church’s bell . . . rung by unseen hands.
The history of the church is for the most part unexceptional. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, there have been no spectacular or peculiar deaths there to account for a possible haunting. The only noteworthy element of the church’s history concerns the graveyard touched by the building’s long shadow. In a previous era, people who committed suicide were denied burial in consecrated ground and instead were interred outside a white picket fence surrounding the cemetery. Over the years, the wood rotted and the fence collapsed. Eventually it was taken down; so one might imagine that the spirits of those who died natural and unnatural deaths now mingle freely in their musty graves.
Hauntings do seem to center on people who may be especially sensitive to paranormal events. Perhaps Sheila Larsen, Barbara Anderson, and the Rev. Elizabeth Robinson were three of those rare individuals.
For her part, however, Rev. Robinson rejected the idea of ghosts at the church. “I don’t think that when people die their spirits float around.”
But she trusted the witnesses who heard the voices in the church and what she heard for herself—the tolling of the church bell.
Although she remained skeptical, the Rev. Robinson was open to the possibility that the voices in the church might have been of a paranormal nature even if they did not belong to ghosts per se. That is some consolation to Sheila Larsen and Barbara Anderson. They believe something not of this world was congregating in their church.
In the years since, Elizabeth Robinson took a position at another parish, and other ministers have taken her place at the Amery church. Stories continue to circulate about other odd events at the church—a ladder that mysteriously ended up back in a storeroom after a custodian had set it up when he wanted to change a light bulb in the ceiling, se
veral parishioners watching as a soft drink can glided toward the edge of a cafeteria table in the basement . . . and then back to the middle again. Many others continue to avoid the church at night altogether. Who could blame them?
Summerwind
The young Wauwatosa woman and her family were doing what thousands of American families do every summer: spending their treasured vacation days at a beautiful lake resort in Wisconsin’s North Woods. In this case the family was about as far north in the state as you can travel, near Boulder Junction, in Vilas County, only a handful of miles from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One evening as the family dined at a nearby supper club, the family struck up a conversation with their waitress. Among the stories she told them was an intriguing one about a strange, crumbling mansion on West Bay Lake, near the Wisconsin–Michigan border and only a few miles from where they were staying. Not long before, it had been listed as one of the nine most haunted places in the nation by Life magazine.
The story was captivating, especially to Mary Beth, the family’s teenage daughter, who listened intently.
She decided to do more than listen to the tale—she wanted to pay a visit to the place. A few days later, she and several friends found the rambling, abandoned house, after some searching, on the wide lake’s pine shores. From a distance, the wood and stone exterior looked like a set from a horror movie, albeit not nearly as terrifying with the sun shining. The girls found that someone had tried to nail shut the doors and windows, but to the curious, drawn by the house’s growing celebrity, getting inside was not that difficult. Poking through the rooms in the hulking mass did give pause if for no other reason than its dangerous physical condition. However, Mary Beth and the others, excited to have found a “real” haunted mansion, carefully made their way through the debris of shattered glass, past sagging walls with moldering wallpaper, and tiptoed their way across barely navigable, rotting floorboards. They discovered the two bullet holes in a door leading to the basement, allegedly made by someone shooting at a “ghost” in the house’s early years. A big old sprawling lake house slowly succumbing to the elements, yes, but certainly nothing outwardly unnerving or supernatural.
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