Part II Southern Frights
The Music Box
It was a hot, muggy late July evening in Madison. The young University of Wisconsin–Madison student hadn’t lived in the city very long. A recent transfer from another University of Wisconsin campus, she was subletting a second-floor apartment with her best friend and two other girls in a plain, old, American foursquare house on the city’s near west side. It was a spacious apartment with separate bedrooms for each girl. They shared a living room and kitchen. On this evening, she was studying, her roommates at work or out of town.
Even with the windows open there wasn’t much of a breeze, and her bedroom at the rear of the house was especially stifling. She got up to stretch her legs, and wandered into the kitchen and on into the living room hoping to find some relief from the heat.
Instead, she found a whodunit.
From her friend’s bedroom off the living room she heard a music box playing “My Funny Valentine.”
“I thought it really was odd that the music box would just start … on its own. I hoped that a breeze might be the cause.”
But that was not the case.
Her friend kept the inner mechanism of a music box sitting on a shelf. She walked over to the open bedroom door and glanced in. The mechanism was indeed tinkling away, playing the old standard. Across the room the window was open, but there was no breeze coming through it.
“Okay, I thought. I’ll just stop freaking myself out. I’ll shut the window so the wind can’t blow against it,” she said to herself at the time, while knowing full well the open window could not explain the curious event.
And then her evening got really strange.
She was taking a step into the bedroom when suddenly her right arm shot straight out in front of her, parallel to the floor and stiff, but her hand remained relaxed. It was, she said, like someone had lifted her arm and didn’t want to let go. She felt no pressure being applied, nothing had grabbed it, yet she could not move her arm.
“I just stood there. I thought, well, this is weird. Then I took a step and sat down on the bed.”
Her arm was still thrust outward, immobile.
That’s when she started talking … to whatever might be with her in that room—something unseen, something letting her know it was there. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“I said ‘Okay, I don’t know what’s happening here but I don’t mean you any harm.’ I tried to see if I could put my arm down. And I could. I let it drop to my side.”
Part of her, quite naturally, felt very foolish “talking to the air,” but, on the other hand, “I thought I had been by myself.”
She went on to introduce herself and say that she was living in the house only for the summer and didn’t want to disturb anyone and that she was now going back to her bedroom to study, which she proceeded to do.
This may seem an improbable episode to many, yet for Krista Clumpner it was an enigma so very real that it mystifies her even now. Today a university librarian in Marquette, Michigan, Clumpner spent just one summer in that Madison apartment. By the end of August, she and her roommates had moved out, but that was because their subletting lease was up and not because of the music box incident.
Clumpner did tell her best friend and the other two roommates about the incident, but they were skeptical. Her friend said the music box only played when she wound it up, so perhaps it had been wound too tight and the wind somehow released it.
“Okaaay,” Clumpner replied, clearly not believing that rationalization.
“I think it was a ghost or spirit, whatever you want to call it. It obviously wasn’t something that was too angry or threatening. I talked to it, I acknowledged it, and I never had another incident. I wasn’t afraid to live there even though that had happened. I simply thought it was odd, but that it was okay.”
She didn’t have time to look into the history of the house because of the brevity of her residence there, but wishes now that she had. The young men who lived in the apartment during the school year couldn’t provide any answers, though Clumpner and her roommates told them about the incident. They didn’t seem terribly surprised. The men did tell her the bedroom most recently had been occupied by a biology major who kept the remains of dead animals, including a bird skeleton dangling from a light cord. She thought that strange, but didn’t see any connection between dead birds and her experience.
Krista Clumpner went on to receive her undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s in library science. From there she worked at various historical libraries in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan before settling in Marquette, where she is the head of technical services and systems at the local university library.
Various professional advancements, her marriage, and the arrival of children have not diminished Clumpner’s occasional interactions with the otherworldly. She believes she is more open to the paranormal than the average person, and not just because of the music box incident. Several incidents at her home in Marquette seem to bear her out.
After a year of renting following their move to Marquette, Clumpner and her artist-husband bought a large, old, early-twentieth-century house, with some Victorian flourishes. Designed primarily in the American Foursquare tradition, it has spacious rooms and a walk-up attic. Yet it’s been a very “odd” home from the very beginning, she said.
Before moving in their furniture, Clumpner insisted that the living and dining rooms be painted. She picked an off-white color with a peach tinge. After they moved in, her husband went to work trying to dislodge a pair of pocket doors that slid back into the walls between the two rooms. After tugging and pushing and prying, he at last pried one loose. The couple discovered the door had been painted the same color his wife had chosen for the two rooms.
“We kept having things like that happen,” she remarked. “We decided to put in a white picket fence. While the workmen were digging the holes to put in the fence, they came across the top part of an old white picket fence. We were meant to have this house because we’re taking it back to the way it was, to what it was.”
Coincidental color schemes and duplicate picket fences were one thing, but her discovery soon thereafter that her family may have been sharing the home with a ghost was quite another.
“Every now and then I’d see something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned directly toward it, it wouldn’t be there.” She attributed it to “seeing things” or simply being tired—the “regular notions” one resorts to when something like that happens.
One night her three-year-old daughter wandered downstairs in her pajamas, rubbing her eyes.
“Mommy, can you tell that little boy to get off the landing?”
She made the request quite matter-of-factly. The family had never talked about the earlier “coincidences,” nor had Clumpner spoken to anyone about the “shadows” she’d been seeing—coincidentally on the same landing her young daughter was now referring to.
“It was a ‘he’s keeping me up’ kind of statement she made,” she explained. “I said, ‘Okay, don’t worry about it. He won’t hurt you. Maybe you should just tell him to go away?’ That calmed her down.”
Krista Clumpner and her husband had been sitting together when their daughter came downstairs. After she’d gone back to bed, they looked at each other and began comparing notes. She told him she’d seen a shadow on that landing too. Her husband admitted he’d glimpsed what looked like a person’s shadow passing by in the attic. But neither had seen anything definite or found anything intimidating.
Some time later, when Clumpner’s son was a preschooler, on what otherwise seemed a typical evening, she tucked him into bed and then walked over to shut the closet door.
“No! He doesn’t want that door shut,” the child insisted.
“He who?” his mom wanted to know. “Your dad?”
“No, the little boy who lives here, he doesn’t want it shut.”
Again Clumpner complied with the unusual request of one o
f her children. She left it open. Perhaps the boy was an imaginary playmate—or perhaps something else.
But once she got back downstairs and told her husband, they decided to ask a friend who was also a psychic to help them out. They wanted to know what was going on and who might be making these periodic visits. Neither one wanted to send away the child spirit—if indeed that’s what it was—but rather simply sought to understand the nature of the haunting.
The psychic told them there was indeed a “presence” in their home, a child whose name was Jeremy, and that he had been confined to a lonely life in the bedroom that now belonged to Clumpner’s son because of a debilitating illness, perhaps tuberculosis. He could only watch through his windows as other children played outside. The psychic said at some point the house caught fire, trapping the boy in his bedroom. He died while hiding in his closet to escape the smoke and flames.
The psychic worked to “release” the boy’s spirit and told him he didn’t have to stay there. Though Clumpner and her husband made it clear they were willing to share the house with the boy’s spirit, she says that after that evening everything seemed to quiet down. Her children didn’t have any further encounters with the boy and neither Clumpner nor her husband again caught sight of shadows flitting by.
Clumpner took the psychic’s findings for what they were, a heartbreaking story that couldn’t be proven one way or the other. She did some research into the house’s history and found that its original owner had been a doctor, but learned little else.
That’s when the couple’s penchant for remodeling may have helped solve the mystery. As in many older homes, some of the rooms had been paneled over. Their son’s room was one of them. When they stripped the paneling away from the walls and ceiling near the bedroom closet, they found scorched wood. Similar remnants of scorched wood were located in the attic over that same bedroom.
Krista Clumpner and her family still live in and continue to be fond of their big old home, despite the occasional hints of dark secrets. She holds out enough hope that this may not be the end of her brushes with the supernatural.
“I’m not sure [the little boy] will come back. We haven’t seen anything more but maybe someday we’ll move somewhere and I’ll have another experience.”
Someone to Watch over Me
Tales of early American wayside inns or century-old hotels inevitably stir visions of romance, danger, … and ghosts. Today, many have succumbed to the ravages of time, while others manage to survive in one form or another as restaurants, hotels, or a combination of the two. But in any case, it is inevitable that where there was so much transient, sometimes tumultuous life there would be some afterlife—guests who refuse to bring down the curtain on their final act. Sometimes the word “guest” is a misnomer when applied to what might haunt a few of Wisconsin’s old hostelries.
The Walker House is generally considered Wisconsin’s oldest inn, having opened in 1836 at Mineral Point, then the “metropolis” of the lead-mining region in the state’s southwestern corner. The handsome, three-story stone building, with its later two-story addition at one end, exuded a decidedly continental atmosphere. In its heyday, tucked into a hillside and set off by a row of sentinel-like trees, the Walker House could have been a European baron’s hunting lodge with heavy, rough-hewn ceiling beams, the bark still on them, throughout the ground-floor rooms. An upstairs tavern featured a polished, room-length bar and walls adorned with hunting trophies.
From the beginning, the Walker House did a brisk business. Wisconsin’s territorial officers were sworn in at Mineral Point the same year the inn was built, and the little village teemed with politicians traveling back and forth between the temporary state capital at nearby Belmont and their home communities. The inn welcomed all the Cornish miners, frontiersmen, immigrants, and speculators pouring into the region, eager for the riches that the lead and zinc deposits promised. At night, the inn burst with life as the rough men jostled with one another for drink, food, and perhaps a bed on the uppermost floor.
But one customer was different from all the rest. He hadn’t come there willingly, for his brief stay preceded his hanging directly in front of the Walker House. He was an outlaw by the name of William Caffee … and it’s his ghost that may haunt this very oldest of Wisconsin inns.
The date was November 1, 1842, six years before Wisconsin obtained state-hood. Caffee had been convicted of shooting Samuel Southwick to death during an argument. A throng of over four thousand men and women—many with children in tow—turned out for the hanging, most of them with picnic baskets and camped on the hills ringing the town. The execution rite itself was macabre. Caffee was put astride his casket, where he beat out the rhythm of a funeral march with two empty beer bottles. He marched up to the scaffold erected in front of the inn with such a nonchalant and contemptuous attitude toward his own death that it brought him a sort of posthumous notoriety. No one who witnessed the spectacle would ever forget it or him.
Yet if this by itself weren’t enough to secure his place in posterity, Caffee, if we are to believe the numerous stories about him, made one final gesture to ensure his memory would remain alive forever: his ghost returned and settled in the Walker House.
The earliest reports of Caffee’s ghost arose in the mid-twentieth century when new owners took over the inn. It had sat vacant for a number of years, ruined by neglect and vandalism. Soon, the owners and a crew of young people had dug out dead trees, replaced eight hundred windowpanes, and built a native stone fireplace in the pub. Oak planking from an abandoned barn was used to cover over the pub’s walls. One dining room was refurbished and opened, serving Cornish-style luncheons and dinners. Another dining room soon followed, and then a second-floor tavern with a massive bar was made ready for guests.
Unfortunately, the business did not succeed and the Walker House was sold to a local physician. It was at about this time that a student from Madison was temporarily living in a second-floor apartment, above the inn’s office. He wasn’t happy about what he said went on when the place closed for the night: someone turned his doorknob from the outside, and he heard strange noises that he couldn’t locate or even identify. After many sleepless nights, he moved out.
Walker Calvert could understand the young man’s fear. The new owners had just hired him as a chef-manager when he discovered that sometimes things just happened in that old inn. On three different occasions, Calvert found himself talking to someone in the main dining room, but no one was ever there … nor could he recall the conversations or describe the person he was talking to. He said it was almost as if he had been hypnotized.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a real person,” he said. Waitresses who heard two voices before going into the dining room found Calvert alone. They said the other voice they’d heard through the door was definitely male.
In the kitchen, the banging and clanking of pots and pans created a din each morning … except no one was using any of the pans at the time. One older kitchen worker refused to work alone. Calvert understood: “When I was in there, I always felt that someone was following me around.”
The other waitresses felt the same way. Several of them told Calvert they would fix drinks and then feel themselves bump into something as they carried the loaded tray to tables. Only nothing was ever in their way to bump into. At other times it was a white shape that might quickly flit by.
One waitress who scoffed at the ghost tales got her comeuppance in the kitchen when her ponytail shot straight up in the air. The girl hollered, “Get away!” Her ponytail slowly dropped. But then just as suddenly it shot upright again. She became a believer. Several women customers also reported their hair being tousled or played with.
“The ghost was always doing something,” Calvert said. “It was as if he tried to prove to everyone … that he was there.”
For example, one might hear the sudden heavy breathing from close by, or the hurried footsteps, which scared a number of employees. On one occasion, a bartende
r was stooped over to check his supply of clean glasses beneath the bar when what he thought was a man’s heavy breathing made him freeze.
“Leave me alone!” he yelled.
As he straightened up, gripping the edge of the counter, the breaths grew shallower, while the slow footfalls across the aged floorboards receded across the room.
On a December morning shortly before the Walker House closed for the winter, Walker Calvert was working alone in the office. He heard someone walk up to the open door behind him and stop.
He had just turned in his chair to look when a deep groan and then a howl split the quiet, cold air. He ran from the building: “It scared me to death.”
Still no one had actually seen a ghost at the inn, nor did they have any solid proof that it was William Caffee. Everyone seemed to think it was him hanging about the property, so to speak, because his was the best-documented death in or near the inn.
Walker Calvert noted, for instance, that it seemed the ghost wanted to keep customers and employees out of the building, as if he resented crowds of people, which was certainly understandable if it was the unfortunate Caffee. Several times, either in the early morning hours or late at night, there would be the jangle of keys in the front door lock, yet no one entered. Or a door that was unlocked would be found locked tight.
Sometimes at night, Calvert and the waitresses discovered the main entrance locked even before they left. “The door we used has a deadbolt lock opened with a key. We’d have to get that key and unlock the door to get out of the building. There was no way that door could have gotten locked. I didn’t lock it, and I had the only key.”
At last, the reluctant ghost made its first visible appearance just before sunset on a crisp October evening. Appropriately, Walker Calvert was the first to see him. He had gone upstairs to check the door that opens from the far end of the barroom onto a porch, containing, at that time, an L-shaped wooden bench. An exterior, wooden staircase led down to the ground level.
Haunted Wisconsin Page 17