Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  Music played a role in another incident as well.

  Debbie explained, “I’d gone upstairs to do inventory on a Sunday morning. All of a sudden I hear this music, beautiful music that sounds like it’s from an old piano. I wondered where it was coming from, but no matter where I walked around the ballroom, it was always the same volume. I thought someone was playing a joke, so I quickly opened the door, thinking someone was there. I went downstairs where a cook and his assistant were getting ready for Sunday brunch and a bartender was setting up. Everybody’s doing their job, there’s no music, no nothing.”

  She went back upstairs to continue with the inventory, and after a few minutes the music started up again. It was calming, she said, but unnerving at the same time because she couldn’t figure out the source. Debbie was tired from working long hours and taking care of the myriad details necessary to operate a successful business.

  “I kicked a box across the room, and just as it hit the floor the music stopped. Then I thought [the ghosts] were only trying to be good, to be nice. I apologized. I said I was sorry and that they could play music for me any time they wanted. But I’ve never heard it again. I really insulted them.”

  In the quiet early morning hours or late at night there’s often other activity in the old ballroom. “You have the feeling someone else is here. Either you hear movement or some muffled talking. Footsteps, too, a click, click, click across the floor, like someone [wearing] heels—very well defined. It makes you wonder if someone is up there. You do get used to it … because you hear it all the time.”

  Another female ghost, in a dark blue polka-dot dress, inhabits the first floor along with the soldier.

  One day a waitress watched as she walked calmly through the dining room and into the kitchen. The woman looked so real that the waitress followed her back to the kitchen to find her.

  Debbie recalled, “When you’re sitting at the bar late at night and the lights are off in the dining room … the doors to the kitchen will open up. We’ve run back to see if somebody had walked into the kitchen but nobody would be there. The doors swing open so the lights in the kitchen filter in and draw our attention to them. There was a period of time when she was around a lot. It was always after the dining room closed and she was always going into the kitchen.”

  A fourth presence dwells with the lady in green on the second floor. He is a bearded man glimpsed once by Tom Schuerman.

  Tom had turned off several spotlights that had been used to illuminate some carved gargoyles on the facade. He was going through the old kitchen upstairs when he glanced into a mirror above the sink and saw an older, bearded, dark-haired man’s face staring back at him. The outside lights have remained on since then.

  The last two ghosts at Chances have only been seen in a painting of the restaurant that hangs on a dining room wall. They are twin children, a boy and a girl, portrayed playing around a kid’s wagon in the foreground of the picture. The artist lives in the area. She is also a psychic.

  “When she gave me the painting, I asked her where she got the idea for the kids in the painting and she said that they’re playing here, this is their play area. Someone had told me about the [ghost] kids before but I didn’t want to believe it.”

  Debbie said the children are the ones “doing their playful things.”

  In fact, all the ghosts at Chances are illustrated in the picture. The psychic painted everyone she felt was at the restaurant. But she didn’t know their names, nor very much about them.

  “What I’ve come to terms with over the years is that the ghosts are souls that are lost, that they’re in this in-between stage with unfinished business. I don’t know what that unfinished business is, but I’ve always thought that if the Civil War soldier could be reunited with his love upstairs then their business would be finished and they’d move on.”

  Does Debbie ever want to help them “move on”? Absolutely not.

  “This is their home and we’re the guests more or less. I get very protective of them. We have a comfortable coexistence. We’re comfortable with them. They help us and we entertain them, I guess. I do have this sense when it comes to them of calm and peace.”

  That does not mean, however, that she would want to live with their steady presence. “I don’t know if I’d feel this way if they were in my house. I can walk away from it here every day.”

  She does have the habit, however, of locking the doors, turning around, and calling “good night” to the lingerers.

  Stacy Kopchinski seems almost as comfortable with her unseen helpmates as does her mother. “It’s just nice to know they’re here, especially when I’m alone closing up the bar. Sometimes you can feel them everywhere, then you know they’re all out, but then there are other long periods when they’re not around.”

  Except for a short paragraph on their menu, the Schuermans have not exploited their unique guests. That would be taking advantage of them. And besides, if changes have been made in the building that the ghosts haven’t liked, or if there are visitors to whom they’ve taken a disliking, “we’ll know,” Debbie added.

  Owners and staff keep a wary eye around the place. Stacy avoids the upstairs rooms whenever possible and Debbie does not go alone into the basement.

  “Sometimes it’s the fear of actually confronting something face to face. What would you do if one of [the ghosts] was actually standing there?” asked Debbie.

  What would you do indeed?

  Kurt Muellner was pleased that his plans to celebrate his mother’s ninetieth birthday were proceeding without a hitch. His son and daughter-in-law were going to attend, as were his cousin and her husband; his godson came up from Chicago. They were all staying overnight at the historic Kewaunee Inn, formerly the Karsten Inn, in the Lake Michigan shoreline community of Kewaunee. His mother’s celebration would be held in the inn’s dining room. The party was a great success. At the end of the evening, Muellner bid his guests a good night and arranged to meet them the next day for breakfast at the inn. But he wasn’t prepared for what they told him when they all came downstairs the next morning.

  Muellner’s daughter-in-law wanted to know what kind of hotel he’d booked his family into.

  At about two o’clock in the morning she awoke to a loud commotion outside her door: laughing, screaming, and hollering suddenly followed by dead silence. Then shortly afterward she heard what sounded like toilets in nearby rooms being flushed all night long.

  Muellner’s cousin and godson echoed the young woman’s complaints when they arrived for breakfast. Loud noises in the middle of the night had kept them awake.

  But Muellner, a local businessman and history buff, knew that none of that was possible—his relatives had been the only overnight guests. They could not have heard a commotion from anyone living.

  That late night revelry may well have been a “welcome” by the three mischievous ghosts that call the Karsten Inn home. They include old William “Big Bill” Karsten, the inn’s 300-pound namesake who bought the property in 1911; a maid named Agatha*, who worked at the inn in the 1920s and ’30s and who according to local lore had been Big Bill’s mistress; and a five-year-old boy named Billy, Big Bill’s grandson who died during a meningitis outbreak in 1940, a few weeks after his grandfather’s death.

  A front desk clerk says she’s heard many stories from departing guests, especially those who stay along the second-floor corridor.

  “They tell me they’ve heard kids running up and down the hall around three in the morning. They get up to look out the door but nobody is there. Some have even heard a kid playing with a ball because the bouncing is what woke them up.”

  The Kewaunee Inn is actually the second hotel on the corner of Ellis and Lake Streets, within sight of Lake Michigan. The Steamboat House opened there in 1858 and, following numerous owners and name changes, “Big Bill” Karsten bought it in 1911. Less than a year later it burned to the ground. Karsten soon rebuilt a grand, fifty-two room, three-story brick hotel. Included in t
he new inn were a ninety-seat dining room, a long, elegant tavern with a separate street entrance, and a wide, attractive summer porch.

  Remodeling undertaken in the 1960s and ’80s seems to have triggered at least part of the ghostly activity. Carpenters working on the third floor felt sudden, bone-numbing drafts but attributed them to typical conditions in an old, poorly insulated hotel. But they weren’t entirely convinced.

  Nothing evil or dangerous has ever been attributed to the ghosts of the Kewaunee Inn, but they do seem intent on reminding staff and guests in particular of their continued presence.

  Sometimes the ghost of a little boy shows up wanting to play, but only if there’s a child staying in a room. A typical example is the experience of a family who once stayed for the weekend. After they checked in and had gone to their room to unpack, the couple let their three-year-old daughter explore the hallways. A few minutes later they heard doors slamming from the hallway, looked out, and found their girl looking into the various unoccupied and unlocked rooms.

  Her mother asked what she was doing. The child replied, “Looking for that little boy.” She wanted to play with him. Her parents quietly explained that there were no little children around.

  Inexplicably, the family packed up and left in the middle of the night. As they were checking out with the surprised night clerk, the child ran up to a photo on a lobby wall.

  “Mommy, that’s the boy I was playing with,” she cried out.

  The picture was actually that of Bill Karsten Jr., Big Bill’s son, taken when he was a little boy. Though he died as an adult in 1964, there was a resemblance between him and his own son, Billy, who died so young.

  Another couple had a scarier moment with their own young son. Several times he ran out of the room because he wanted to “play” with the other child he’d seen earlier. Though his parents tried to dissuade him, he kept insisting that the “other boy” wanted him to come out and play. Sometime that night both parents awoke to the sound of the boy’s sharp cry. They found a teddy bear on his bed that earlier had been sitting on a shelf. More disturbing was that an old hat pin was stuck in the bear. Apparently the pin had also stuck the boy in the foot. Neither parent had put the teddy in the bed, and the shelf on which it had rested was too tall for the boy to reach.

  In Agatha’s old room, the former maid seems to be playful or helpful, depending on the guest. A female guest once jotted down a comment in her room’s diary and placed the fountain pen alongside it on the desk. Minutes later, when she finished with her shower, the pen was lying several feet away on the floor.

  Two overnight guests from Arizona found items in their room rearranged. A straw hat had been moved to the bedpost and the water pitcher moved closer to the sink.

  Two men staying in Agatha’s room were perplexed that the toilet kept flushing all night, even though one or the other got up several times to adjust it. There seemed to be nothing to account for it.

  Agatha insists on having the doors and windows open in her old room.

  They are found open “all the time,” claims a former owner, even though no one has been in the room. The overhead light might be shut off, windows and door locked, but within a short time hotel workers discover them on and open.

  Though he loved to be in the lobby sitting in his favorite club chair, “Big Bill” Karsten spent most of his final days in his private suite, now room numbers 205–210, battling obesity, arthritis, and heart trouble before his eventual death in 1940 at the age of seventy-eight.

  It is his ghost that may appear as a dark shadow in those rooms or, as one guest in his old suite found, be the source of the mysterious heavy breathing and wheezing that greeted him when he checked into the room. At other times he’ll give out a sharp, unpleasant odor that drifts through the building. Cold spots and mysteriously rearranged furniture in his old room may surprise guests. Another guest suggests Big Bill may wander the hotel—he swears he saw the old man’s ghost sitting at the bar, quaffing a beer.

  The Kewaunee Inn, through many owners and name changes, seems to survive, arising Lazarus-like from the commercial grave. The mischief-making ghosts seem to thrive as well, leaving guests with special memories they may not have anticipated.

  It took Samuel Bradley six years to build the landmark Cobblestone Waystation Inn at East Troy. Beginning in 1843—five years before Wisconsin’s statehood— Bradley dutifully hauled thousands of selected cobblestones he’d gathered from the glacial drift fields in southeastern Wisconsin and from along the shores of area lakes. Once he had enough stones he began constructing his “monument,” as he termed it, on a corner lot on what is now South Church Street. When it was finished in 1849, Bradley’s three-and-a-half-story Buena Vista House was the community’s landmark hostelry, noted especially for the unusual third-floor springboard dance floor.

  During its first three years, well-known personages stayed there, including, according to legend, Abraham Lincoln during one of his infrequent forays into the state.

  But then something caused it all to change. Shortly after the Bradleys paid off the mortgage—years ahead of schedule—Samuel and his English-born wife said they were returning to Britain to visit her family. They never returned, nor is there any evidence to indicate what became of them.

  However, some claim that Samuel never really left the old inn and that his ghost is still there.

  During the building’s late-twentieth-century renovation, workmen and employees reported enough oddities to think someone made their home there, someone who made his presence known in most peculiar ways.

  A carpenter claimed that someone always seemed to be watching him as he worked. He’d find his tape measure a yard or more away from where he’d put it down. And somehow a clock radio’s volume would be cranked up only when music came on the air. A remodeling on the third floor included new curtains for the windows. Someone, however, didn’t like them; one day employees found them all on the floor. No one admitted being up there.

  New pictures were hung throughout the second floor. A manager checking through the rooms is said to have found them all turned against the wall. She straightened them all around, but within half an hour she again found them facing backward. The workmen were working on the exterior that day, and the other three employees were all accounted for.

  Then there was the rocking chair. Employees heard it from the third floor—a distinct creak-creak-creak on the ancient flooring, especially as managers were closing up around ten o’clock at night. The problem? There was no rocking chair on the third floor.

  Though many remain skeptical of the inn’s haunting, there is some evidence that as far back as the 1940s, restaurant menus included some brief anecdotes about their “Cobblestone ghost.”

  Perhaps a former manager got it right when she said that in such an old building “there can’t not be anything here. Something’s got to be around.”

  The waitress at the Hotel Boscobel had just finished making salads for a private dinner-party when a sudden draught of cold air swept over her. From around the corner in the kitchen came the quick steps of someone walking away. But when she peered through the doorway no one was there. She reported the incident to the manager, who then realized that he had forgotten to turn on the deep fryers. He went in but was astonished to see that they were already switched on. He checked with his son, at work in a different section of the restaurant, but the latter denied having anything to do with it.

  Was this another in a line of visits from the ghost of Adam Bobel?

  Best known today as the home of the Gideon Bible, the old Boscobel inn dates to a few years after its founder, Adam Bobel, a Prussian emigrant, arrived in town in 1861. Bobel and a partner built the three-story stone structure as a saloon and small hotel. When the Civil War broke out, he served in the Union Army as a sutler, or government approved vendor, selling supplies to soldiers at often-inflated prices. Back in Boscobel, Bobel eventually became the sole proprietor of the hotel, but fire leveled it in 1881. He rebuilt
and opened it as the Central House in May 1881. He continued to operate it until he died in 1885.

  In later years, it was the chance to greet old Adam Bobel himself and his mysterious girlfriend that attracted visitors to the establishment.

  A former bartender said Bobel’s girlfriend sometimes joined Bobel on late night, spectral visits. A chef once saw a woman sporting a Victorian, “Gay ’90s” bonnet stroll by the bar on her way to the dining room. He quickly followed to take her order, but the dining room was empty.

  Bobel sometimes opened and closed doors—and even left tips on occasion for long-suffering waitresses. “I never worried when I was there,” one former waitress said. “He never played malicious tricks.”

  Overnight guests would ask about the elderly man and woman they’d seen strolling down the hall. They were surprised at the couple, as they’d been told they were the only guests that night. When a picture of Adam Bobel was pointed out to them, they readily identified it as the man they had seen.

  Sometimes there were only voices. Once, half a dozen of them floated down a hallway where two employees there overheard them. They thought it odd that a group of people might be walking through the place, but soon discovered that no one else was about that night.

  The Gideons International had its beginnings in 1898 when two salesmen— John Nicholson and Samuel Hill—stayed at the hotel and fell into a discussion about the lack of an organization for “mutual help and recognition for Christian travelers.” They met a year later and decided to act upon their earlier discussion. A subsequent organization meeting in Janesville led to the founding of the organization, best known today for placing Bibles in the nation’s hotel rooms.