Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  The next night Barb was again awakened by Kate—only this time the girl was screaming in what seemed like utter terror. She told her mother that “the man” had come again, although this time he had brought frightening circus animals.

  Kate was a bright and very vocal child, according to Barb; yet she could not provide any sort of description of the man or the animals. Barb held her tightly until she quieted down and fell back asleep.

  Barb was left with many questions and an equal number of fears.

  The next night, Michael had decided to stay downstairs watching television when his wife went to bed. She had not been asleep long when she felt a stinging slap across her face.

  “Barbara!” a deep male voice cried out.

  She flung an arm out to defend herself. It fell across the other side of the bed, where Michael slept. He wasn’t there.

  “I was frozen to the bed,” she recalled. “I do remember praying and then getting enough courage to move. But I [felt] real heavy. I couldn’t get myself up. I always scoffed when you see heroines in movies that can’t move. I thought this was silly—you can always do anything you want. Your own will is stronger.”

  Barb finally made her way downstairs, where she confronted Michael. She still thought he was responsible. But he was as astonished as his wife; he had been watching television the whole time.

  Michael remembers that night as if it were yesterday. “Barbara isn’t the type to dream. That’s why I couldn’t figure it out. I’m a very logical individual. I couldn’t figure out the logic for something like that. Knowing her as I do, she never lies. It just wasn’t Barb.”

  Meanwhile, Michael began noticing other oddities in the house. Intense cold often filled the kitchen, the upstairs hallway, and Kate’s bedroom, which was situated directly over the kitchen. At first Michael and Barb reasoned that the drafty old windows were the cause. But modern, carefully sealed windows did not lessen the chill, especially in Kate’s room. With hot air pouring from the register in Kate’s room, Michael could still see his breath. “I’m so cold,” the little girl sometimes complained to her parents in the middle of the night.

  In the upstairs hallway, newly applied wallpaper kept peeling. No amount of glue or pressure could keep it sealed to the plaster.

  One morning in the spring of 1976, Michael had an especially disturbing experience.

  As he awoke, Michael saw a vaporous, whitish haze flowing into the room from under the bedroom door. It didn’t look or smell like smoke, perhaps something closer to steam or fog, a heavy, damp thing, transparent. He could see its edges as it receded back under the door and into the hallway.

  Michael nudged Barb and asked her if she smelled anything. But she only murmured and continued sleeping. When he looked back toward the bedroom door, the vapor was gone. Michael finally roused Barb, and she got up to check on Kate, who was sleeping peacefully.

  A few days later, Michael awoke to find a similar blanket of vapor, but this time it surrounded the bed.

  “It reminded me of a screen completely encompassing the bed,” he said. “You could look through it. But this time it had no [dank smell].”

  Michael’s personal experiences upset Barb even more. “The next months left me fighting a battle to remain calm in the evening. We didn’t seem to notice anything during the day. I rarely went to bed without Mike. I’d sleep on the sofa until he’d come home. I’d check on Kate a great many times.”

  Barb and Michael had kept their peculiar experiences to themselves yet continued to search for answers. The events were usually spaced far enough apart that they came unexpectedly, which only added to the couple’s distress. Neither one believed in psychic phenomena; they had no interest in the subject. But all that changed early the following fall of 1976 as Barb was starting to teach again.

  Her mother, Margaret, was a straightforward woman in both her speech and manner. One day she asked her daughter directly if she thought something was “wrong” with their house. Margaret said the kitchen was often so bitterly cold that she had to put on a sweater while she cooked or did her crossword puzzles. Yet at the same time the adjoining living room and dining room were very warm.

  Barb took some relief in knowing that her mother thought something odd was going on. “She’s the most stable person I have ever met, a very calm, quiet, sedate lady full of common sense and very much in control of her surroundings.”

  Her mother suggested that the house be blessed, but Barb was hesitant.

  “This person or whatever it is isn’t aggressive or violent,” she reasoned. “Who knows why it’s here?”

  The house was never blessed. And that may have been a mistake if an event the following January was any indication.

  Michael had been playing with Kate before her bedtime. When she got tired he scooped her into his arms and carried her up the stairs, her head snuggled against his shoulder. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. When he opened the door to his daughter’s room, he stopped short. A squat, vaporous form shimmered in the middle of the room. Clearly it was the figure of a small man.

  “The [out]lines of it were moving, vibrating. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could see somewhat through it but nowhere near like the [vapor] around the bed. I reached over, turned on the light, and it was gone.”

  The room was intensely cold.

  Nevertheless Michael put Kate to bed. He did not tell his wife of the experience until much later.

  The sensitivity of animals to reported supernatural events is well documented. Household pets such as dogs, cats, and even birds seem to be more sensitive to the unseen world than their human companions.

  Such was the case with Benji, the Yashinskys’ massive Great Pyrenees. He slept on the floor in the master bedroom. His behavior one night was another signal to Barb and Michael that all was not well. The couple was sitting on the edge of the bed talking. Benji was curled up on the floor. Suddenly the dog leaped to his feet, looked toward Barb, and growled. She was momentarily frightened, thinking he “had gone nuts or something.”

  However, in one great leap, he bounded past her and into the corner of the room, facing the closet where Barb had first heard the crying voice. Benji growled for a few moments, then, looking as if he had made a fool of himself, returned to the couple with his head lowered and a rather woeful look on his large face. Neither Barb nor Michael had heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, yet they could make little sense of the way their dog had acted. All they could figure out is that the room had been in near total darkness so perhaps it had been a passing shadow. The couple said that was the only time their dog ever acted oddly in the house.

  On January 13, less than two years after they moved in with high expectations, the Yashinskys packed up the furniture and moved away.

  “We wanted to get out of there,” Michael said. “Whatever it was seemed more and more disturbed.”

  Barb was convinced that if they stayed in the house, their lives would continue to change for the worse.

  “It might start throwing pots and pans, rumpling bedding, or become hostile in some way. It’s silly to talk about it like this, but you wonder. If Kate saw a man bringing animals maybe he was [a ghost] just interested in her as a child.”

  Or maybe not. That was her great anxiety: their unknown and unknowable future if they continued to live in the house. Was the “presence” merely curious, or might it become even more aggravated and dangerous?

  Before they moved away, the Yashinskys had tried to discover something of the history of the house. The original homestead apparently stayed in the builder’s family for nearly a century except for one brief period of time. The last member of the family had been a reclusive bachelor who died in the place. He reportedly never saw any outsiders save for his widowed sister-in-law; he heated only a few rooms downstairs and closed off the second floor.

  A descendant of the original family provided another intriguing bit of information: a miserly ancestor was thought to have hidden a sizable
quantity of old coins somewhere in the house. At least one search by his descendants years earlier included knocking out some walls.

  A neighbor family to whom the Yashinskys confided their troubling experiences said they’d never seen or heard anything odd in or around the house. Yet their daughter often babysat for the Yashinskys and habitually turned on every light in the house when she was there.

  The short, squat figure Michael had seen in the bedroom might have been a member of the builder’s family—the descendants Barb was able to track down were strikingly similar in that they were all small of stature.

  The couple could find no leads on the identity of the sobbing woman or child Barb heard.

  “It’s changed my ideas about people who I previously thought were crackpots for seeing ghosts or trying to film ghosts,” Barb concluded, finally coming to terms with what she determined was the supernatural basis of the “problems” in her home. “Although our experiences weren’t particularly frightening, you … want to forget. We’ll probably wrestle with this the rest of our lives.”

  Michael agreed.

  “I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, many times. I’m not an extremely well-read person, but I know what I know and I know what I saw. Nothing will ever change that. This happened to me.”

  In the years following their adventures in the old farmhouse, the Yashinskys found their new home blissfully terror-free. Even little Kate noticed the change. “Oh, mama,” she often confided in her mother, “it’s so nice and warm in my room.”

  The Legacy of Mary Buth Farm

  The weather was warm for the last day of December. Wispy strands of fog clung to the gently rolling fields of southeastern Wisconsin as the thermometer hovered near thirty degrees. At the end of a long, paved road near Germantown, Tom Walton and his family prepared to celebrate New Year’s Day in their 140-year-old farmhouse. The clock struck midnight. Family members and several guests toasted each other for success and happiness in the coming twelve months.

  But, as Tom later said, the evening had not been cheerful. There had been a tinge of something sinister, something almost evil intruding upon the celebration. The whole evening had been very strange. Small things happened at first. The house suddenly cooled for no apparent reason. A candle burned much faster than its twin sitting nearby. The television set lost power—without explanation. And then, outside the wide living room window, she appeared: an old woman, dressed in a rough black dress, staring in at the assembled family and guests. Before Tom could react, she was gone.

  Who was she … that vague, dark phantom staring in at the startled assemblage? Tom had a hunch—a guess that led back in time to 1838.

  In that year, John and Mary Buth built the farm as one of Wisconsin’s pioneer homesteads. The Buth cabin and land also were used as a trading post for early settlers and traders. Near the farm, Indians camped by a small stream. The decades have brought innumerable changes to the original log cabin, but a section of it forms a part of the present two-story frame house. Sturdy log ceiling beams now support a segment of the second floor. The place is still known as Mary Buth Farm.

  John and Mary Buth had three children: Herman, who died at age seventy in 1917; Carl, who died at age seventy-four in 1923; and Mary, the only daughter and the farm’s namesake, who died at age seventy-six in 1926. None of the children married. An overgrown cemetery near the farm holds their remains.

  How does this explain the eerie events of the Waltons’ New Year’s Eve gathering? The Buth farm has a long history of being haunted. The ghosts of the younger Mary Buth and her mother were said to roam the farm by day and inhabit the house at night. Tom had heard neighbors tell stories about the farm. When Walton and his family moved there, they didn’t place much faith in these tales until that night about four years later.

  It was then that Walton changed his mind. The fleeting apparition outside the window left him perplexed. The next morning he discovered that a pepper plant near the window had wilted leaves on one side while the other half remained green and healthy. The other small incidents that night added to the mystery.

  Over the next several years, until the family moved away, the Waltons were to have other baffling experiences. An overnight visitor told Tom that he had seen a young girl in the yard vanish into the early morning mist. The Buth farm is quite isolated from nearby houses, making it unlikely she was a neighbor.

  One afternoon, Tom was alone in the house when violin music floated through the house. No radio was playing. The stereo was turned off. Later, Walton learned that Herman Buth had played the violin as a hobby.

  On another occasion, when the kitchen was being remodeled, the Waltons’ plumber said he had heard footsteps walking across the upstairs floor. The plumber had been alone in the house at the time.

  What caused these phenomena? To find out, Tom asked author and expert in the supernatural Mary Leader to visit the home. After a session with a Ouija board, Leader said at least two ghosts haunted the Buth farm. She identified them as the two Mary Buths—mother and daughter. The daughter was an evil ghost lurking outside the home and searching for her missing lover. According to local lore, Mary had been left standing at the altar on her wedding day. The mother was the “inside” ghost protecting the house from her daughter. The psychic could not explain the violin music Tom had heard.

  Some neighbors scoff at the idea of the two women coming back to haunt the house. The younger Mary, according to one long-time resident, “just wasn’t the type who would come around and haunt [the farm]. Sure she was an old maid and probably a little eccentric, but she had a good heart.” Mary reportedly cared for mentally disabled people in the vicinity during an era when they were shunned by most of society.

  Few contemporary accounts remain of the elder Mary. She was ninety-three at her death in 1899, outliving her husband by forty-six years.

  After their parents’ deaths, Mary and her brothers were hardworking farmers who cut wood with a handsaw and offered the use of their farm as a resting place for peddlers traveling to and from Milwaukee. Is it possible that one of these itinerant salesmen proposed to Mary and then jilted her when a new territory beckoned? It has been known to happen.

  The Strange Case of Henry James Brophy

  At noon on Tuesday, March 9, 1909, schoolboy Henry James Brophy, age eleven years, arrived home for lunch. He opened the side door of his home in Mount Horeb and was immediately struck in the back by a snowball that broke and splattered across the kitchen floor. The boy spun around, but there was no one in sight.

  At the same time the next day, the same thing happened.

  Early on Thursday evening of that week, cups suddenly flew from the dinner table and crashed to the floor. Glass lamp chimneys disintegrated. Spools of thread unwound. Bars of soap soared through the air.

  And so began one of the strangest cases of alleged poltergeist activity ever recorded in Wisconsin.

  Little Henry Brophy lived with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Knut K. Lunde, in Mount Horeb following his mother’s second marriage, to Patrick Trainor. It is not known what happened to Henry’s natural father or why he was unable to live with his mother and stepfather.

  The boy attended the village grade school. A shy, delicate child with few close friends, Henry possessed no extraordinary talents … or so everyone thought. But he was soon at the center of a series of events that led those in the community to believe he was either psychically gifted or was a superb manipulator and clever fraud. Which conclusion was correct has never been satisfactorily determined.

  On Friday, March 12, Henry’s mother came from Madison to attend a family funeral and spend the night with her parents, her son, Henry, and her sister, who still lived at home. Early that evening, Mrs. Trainor is said to have sat down to play the organ. In that instant, household utensils allegedly took to the air, banging against the walls and crashing to the floor. Knut Lunde became so agitated that he sent for a local minister, a certain Reverend Mostrom. When the minister arrived wi
th a friend, Sam Thompson, a hymnal that had been sitting on a windowsill near the door fell to the floor at their feet.

  “There, you see it!” Knut Lunde said.

  Reverend Mostrom listened attentively as the Lundes explained what had been going on. Since most of the unexplained events occurred near Henry, Sam Thompson kept the child by his side.

  “Look out!” Henry shouted as a butcher knife flew from the kitchen table, arced through the air, and fell at Thompson’s feet. The man said later that the boy could not have touched it. Later, a hatpin retraced the knife’s arc. Neither Thompson nor Mostrom understood what had happened.

  Nightly thereafter, the family and a steady number of curiosity seekers reported objects flying around the house. Doors crashed to the floor after screws in the hinges were mysteriously loosened. Glass lamp chimneys shattered. A stove lid toppled to the floor. A drawer under a sewing machine came free and soared high into the air, knocking plaster from a wall and scattering bobbins, thread, and needles in every direction. Mrs. Lunde had to duck when a table knife leaped through the air at her before clattering to the floor.

  News of the strange phenomena spread rapidly beyond the confines of the little town, attracting the attention of newsmen and self-described clairvoyants from across the Midwest. On a single night in March, an estimated two hundred people left muddy footprints as they tramped through the house. No one in that group reported seeing any paranormal manifestations.

  If the Lundes and their visitors could not explain what was happening, some of Mount Horeb’s residents believed they could—even if their reasoning was a bit unusual to say the least.

  Two prominent citizens came to the Lunde house and singled out the recent installation of a telephone line and electricity as the source of the disturbances. The house had been “electrified,” they insisted, and therefore cutting the electric wires would put an end to the troubles. The distraught family, however, apparently feared darkness more than chaos, and so they demanded that the visitors leave.