Wisconsin
Our Three Ghosts
Pierce County
Doug and Annette O’Brien moved with their two children, one-year-old Nathan and eight-year-old Valerie, into a spacious, century-old house on a quiet street in Pierce County on November 1, 1985. At the time Annette was pregnant with their third child, and they thought it was the perfect house for their growing family.
Within a few months, however, they were having serious reservations. The couple found that eerie and inexplicable events came with their dream home.
All was quiet for about eight months until an especially hot night the following August when their idyllic life changed. Doug decided to go to bed early, leaving Annette and daughter Valerie downstairs. He had had a long, hard day at work and was unusually tired. Adjoining the couple’s upstairs master bedroom was a nursery in which four-month-old Trevor was already fast asleep.
Doug was nearly asleep when the baby started fussing. He propped himself up on his elbows and rubbed his eyes. Something made him glance sidelong, toward the open bedroom door. A woman in a long, light-colored dress glided past, toward little Trevor’s room.
The baby quieted down immediately. Doug thought the woman must have been Annette, but something did not seem right. He waited a few moments and got up. He looked in on Trevor but the baby had fallen back to sleep. There was no sign of Annette or anyone else. Downstairs, he found his wife and Valerie. Neither one had been upstairs.
Doug and Annette were understandably upset. Who had gone into the infant’s room?
Annette took pride in being a calm, easygoing woman. She was not nearly as alarmed by her husband’s experience as he was. He had been dreaming, she reasoned. But what if it had not been a dream? A strange woman who seemed to vanish was not something that made either one of them comfortable.
Doug encountered a second mysterious visitor a short time later.
This time he was sitting alone in the living room one evening watching television. A connecting door led from the living room into a downstairs back bedroom. As if out of nowhere, a little blond-headed boy was standing in the doorway. He wore knickers buckled below the knees and a blue shirt. The outfit was clean and neat, definitely not play clothes.
He took a few steps into the room and looked at Doug.
Doug was calmer than might be expected. “I asked him who he was and what he wanted, but he didn’t answer.”
The child vanished as quickly as he had appeared.
In the morning, Doug told Annette about the boy. She wished she had seen him too.
Another time when Doug was on the couch watching television, a small, bright red ball bounced through the same doorway in which the boy had appeared, and promptly vanished. Perhaps the boy was showing a playful side?
That first-floor back bedroom was one of the centers of the ghostly disturbances they continued to experience.
Doug was the first to reach that conclusion when on a late afternoon he went in that bedroom for a nap and closed the door to the living room.
“Just as I was dozing off there was that lady again,” Doug said.
She stood beside the bed wearing a red jacket. Doug stared at her but did not say anything. He could not make out her arms or face yet he knew instinctively it was the same woman he had seen upstairs.
Doug covered his head with a blanket and she went away.
The family’s brush with the supernatural took an even odder turn one afternoon when an elderly woman knocked at their front door. She told them her name was Ethel and that her grandparents had once owned the O’Brien house.
Annette and Doug invited her in. Ethel immediately said, “There’s a closet in that back bedroom off the living room.”
Annette nodded. She said it had been turned into a small nursery and that Trevor was napping in there at the moment.
Their visitor shook her head and paused. “My grandmother used to lock me in the closet and make me pray.”
Doug was curious. He wondered to himself if the ghost he had seen might have been Ethel’s late grandmother.
They learned more about the history of the house from Ethel on that day, but little else that could identify the causes of a haunting.
Doug worked ten-hour night shifts at a company in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. When he started leaving the house at two in the afternoon and getting back home well after midnight, Annette, for the first time, became anxious and ill at ease in the house. What she feared did not come from anything mortal.
“I had all the lights on when I went to bed. I was really terrified. But once I was in bed and my eyes were closed I was fine,” she said.
Annette often waited up for Doug because, as she said, “just as long as somebody was downstairs before I went to bed I was all right.”
One of the couple’s greatest concerns was that the children would be frightened or harmed. Only eight-year-old Valerie had a curious personal experience.
She and a friend were playing in her upstairs bedroom when the door slammed shut.
Valerie thought somebody might be hiding in the hallway and looked around. She even looked in corners where someone could hide. Nothing.
Valerie shrugged and returned to the bedroom. Her friend Abby was not so composed. She told Valerie that she had heard something at the door after it slammed shut and the handle turned.
The girls abandoned their toys and scrambled back down the stairs.
A short time after that, the O’Brien children started having bad dreams—not really nightmares, but scary dreams they could not remember in the morning. Their parents knew then that they needed some help in identifying what might be going on.
At the urging of Annette’s sister, the family contacted a Minneapolis psychic named Jacki about visiting their home. She agreed to drive over the next day. The children would not be present.
As long as they live, Doug and Annette O’Brien will never forget Jacki’s visit.
Jacki went room to room in search of the spirits. With her were Annette, Doug, and Annette’s sister, Susan, the one who had suggested seeking the psychic’s help.
“She said we had three spirits—a woman, a young boy, and an old man,” Annette recalled. However, only one of their boys would see the man. Doug and Annette would not.
The ghost child had shown himself to Jacki right away. At first she thought he was one of the family’s boys, but then he vanished.
The woman was a nanny who would stay in the house for as long as there were children there.
The old man was perhaps the saddest presence that Jacki detected, an alcoholic who died of malnutrition.
The quartet headed for the back bedroom, where Doug had seen the woman in red.
“The psychic said that a little girl was locked in the closet at one time, down on her knees reading a Bible,” Annette said. That was nearly an identical description of what their Texas visitor had told them about her own experience.
When the small group got to the master bedroom upstairs, she said that was where the old man had died. And where he still hung out.
“That really scared me,” Annette said.
The bedroom was at the front of the house, above a porch. Jacki said there used to be a door from it leading out to a now-vanished balcony and a stairway to the ground. The couple knew about the door as they had replaced it with a window and put a roof over the open porch. Jacki said the old man would sneak out that door at night to go drinking.
In the same room, Jacki seemed to solve another of the hauntings. The O’Briens’ bedroom had been Valerie’s room when she and Abby saw the door handle turn. Annette speculated that the old man was trying to get in to “shoo the kids out.”
The psychic thought the little boy she saw sometimes played in the attic. Each time he went up there he carved his initials on an attic crossbeam. However, the O’Briens had never seen evidence of that.
Jacki claimed the little girl in the closet wanted help for her stepbrother, who had been physically abused and denied food. He later died of his injuries and severe malnutrition. But it was all kept very quiet; even the girl did not know what he died of. He was about six or seven years old, but physically no bigger than a three-year-old. His hard, leather shoes were too small and pinched his feet.
The ghost boy is the one that led Jacki upstairs to where the old man once lived. Jacki told the little boy it was time to leave, that it was better on the other side because there were places for him to play.
“What’s play?” she said he asked her.
The old man lived in the house at a different time than the child.
“He was not a nice man,” Jacki said.
He told her he did not like children because they made noise. She explained to him that the children lived there too and were allowed to make noise. He was not to frighten them.
Jacki said the man was as spiteful after death as he had been in life.
The nanny was a benevolent spirit who did not leave a very strong impression. It is possible that she was the ghost nanny Doug saw tucking in little Trevor
Before Jacki left, the O’Brien children returned home from school. She sat them down and explained that an old man had been giving them the bad dreams, but they did not have to worry anymore. She had put a red aura of protection around each of them. Only spirits with love in their hearts could stay. And the living have superiority over any entity that has passed on. If the family tells a spirit to leave, it must.
Once people realize that, she said, trouble with spirits usually goes away.
Unlike some psychics, Jacki did not drive any of the ghosts out of the house.
“I tell earthbound spirits that they have passed into the next world. They don’t have to hang around anymore. Usually they go.”
The O’Briens were comforted by Jacki’s visit. They sincerely hoped their three ghosts would soon be gone—yet in the spirit world, as in life itself, they knew there were no guarantees.
Everlasting
Shorewood
Bob Lambert really did not want to go upstairs.
The clouds had been lowering all that humid August afternoon, and now the weather bureau had issued a severe storm warning.
He waited. Perhaps the rain would not come. Perhaps it would skip Shorewood and go south. He sat nervously in his lower-floor apartment, occasionally glancing out the window. He just knew he would have to go upstairs. If only Ginny were here. Maybe she could not protect him, but at least she would be around in case anything should happen.
But why should it? After all, ghosts belonged to a bygone era. No one believed in them anymore. Right? Right. But then who or what belonged to those footsteps? For a time Bob thought they could not harm him or Ginny, but now he was not so sure.
“Come on, grow up,” he muttered to himself. “It’s silly to think that ghosts come out only during thunderstorms.”
At the first sign of rain, Bob decided that he would close the windows in the upstairs apartment, just as he had promised the tenants he would do. And nothing would happen.
Shortly after three o’clock, the rain started coming down heavily. Bob had no choice. He started up the staircase, then stopped.
“I’m coming up to close the windows,” he shouted, hoping with all his being that nothing answered him back. Farther up the stairs, Bob again paused. “I’m going to shut the kitchen windows first,” he called out.
If something was around, he did not want to take the chance of surprising it. He hesitated a moment, reflecting on the five years he and Ginny had spent in their Shorewood apartment.
Up until that afternoon, the Lamberts had lived in relative peace with their upstairs “ghost” as if it was another member of the family. But the noises only occurred when no one was home in the upstairs apartment.
The tenants had keys to each other’s apartments in case of an emergency. At first, Bob or Ginny would climb the stairs each time the footsteps started in order to check on their source. But the footsteps always stopped before either of them reached the apartment.
The ghost made but one appearance over the years.
Dottie Rosmund, the upstairs renter at the time, was taking a bath. Her husband was out on business for the evening. Suddenly, the air chilled. From the bathroom door, a light, gray mist hovered in the air, the vague outline of a man billowing upward from the cloud. He was staring straight toward Dottie. She watched stricken as the mist evaporated. The Rosmunds soon moved away.
Bob Lambert later discussed the peculiar episodes in the apartment with the woman who owned the building. She told him that one of her sons, who had been raised in that house, was sickly as a child and adult and had been confined for most of his life to a bedroom on the second floor. He died as a young man shortly after his mother moved to a new home. She told Bob that it might be her son’s ghost who was prowling the second-floor apartment.
Bob flipped on the apartment lights as the storm built outside. But a few seconds later they dimmed and went off. His flashlight was downstairs and he had no idea where the upstairs tenants kept their flashlights or candles. He would have to make do. Although it was only midafternoon, the dark sky had turned the apartment into layers of deep shadows.
He closed the kitchen windows and started down the long, narrow hallway toward the bathroom. He noticed something palpable in the air, something more than the watery humidity of a typical late, August afternoon. It was a sense of being followed, of knowing that he was not really alone.
The bathroom door was closed; the window inside was probably open. He hesitated. A little voice inside him—and he was never quite sure where it came from—told him not to open that door. A sense of imminent danger swept over him. The tiny hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He could feel the sweat starting to roll down his chest.
He took his hand from the door and carefully backed away. Then, as quickly as he could, he closed the bedroom and living room windows and raced for the staircase. As he passed the hallway, he looked toward the bathroom. Now the door stood wide open. It had been firmly closed a minute before. Had the landlady’s son returned?
Bob Lambert did not wait around to find out. He never wanted to visit that apartment again.
Spirit of Rosslynne Manse
Delafield
On the sprawling campus of St. John’s Military Academy outside of Delafield, Wisconsin, more than a century ago, a silver shovel turned the first piece of earth for the fourteen-room building that would house the school’s president, Dr. Sidney Thomas Smythe, and his family. Rosslynne Manse drew its name from the old Scottish term for a clergyman’s home. The house was planned around a massive stone fireplace that Dr. Smythe had seen as a child in his uncle’s Scottish home.
After it was built, broad, inviting porches stretched across the front and rear portions of the house, the latter enclosed by pillars wedged atop hand-hewn stone blocks. The Smythe family lived on the first two floors, reserving the large room on the third floor as a sort of clubroom for senior cadets who frequented the house in great numbers. Dr. Smythe insisted on knowing each student personally, and as many as fifteen to thirty cadets dined at the house weekly.
Dr. Smythe was so devoted to the school and its students that he placed a large, leather armchair in front of the huge picture window overlooking the academy grounds so that he could keep an eye on “his” campus.
Although the school sought to shape the strong, moral characters of its young men, the house itself was the site of strange episodes that defied even the president’s most rational explanation.
Mrs. Sidney Smythe was sewing in the upstairs hallway on a November evening in 1905. Her two small children, Betty and Charles, were fast asleep. A grandfather clock near the stairway to the second floor chimed eight o’clock, reminding Mrs. Smythe that her husband would soon be coming home and would expect a light meal. She put down her sewing materials, descended the stairs, and started toward the kitchen.
The house had a rather broad entrance hall that extended directly into a living room with two large windows, one facing east, the other south. A rocking chair was situated so that it commanded a view out the south window.
As Mrs. Smythe walked toward the living room, her gaze shifted toward the rocking chair. She was shocked to notice a man, well dressed but quite pale and sickly, sitting in it. Mrs. Smythe backed up a step or two, bumping into the clock. As she reached out to steady herself, she looked back into the living room. The man had vanished.
The next morning Mrs. Smythe told her family about the incident. Even then she coolly took it all in stride, describing the man’s appearance, and disappearance, as if the specter had been an old family friend stopping off for a visit.
The Smythes knew that their home was not the first house built on that particular parcel of land. A family named Ashby had owned a house there some time before, but the Smythes did not know anything about the family or what had become of them. Now they wanted to find out, sensing a possible solution to the mystery of the man in the chair.
An answer came the following summer. An elderly gardener, who worked for the Smythes, had also known the Ashbys. One day while he was planting shrubs near the porch, Mrs. Smythe happened to ask him about the Ashbys. The gardener told her a few stories about the family, including the fact that their son-in-law had died of tuberculosis. Mrs. Smythe pressed the gardener for details of the dead man’s appearance—they matched in precise detail the figure she had seen in the rocking chair.
Twelve years later, Charles Smythe, by that time twenty years old, also encountered the Ashby’s ghostly son-in-law. The rest of the family was attending a function at the school one evening, leaving Charles alone in the house. When they returned, Mrs. Smythe noticed Charles seated in the living room. He did not look well.
At his mother’s urging, he recounted what had happened to him earlier that night. He had been upstairs reading when he decided to go downstairs. His dog, Jack, led the way. When he reached the lower landing, he looked toward the window, and there he saw the same man whom his mother had seen. This time he was standing with his feet apart, hands behind his back, facing the window. His face was partially obscured.
Jack the dog marched to the center of the room and uttered a nasty growl. Charles described it as partly a choked snarl, and partly a moan, as if the animal was in terror. He was crouched down, ears laid back, teeth bared, and was staring at the figure by the window.
Charles glanced down for a second toward the dog, but when he looked up, the figure was gone. He searched all around, as the dog tried vainly to pick up a scent; there did not seem to be one.
Betty Smythe, who was upstairs as her brother told their mother about the bizarre event, had noticed the dog sniffing around, going from room to room, whining. He seemed to be searching for something.
Neither Mrs. Smythe, nor her son Charles, sought an explanation for the phenomena they witnessed. And to this day no one knows why the long-gone Ashby’s son-in-law, if that is indeed who it was, found it necessary to haunt his former home. There were no other ghost sightings ever reported there.
In 1981 Rosslynne Manse was burned to the ground in a training exercise by the local fire department. Uninhabitable after years of neglect, and too costly to renovate, Rosslynne Manse became a mere memory for the thousands of young men who passed through the gates of St. John’s Military Academy. But for others who knew of the peculiar ghost story connected to it, Rosslynne Manse lives on.
Mrs. Pickman Goes Too Far
Milwaukee
On a cold evening at midnight in early December 1913, Max Kubis could not sleep. It was not just the relentless wind slamming against the house, pushing the falling snow into ever deeper drifts, that kept him awake. From somewhere below his second-story bedroom, a faint scraping noise was keeping him awake.
It seemed at first nothing out of the ordinary—perhaps one of the family’s numerous cats. The house was locked tight against the Milwaukee winter, after all, and animals become bored during the long months indoors just as their masters do. A frolic late at night was not unusual for the Kubis cats—yet the rhythmic sounds of this disturbance puzzled Max. Felines are sporadic creatures, their activity coming in sudden bursts followed by splendid lethargy. The noises that reached Max’s ears seemed human, like someone moving about in the darkness, slippered feet sliding across the oak floors.
Max carefully lifted the blankets and eased out of bed. His wife, Julia, slumbered peacefully over on her side of the four-poster. His feet found the carpet slippers. He threw a robe around his shoulders as the mantel clock downstairs completed its midnight tolling.
His stealth was not necessary. At the instant his hand found the bedroom door, a vicious pounding at the front door roused the entire household. Julia sat up in bed, eyes wide and questioning. The couple’s daughters, Helen and Armilla, called out from their bedroom.
Before Max could answer the midnight commotion, however, the front door crashed open and he heard somebody tromp down the hallway and into the kitchen.
By this time, the fearful family found themselves huddled in the upstairs hall, staring down the darkened staircase toward the unseen caller.
“Who’s there? What do you want?” Max cried out, his strong voice betraying only the slightest quiver.
After a few seconds of silence, the family moved toward the staircase, flipped on the lights, and made their way down the steps. The little troupe fruitlessly searched high and low. The front door was closed and locked as it had been when they all went to bed.
The Kubis family knew very little about their new house, except that it had been, until her recent death, the lifelong home of Mrs. Alex Pickman. The family had only recently moved back to Wisconsin after a brief residency in Washington State.
Some weeks after the midnight disturbance, on a night when the thermometer hovered well below the freezing mark, Mrs. Kubis climbed out of bed in the early predawn hours to add wood to a bedroom stove. She was halfway across the floor when the distinct image of an elderly woman materialized a few feet away from her. Her hands were held out toward the warmth of the blaze as if trying to ward off the chill.
Could this old woman and the nocturnal prowler be one and the same, perhaps old Mrs. Pickman herself? When Mrs. Kubis described the apparition to a neighbor, she said it matched the former owner, even down to the dowdy housedress the vaporous figure had worn. Furthermore, Mrs. Pickman had told her husband and relatives that she intended to return to her Milwaukee home as a ghost. It seems she may have kept her promise.
Over the following weeks, in the hour between midnight and 1:00 a.m., there were repeat performances of the door opening and closing, footsteps pacing about, and—most disconcerting of all—heavy, labored breathing. That settled it, the neighbors told Mrs. Kubis: Mrs. Pickman had severe asthma.
One night, Mrs. Pickman went too far with the Kubis family. Helen and Armilla were fast asleep when they were jarred awake by the heavy thud of a falling body hitting their bed and then trying to crawl under the sheets. The girls fled screaming into their parents’ room, quite convinced that the old lady had jumped into bed with them.
That was enough. The following morning, Max Kubis packed up his family and belongings and moved. In their rush to leave, however, the family left behind their mantel clock. When Julia Kubis returned for it the next day, she found it had stopped—at midnight.
Mr. Sherman Pays a Visit
Plover
Tim and Louise Mulderink always dreamed of owning a restaurant. So it was no surprise when they decided in the early 1980s to buy a historic, 125-year-old house in Plover, Wisconsin, to remodel into a fine dining establishment.
Their task was made all the more challenging because they discovered that not all the deceased owners and residents of the attractive, two-story clapboard dwelling had moved out. As the conversion got underway, someone they could not see opened the doors for them or knocked glasses off the new bar. It might have been someone else who tromped about the upstairs rooms and turned lights on and off.
At first, Tim and Louise were so busy remodeling that they did not really notice the peculiarities. They put in new wiring and plumbing, installed a new roof, and insulated the walls. Tim Mulderink’s background in food management and catering was key in the planning, including the conversion of the former garage into a modern, commercial kitchen. Louise, a vivacious, willowy blonde, supervised the interior design of the house-turned-restaurant. The main color scheme of petal pink and burgundy created an elegant ambiance for fine dining.
The Mulderinks named their restaurant the Sherman House to identify it with the famous Sherman House restaurant in Chicago, the couple’s hometown. They also wanted to honor Eugene A. Sherman, the most historically significant of the home’s previous residents. Eugene Sherman had operated a sawmill and general store in Plover, moving into the house in 1891. Now, nearly a century later, the Sherman House Restaurant was ready for its first guests. The successful grand opening in April pleased Tim and Louise.
Not long afterward, however, the couple found that a crowded dining room would not be their only challenge in what became a rash of exploding drink glasses.
In the first incident, Louise Mulderink was standing behind the polished bar facing a glass-shelved cabinet when one of the drink glasses inside exploded.
“It simply shattered,” said Tim. “Louise never touched it. Shards of glass everywhere.”
The drink glass had been in the center of a row of glasses. Tim did not think a vibration of some sort had sent it off the shelf, as nothing else moved.
Shortly afterward, two women in the bar ordered drinks. No sooner had the bartender set the first drink down than that glass exploded as well, showering one of the women with liquid and pieces of glass. Fortunately, she was not hurt.
Three witnesses said no one had touched it.
On a Friday night, one of the kitchen helpers experienced a similar incident. A few minutes after he pulled a rack of glasses out of the dishwasher to air dry, there came a loud popping sound.
Tim Mulderink had been standing nearby. “What are you doing, breaking glasses?” he asked.
“I didn’t even touch it,” said Paul, the kitchen dishwasher, holding a stack of plates he had just removed from an automatic dishwasher.
On another day, during the lunch-hour rush, a fourth glass exploded, throwing shards into the liquor and ice bins.
“The pieces looked like a windshield somebody took a sledge hammer to,” said Louise.
By this time, Tim was convinced he had gotten a defective supply of glasses, so he called the company representative, who could not explain to Tim why the glasses had shattered. He said the occasional glass breaks because of a defect, but it is highly improbable for several glasses to do so.
The restaurant opened during its early years at four thirty on Sundays. On one of those Sunday afternoons Louise’s father, Charles Grachan, was alone in the house answering the telephone and taking dinner reservations. Someone unlocked the front door and opened it.
“Come in, Mr. Sherman. I’ll buy you a drink,” Grachan jokingly called out from the next room.
No one came in.
Grachan found the door open just wide enough for a person to slip through. It had been locked.
“Only a few people have a key to that door,” he said. “Whoever opened it had to have a key. I heard it click.”
But that was not the end of his experiences there. Late one evening, Grachan, Tim, and a friend named Rick were deep in conversation after hours in the bar when the mantel clock on the top shelf behind the bar struck the midnight hour. The men looked up. Each one agreed with the other—it had struck thirteen.
“I’ve had enough for tonight,” said Grachan. He had bought the clock new the previous April and this was the third time it had struck an extra hour. Grachan could find nothing wrong with it.
It was all a bit too much for him. “I’m not scared of anything except something I can’t see. I have trouble with that.”
Corinne, the restaurant’s cleaning lady, had the same opinion. A religious woman who always carried her Bible with her, she reported to work early each morning until the day she quit. “Whatever is in there I can’t work there any more,” she told the Mulderinks.
Tim shook his head.
“She was scared out of her wits. She would talk about kitchen pots clanging or shadows in the bar; when she was near the entrances she could see shadows going by.”
Even though other employees besides Corinne were nervous about working in the house, Tim and Louise Mulderink were not inclined to accept a supernatural basis for the incidents. Tim, especially, looked for logical explanations for everything.
Meanwhile, Louise experienced an episode that changed her mind. For a time it frightened her so badly that she refused to be at the restaurant by herself.
That particular night while another dishwasher finished up in the kitchen, Louise emptied the cash register and took the money upstairs to the office to count and then put in the safe. She kept the office door open. Suddenly, it slammed shut. She opened it back up and took a look down the dim hallway. Returning to her desk, she heard footsteps cross the hall and looked up. That is when she noticed the door to the banquet room opposite the office had swung open. It was always kept closed when nothing was scheduled.
Louise raced downstairs to find the dishwasher. Had he just gone upstairs for some reason? No, he had not left the kitchen.
Louise went back up, cautiously switched on the banquet room lights, and checked around. Nothing was disturbed. By the time she returned to counting the money, the dishwasher was finished and called up the stairs that he was ready to leave.
Louise remembered: “I counted very fast and put everything in the safe, made sure the back [fire escape] door was locked, turned off the light in the office, and made sure all the upstairs lights were off. [We] walked out the door together and he got in his car and left. I got in my car, locked all the doors, and backed the car up. I looked up and the office light was on. I know I’d turned all the lights off and I wasn’t about to go back in. So I went home and woke Tim up. I had to tell him what happened.”
Neither one returned to the restaurant that night. When they did the following morning, the office light was off.
Louise said her father had a similar experience while filling in at the restaurant when Tim and Louise were out of town. Charles Grachan finished counting the money late one evening, put it in the safe, and turned off all the lights. While walking to his car, he looked up and saw the office light burning. He went back inside and the light was off.
The incidents continued. One Friday night, Tim and Louise and four of the employees were talking in the kitchen when they heard distinct thumping noises overhead.
“Stop talking for a minute!” someone shouted. Heavy footsteps crossed the upstairs hall as if to enter the banquet room.
On a fall night in 1983, Louise witnessed a second disturbing incident. She was upstairs when the fluorescent lights in the office flickered but did not go out. Then Louise heard a tinkling noise. On the back of the office door is a rack holding lightweight metal clothes hangers.
As Louise turned from the safe, she noticed the wire coat hangers swinging back and forth, including one that held Tim’s shirt.
“It was as if somebody had brushed past them,” she said.
“I went home and told Tim that the ghost was here again,” said Louise.
In time, the Mulderinks searched for a possible identity to their ghost . . . or ghosts.
Wendell Nelson, a Portage County historian, provided the couple with background information on the house and its residents. Louise also gathered information from customers familiar with the place. The only person confirmed to have died in the house was a two-day-old infant.
However, all the families who had lived in the house were Methodist teetotalers, especially the Pierce family, who owned it from 1903 until 1945.
James W. Pierce was a Plover grocer. The church deacons and the men’s club met in the house, and Mrs. Pierce regularly entertained the ladies’ sewing circle.
Louise thought the Pierces might be offended by the transformation of their homestead into a restaurant. Especially after she and Tim unwittingly converted Mr. Pierce’s old bedroom into the bar.
“He’s probably just having kittens over that,” chuckled Louise.
If it is the ghost of James Pierce that roams the house, he might have been there long before its transition into a restaurant. The Mulderinks believe the house has been haunted for at least twenty-five years. The last residents before the Mulderinks, the Sowiaks, who owned it from 1957 to 1982, also witnessed strange phenomena, which a member of the family related to the Mulderinks.
The rear portion of the upstairs banquet room was once a Sowiak son’s bedroom. (Tim and Louise removed the wall between two bedrooms to create a private banquet dining space.) The Sowiaks had a fearless yet friendly dog who refused to go upstairs. It would stand at the foot of the stairway and bark and howl. Once, the Sowiak son pushed the dog up a couple of steps, but it came right back down.
The son married and moved to Chicago. Each time he and his wife returned to visit his parents, they slept in his old bedroom. But they got little rest. The couple heard someone come into the room and walk over to the bed. It was as if a parent were coming in late at night to check on a sleeping child. But no one was ever there.
After a few such nocturnal checks, the Sowiaks’ daughter-in-law refused to sleep in the room anymore. Her husband stuck it out until one night when something awoke him. He refused to say what had frightened him.
A few sensitive patrons of the Sherman House may have suspected that someone invisible was watching them in the oak-trimmed bar or in one of the comfortable dining rooms. But luckily, since the bar glasses shattered, there were no further incidents involving customers.
They also knew that the front door, secure as it seemed, might open mysteriously at any time, that someone prowled the banquet room upstairs, and that the mantel clock in the bar could not be depended on to chime the correct hour. And that the woman who lived next door might greet Tim and Louise in the morning by asking, “Did you know your office light was on all night?”
Charles Grachan, Louise’s father, believed in ghosts and did not worry about who or what might be sharing space with him.
Of the ghost, Grachan said, “He’s just a nice, friendly guy.”
The Mulderinks eventually sold the Sherman House. The space is now home to the Cottage Café, which capitalizes on the building’s haunted history, hosting psychic readings and other paranormal-themed events.
The Nodolf Incident
Platteville
Southwestern Wisconsin abounds with unique geographic formations, such as its deep valleys called coulees, the towering river bluffs, and unique limestone outcroppings. There are pockets of wilderness virtually untouched by the outside world, picturesque villages, and isolated farmhouses recalling a way of life more suitable to the nineteenth century.
The community of Platteville is one of the region’s larger cities. It served as an early trading center for the nearby lead miners, the badgers who gave the state its nickname. Today Platteville is a thriving small city that savors its ties to pioneer history.
Just outside of Platteville is a towering rock bluff known as the Platte Mound. Today, the Mound has the distinction of bearing the world’s largest M, first placed there by students at the Wisconsin Mining School (now the University of Wisconsin–Platteville) in the 1930s. Before there was the M, however, the mound had already gained local distinction as being the site of a bizarre incident in the nineteenth century involving a German immigrant family. Those familiar with the case call it “The Nodolf Incident” or simply “the strange night.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, Carl Nodolf, a German-born farmer, moved into a sturdy, two-story house on a large swatch of land near the base of the Platte Mound.
Carl had left his bride-to-be in Germany when he immigrated to the United States. Like many other men creating a new life in an unfamiliar land, he wanted a measure of success before he married and raised a family. The deep, rich black soil, the spectacular view of the rolling countryside from the house’s windows, and the dramatic mound towering above it would surely appeal to his betrothed as it had to him. No doubt he had simply fallen in love with the region.
Carl prospered and returned to Germany in the late 1860s. When he arrived, he found tragedy—his sweetheart had died in a diphtheria epidemic only a few weeks before his arrival.
Anguish replaced Carl’s optimism. Only two of his fiancée’s family had survived: her mother and another daughter, sixteenyear-old Louise. Gradually he realized that his dream of a farm and family in Wisconsin could still be fulfilled. He would ask Louise to come with him to America. Louise accepted but did not want to rush into such an important event. She suggested that her mother join them, with the marriage taking place after they arrived in Wisconsin.
So both Louise and her mother accompanied Carl back to Platteville, and Carl and Louise were married soon after. Their first child, a daughter named Minnie Louise, was born three years later. Louie, their first son, was born two years after that.
Louie was two years old and Minnie had just turned five when “the strange night” began. All day a wicked storm moved closer and closer to the Nodolf farm. Near dusk, the blackened clouds loomed directly overhead and the wind increased to gale proportions.
Carl and Louise tucked their two children into an upstairs bedroom, then securely locked each bedroom window shutter. Downstairs, Carl slid the shoulder-high bar across each outside door. They shuttered each window tightly against the storm.
Still they hesitated to go to bed. Lightning ricocheted across the night sky. The wind howled more like a November blizzard than a June thunderstorm. An occasional wolf howled near the house. Too near, Louise thought.
Shortly after midnight, Carl finally decided the house was secure, and, with Louise leading the way up the stairs with the lantern, they checked on the children and tucked the blankets around their shoulders. Only then were they ready to retire for the night.
A few hours later, a deafening explosion of thunder awoke Louise. At the same instant, she heard little Minnie’s voice crying for help. Louise quickly lit the lantern and ran into the children’s bedroom.
The beds were empty.
By this time Carl was at his wife’s side. Together they searched.
“Carl, they must have become frightened and gone downstairs,” said Louisa.
The couple called for the children as they rushed down the stairs. No voices answered. When they reached the front room, they stopped, straining to hear.
Between the cracks of thunder and pounding wind, they heard faint voices—coming from outside the house.
Carl threw off the heavy bar securing the door and swung it open. On the steps, shivering in their nightwear, stood Minnie and Louie. Carl scooped them up in his muscular arms.
“Wrap them up,” said Louise. “I’ll get their dry . . .”
Her husband stopped her.
“Louise, you don’t have to get dry clothes. The children aren’t wet!”
Despite the heavy downpour, battering even now against the stonewall exterior, neither Minnie nor Louie had as much as a drop of rain on them. It was as if they had been standing in some invisible shell on the doorstep of the house. Handing the children to Louise, Carl checked each shuttered and locked window and the bolted doors. All were secured from the inside.
“How did they get out there? That is not possible,” said Carl, shaking his head.
When their parents asked them what happened, neither child could answer. Stuttering badly, they tried to recall the last few hours but could not. The children stuttered for the rest of their lives, the only two of the eight Nodolf children to do so.
Friends and neighbors offered many theories to explain the strange evening.
Perhaps one of the parents was a sleepwalker and picked up the children and put them outside while under the influence of some strange dream.
Others with more vivid imaginations suggested that gypsies, known to frequent that neighborhood, broke into the house, snatched the children, and then were scared away, leaving the youngsters to be found on the front doorstep. But that does not explain why the doors and windows were still locked from inside. Or their dry clothing.
For decades after the incident, scores of curious visitors found the old stone house, crumbling and vacant, standing forlornly at the base of the mound. They sometimes paused as they crossed the expansive lawn, perhaps in the shade of one of the towering oaks, and wondered: What really happened on that strange night so very long ago? There did not seem to be a rational explanation.
The Nodolfs have not been forgotten.
A choral composition based on the episode and written by Wisconsin composer Heidi Joosten had its world premiere in Plateville on October 26, 2015. With funding from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Platteville Community Fund, Joosten was the composer-in-residence for the public schools’ sixth through twelfth grade choirs. Over 160 vocalists and musicians performed the composition at school assemblies, and for the general public.
Joosten titled her work “The Strange Night.”
Indeed. And not one to be forgotten.
Return of the Hanged Man
Mineral Point
The Walker House in Mineral Point is one of Wisconsin’s oldest inns. With exterior stone in its walls dating to the 1830s, the solidly handsome, three-story building, with its newer two-story addition at one end, has a decidedly early American frontier elegance.
Tucked into a hillside that was among those producing the lead ore once mined in the region from the 1820s, the Walker House could have been a nobleman’s hunting lodge transplanted to Wisconsin. Inside, massive stone fireplaces and heavy, rough-hewn beams, with tree bark still on them, gave character to the original ceilings of the main-floor rooms. A massive bar and walls adorned with hunting trophies dominate an upstairs tavern.
From its very earliest years, the Walker House did a brisk business. Wisconsin’s territorial officers were sworn in at Mineral Point, and the little village teemed with politicians traveling between the state’s temporary capital at nearby Belmont and their home communities. Cornish miners, frontiersmen, and speculators poured into town, eager for the riches that the lead and zinc deposits promised. At night, the men crowded into the village bars and lodgings, including the Walker House, jostling one another for drink, food, and perhaps a bed for the night.
But on the morning of November 1, 1842, a “customer” of a different kind patronized the Walker House. He was a murderer who would hang later that day from a scaffold erected in front of the inn. His name was William Caffee and he had been convicted of shooting and killing a man during an argument in the community of Gratiot several months before.
A crowd some estimated at over four thousand turned out for the execution. Men crowded the narrow streets and mothers with children and picnic baskets camped on the hills ringing the town, all jostling for a view of the condemned man swinging from a rope. That was not usual “entertainment” on the rough American frontier.
The execution was a macabre affair from some reports. Caffee sat astride his casket and beat out the rhythm of a funeral march with two empty beer bottles. Such a carefree and contemptuous attitude toward his own death brought him a sort of posthumous fame, even in this rough and tumble mining region. No one who witnessed his execution would ever forget him.
Just to make sure his memory would be preserved in this place where he so nonchalantly met death, Caffee is alleged by some to have settled into the Walker House as a ghost. If true, the Walker House would be one of the oldest haunted buildings in the United States.
The ghostly appearances attributed to William Caffee became widely known to the public sometime after 1964. In that year, Ted Landon and several partners bought the old inn. It had closed its doors and stood vacant for seven years, ruined by neglect and vandalism. Landon, an Iowa County social worker and local artist, could not bear to witness further destruction of the historic building. He and his associates wanted to transform and restore the Walker House into a restaurant and perhaps a bed and breakfast.
Landon’s restoration was extensive. He hired crews of young people to dig out dead trees, replace some eight hundred window panes, and build a massive fireplace of native stone in what they called the Pub. Oak planks from an abandoned barn became the Pub’s walls. It took several years, but in time one dining room had been refurbished, and the Walker House opened for business, serving Cornish-style luncheons and dinners to honor the region’s original settlers from Cornwall. The next year, another dining room was opened, and in 1974, a second-floor tavern was ready for guests.
In 1978 Landon and his partners sold the Walker House to David F. Ruf, a medical doctor from Darlington, Wisconsin.
At the time Ruf took over, a student from Madison was living in a second-floor apartment at one end of the building, above the office.
What happened to him may have been the first incidence of a possible haunting.
The student complained the doorknob would turn this way and that at night. He heard other unidentifiable noises that did not seem “natural.” After countless sleepless nights, he moved out.
Walker Calvert understood the student’s fear. Calvert, a distant relative of the inn’s early owner, had been hired by Ruf as a manager and chef, and almost immediately he began to witness curious incidents.
In the main dining room, adjoining the office, a small wooden door covered a rectangular, floor-level opening concealing water pipes. When it was removed, one could peer inside straight up to the second floor. One day Calvert said he saw the door slide along the wall and drop down a few inches to the floor. He said it was just like someone had taken it in hand and slid it across the floor, out of the way. He saw that happen several times, as did a few of the waitresses on staff.
The main dining room presented its own head-scratching incidents.
On three different occasions, Calvert said he found himself talking to someone only to find that no one was there.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a real person,” said Calvert.
In the kitchen, the banging and clanking of pots and pans sometimes created a din, except that no pans were being used at the time.
One of the older staff members became so frightened she refused to work alone in the kitchen. Calvert understood.
“When I was in there, I thought someone was following me around,” he said.
Several of the waitresses told Calvert they would fix drinks, turn around, and seem to bump into something solid, like a person, but no one was ever there. At other times a sort of white haze floated in the air across the room.
One waitress had been particularly outspoken in her disbelief of the ghost stories. Soon after, while she was in the kitchen, something grabbed her ponytail and pulled it straight up into the air.
“Get away!” she screamed.
Her ponytail remained upright a moment, dropped limply to her back, then suddenly shot straight up again.
Other female customers also related that they felt their hair being lifted or stroked when no one else was around.
The ghost was always acting up, Calvert said. It was as if he tried to prove to everyone that he was there.
Things like heavy breathing and footsteps scared a number of employees. On one occasion, a bartender cleaning in a secondfloor barroom stooped to check his supply of glasses in a lower cupboard. Hearing heavy breathing, he froze. He thought he knew who it was.
“Leave me alone!” he yelled.
As he straightened up, gripping the edge of the counter, the breathing become shallower, and then the bartender heard what seemed to be someone walking away across the squeaky floorboards.
On a December morning just before the place closed for the winter season, Calvert was working alone in his office. He heard someone walking across the hardwood floors outside his open office door. The footfalls stopped at the doorway. He turned to see who it was.
“All I heard was a deep groan. I ran out [because] it scared me to death.”
Calvert said whenever he was alone in the restaurant it was like the ghost wanted to let him know it was there, too. But then once he reacted, the ghost would leave him alone.
The ghost of William Caffee—if that is indeed who was responsible for these oddities—developed quite an affinity for doors and locks. Several times, either in early morning or late at night, someone might hear keys jiggling in the front-door lock. Or a door that was unlocked would suddenly be found locked.
Calvert said sometimes when he or the waitresses were ready to leave for the night, they found the outside door locked—from the inside. That particular door used a deadbolt locking system with a key that only Calvert possessed.
The ghost did his best to scare people away, Calvert believed. It was as if he resented crowds of people. Considering William Caffee was executed in front of a crowd of thousands, it might be understandable if he resented large gatherings.
Walker Calvert and his wife and comanager, Linda, were inside one spring day preparing to open for the season. One of the entrances has outside and inside doors, creating a small airlock vestibule between them. The outside door was seldom used and always kept locked. The interior one had been sealed in plastic to keep out drafts. When Calvert removed the plastic and Linda opened the door, a voice called out, “Hello!” Linda jumped back, startled.
Curiously, Calvert did not see an actual something that could have been the ghost until several years after he started working there.
Just before sunset on a crisp October evening, Calvert went upstairs to check the door that opened from the far end of a second-story bar onto a wide porch. The porch contained an L-shaped wooden bench and an attractive tree that grew up through a hole in the floor. An exterior wooden stairway led up to the porch from ground level.
As Calvert opened the door to the porch, he noticed what looked to be a person sitting on the porch bench barely two feet away, attired in a gray miner’s jacket and denim pants. But Calvert says he knew immediately the man was not real—because he had no head. A black felt hat rested directly on his shoulders.
Calvert said the clothes were old, rumpled, and dusty, but not ill-fitting. His body was turned to face Calvert.
“I didn’t reach out to try and touch him,” said Calvert. “I didn’t want to get that close!”
He put the key in the lock and closed the door. When he looked back at the bench, it was empty.
Surprisingly, Calvert was not in the least upset by this encounter. “I’d had so many connections with him that I didn’t think much of it,” he said.
He had been told the ghosts of hanging victims might appear as headless apparitions. He assumed the ghost was that of William Caffee.
The same week that Calvert saw the man on the porch, a waitress saw the ghost of a younger man in the second-floor barroom, adjacent to the porch. This one had a head. He stood by the bar for a moment, then vanished.
To Walker Calvert’s knowledge, the ghost of William Caffee never harmed anyone, nor was he a threat to the Walker House. He did not smash dishes or try to set fire to the place. The ghost did get irritated, however, by those large crowds. Caffee’s last earthly sight, of course, was the raucous throng pushing against the scaffold, eager to see him swing. Caffee had been brandishing beer bottles just before he mounted the scaffold for his early afternoon hanging. Could that account for the beer bottles that sometimes flew into the air and crashed to the floor during busy lunch hours at the restaurant? Calvert wondered about that.
Caffee’s ghost was certainly prankish, and, at times, downright frightening to someone startled by his sudden presence. Yet perhaps he was only trying to be “helpful,” rattling pans in the kitchen, checking out the bar, and helping to lock up at night. The ghost may have wanted to do nothing more than to look over the books on the morning the ghost surprised Calvert in the office. It is not always possible to predict a ghost’s wishes.
Before he went to work at the Walker House, Calvert scoffed at the supernatural.
“Now it’s all possible.”
Current owners of the Walker House acknowledge that the paranormal is a part of the history of the building but term the stories isolated “anecdotes.” They say that over the years numerous psychics, ghost hunters, and researchers have searched for evidence of the paranormal but with little or no success. Video and audio equipment have not detected anything that could be identified as a “presence.” People who have lived for several years in the Walker House say they have never encountered William Caffee or any other ghostly being.
A Mother’s Plea
Southwestern Wisconsin
The bond between a mother and her child is often beyond comprehension—a slight, unexpected stirring from the baby’s nursery can awaken her from deepest slumber, a kind of sixth sense warning her of imminent danger to her child. But does that sense of peril end at what is taken by most of us to be death?
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cholera was a terrifying disease, a nearly always fatal intestinal infection that swept across various regions of the United States, leaving thousands dead in its wake. No one was exempt. Not until well into the twentieth century were cholera epidemics brought under control; even today the word “cholera” evokes images of slow, agonizing death, sometimes coming within hours of a diagnosis if it is left untreated.
The story of little five-year-old Maxie Hoffman’s reprieve from “the yellow death,” as it was called, is one of the most amazing such tales to have emerged during this time, albeit one that is nearly impossible to verify.
Maxie lived with his parents, brothers, and sisters on a small Wisconsin farm in the mid-nineteenth century. Shortly after his fifth birthday, he contracted cholera. The doctor looked in on him, but he knew little about the disease and even less about its treatment. All he could do was make the child comfortable and offer his sympathies to the family. And, he added, pray that no one else in the family contracted the disease.
Maxie died three days later. The doctor ordered that the child be buried immediately to help prevent the cholera from spreading any further.
His small body was placed in a simple pine coffin. His father used part of the family’s savings to buy silver handles for the casket. Maxie was buried in the country cemetery.
On the night following his death, Mrs. Hoffman awoke wild-eyed, screaming in panic. Her husband reached out to console her as she sobbed out the nightmarish scene that had been more vivid than life.
“It was Maxie . . . in his coffin. But dear God, he was alive!”
She collapsed in her husband’s arms.
“He . . . he was trying to get out. I saw him. His hands were under his right cheek. He was twisted. Oh! He’s alive . . . I know it! We must go to him!”
Mr. Hoffman said he understood. The agony had been great for both of them. As the “baby” in the family, Maxie held a special place in their hearts.
Mrs. Hoffman’s dream reappeared the next night.
The details were the same as the night before. Maxie lay twisted in his coffin, one tiny hand clenched tightly under his head.
This time, Mr. Hoffman acquiesced, reluctantly agreeing to her pleadings. He sent his eldest child to a neighbor’s house for help. Together the men would exhume Maxie’s body. Mr. Hoffman believed this was the only way to persuade his wife that her son had indeed passed away, as horrifying as the experience would be.
It was well past one o’clock in the morning when the Hoffmans’ neighbor held the lantern high as they raised Maxie’s coffin from the freshly dug earth. Mrs. Hoffman huddled close with two of the older children as her husband pried off the top.
A gasp arose nearly simultaneously from everyone’s lips.
Maxie’s body was twisted onto his right side, a hand clenched under his cheek.
Just as his mother had dreamed.
Although the child showed no outward signs of life, Mr. Hoffman scooped up the boy’s still form, placed it gently into the buckboard, and drove through the night to the same doctor who had pronounced Maxie dead only days earlier.
After answering the pounding at his door, the physician drew back quickly from Mr. Hoffman when he saw Maxie cradled in his arms. Reluctantly, but at the family’s insistence, the doctor tried to revive the child, if only to please the distraught mother. He detected something, an unnatural warmth in the frail body, perhaps, that caused him to continue his efforts.
The minutes passed. At last, nearly an hour after the doctor first began, Maxie’s eyelids fluttered open. Everyone huddled around, almost afraid to hope, while the doctor coaxed some brandy down the child’s throat, then placed heated salt bags under Maxie’s arms, a common restorative in those days.
Within the week, Maxie Hoffman, healthy and normal as ever, played cheerily with his brothers and sisters. He would remember nothing of his own premature “death.”
Is there an explanation? We can only guess that Maxie was one of those rare medical cases in which an individual showing no apparent signs of life has been pronounced dead only to revive later. In the nineteenth century, the technology for assessing the presence of life was limited to the doctor’s stethoscope or intuition. The child was fortunate indeed. His mother’s dream saved him from death after burial.
Maxie Hoffman lived a long life until his death at the age of eighty-five in Clinton, Iowa. The silver handles from his first coffin always held a place of prominence on the fireplace mantel in his home.
The Psychic Detective
Milwaukee
There is no reliable evidence, of course, that the fictional Sherlock Holmes, the master of Victorian detection, ever visited America, let alone Milwaukee. More’s the pity, for Holmes, and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, missed the opportunity to meet a man of that city whose abilities to solve seemingly impenetrable crimes were said to have nearly matched Holmes’s own.
Or did they?
Arthur Price Roberts, known as “Doc” or “The Professor” to his friends, was a psychic detective. Like Holmes, Doc Roberts was called on by authorities and private clients to help unravel intricate crimes or to find lost possessions. But unlike Holmes, who solved his puzzling cases through the powers of observation and deduction, Roberts claimed to use his own mysterious “psychic powers.”
Doc Roberts was born in Denbigh, Wales, in 1866. He immigrated to this country as a young boy, settling first with an uncle in Fox Lake, Wisconsin. As a teenager, he headed for Blanchard, North Dakota, and took a job herding cattle. There, he once said, he first became aware of his psychic powers. Roberts claimed that a man named Wild lost some money and Roberts found it. He said that he “saw” a picture in his mind’s eye of its hiding place.
Incredibly, Roberts remained nearly illiterate all his life. He feared an education would destroy his psychic abilities.
Doc Roberts rose to fame in the late nineteenth century and continued his celebrated career for over forty years. Most of his psychic puzzlesolving took place in Wisconsin, although he occasionally was called upon to solve cases elsewhere in the United States.
Roberts did possess one of Sherlock Holmes’s more startling traits—the ability to correctly surmise a person’s background, current difficulties, and other personal information through mere observation. In 1905, for instance, he took on the case of Duncan McGregor, a Peshtigo, Wisconsin, man who had been missing for a number of months. His distraught wife sought Roberts out when authorities reached a dead end in their investigation.
Mrs. McGregor said later that when she visited Roberts, he met her at the door to his home and proceeded to accurately identify her and the cause of her distress. There is no evidence that Roberts either knew of the case or had ever seen the woman before.
He concluded that first, brief meeting by saying that he could not help her at that moment. But, he added, she should come back in a few hours after he had some time to concentrate on the case.
Roberts took an unusual step for him and went into a sort of trance. Normally, when asked to put his abilities to work, he received a mental picture immediately.
The trance apparently worked.
Mrs. McGregor returned early that evening. Gently, Roberts revealed that her husband had been murdered, but he could not identify the individuals responsible.
“The testimony I could give would not be admissible in court,” he apologized. He told her that the body of her husband was in the Menomonee River near Milwaukee, snarled in some sunken logs that prevented it from rising to the surface.
Mrs. McGregor alerted police, who dragged the river at the location Roberts specified. They found McGregor’s body. His clothing had become entangled in sunken logs on the river bottom.
Geography did not constrain Doc Roberts’s psychic senses.
In one of his more dramatic cases, he found the body of a missing man in Arizona without ever leaving his Milwaukee home.
In this case, wealthy Chicago financier J. D. Leroy sought out Roberts after his brother vanished on a trip to the American Southwest six months earlier. The police did not have a clue as to the man’s whereabouts.
Doc Roberts disclosed that the man had been murdered and his body dumped in a place called Devil’s Canyon in Arizona. He then described for J. D. Leroy the area in which his brother’s remains would be found.
A few weeks later, Roberts received a letter from Leroy. Police had found his brother’s corpse in Devil’s Canyon, only a few hundred feet from the very scene Roberts described. The body bore signs of foul play.
In yet another case, Roberts allegedly tracked a murder suspect to Canada without leaving his home state. He was visiting Fond du Lac when police in that city approached him for help on an old, unsolved murder case. Their search for a suspect had been stymied.
Roberts listened carefully to their story, then held up his hand for silence. He proceeded to describe the murder victim in detail. Although the police were amazed, the cynics still were not satisfied. They claimed Roberts really had not revealed anything that could not have been obtained from published accounts of the crime.
But what happened the next morning surprised everyone. Doc walked into police headquarters and asked to look through their mug shots of known criminals. He sat for several hours scanning the faces as he slowly turned the pages. At last he called detectives over and placed his finger on the picture of one man, known to officers as a petty criminal.
“That’s your killer, gentlemen!” he exclaimed. He said police could find him in Canada—working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Fond du Lac police notified their Canadian brethren of the man’s name and description and said he was wanted for murder. Sure enough, the Canadians found him, working for the Mounties. He confessed to the Fond du Lac murder.
In another dramatic case, Doc Roberts claimed to have saved a man from the electric chair. The family of Chicagoan Ignatz Potz asked Doc for help while Potz was awaiting execution after being convicted of first degree murder. He claimed that, although he was present at the killing, he took no part in it.
Roberts went to work and uncovered evidence supporting Potz’s claims. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Roberts made more headlines in the mid-1920s in two separate crime investigations.
He was consulted by Northwestern National Bank officials following a bank robbery. Based on a séance Roberts held, a suspect was identified and arrested. However, the man was later acquitted for lack of admissible evidence.
One of Wisconsin’s most famous murder mysteries also involved Roberts. The body of Clara Olson was found in a shallow grave near Mt. Sterling, in Crawford County, on December 2, 1926. After her husband, Erdman Olson, became the prime suspect in the murder, he dropped out of sight. Doc Roberts predicted that Erdman would never be found alive. He was not and the case remains unsolved. Roberts apparently was not able to “picture” the culprit.
Roberts’s crowning achievement came in the months of October and November 1935 when Milwaukee was rocked by a series of terrorist bombings that held the city in their grip for over a week. Roberts allegedly predicted not only the bombings but the final horrific blast, which proved to be an accidental detonation caused by the bomb makers.
The extraordinary episode began on October 18, 1935, a Friday afternoon. Roberts told a group of acquaintances that the city would experience several bombings in the very near future. His audience wanted desperately not to believe this awful prediction, but they were too familiar with Roberts’s uncanny accuracy to dismiss his words. It is not clear if anyone considered informing the police.
On Saturday night, October 26, the Shorewood Village Hall was dynamited at 7:23 p.m. The estimated five sticks of dynamite ripped a hole in the building’s foundation and splintered a tall, white column. The explosion was felt for blocks around with windows blown out in scores of homes and offices. The resulting fire consumed what remained of the village offices at 3930 North Murray Avenue.
Less than twenty-four hours later, investigators had no more than just begun their investigation when two more explosions shook the city. This time the targets of dynamite bombs were two branch offices of the First Wisconsin National Bank. At 6:40 p.m., October 27, a hole was blown in the rear wall of the bank branch offices at 3602 North Villard. Damage was limited to the back wall and many shattered windows.
Forty minutes later, the east side office of the First Wisconsin National Bank at North Farwell and East North Avenue was targeted.
There was no major damage to the bank, although eight cars in a parking lot were demolished. In both of the bank explosions, witnesses saw the suspects flee in a small, gray motor car.
By this time, Milwaukee realized a reign of terror might have been set loose on the city. Dozens of federal, state, and local investigators converged on the explosion sites.
So far, there had been no serious injuries, but officials feared that in the next bombing they might not be so fortunate.
Guards were posted at all governmental and bank buildings since these seemed to be the chosen targets. Investigators theorized that the bombers may have mistaken the Shorewood City Hall for a bank building.
The city was fearful and on edge as the following week passed uneventfully. Police determined that the dynamite in the early explosions had been stolen from a Works Project Administration work site several weeks earlier. One hundred and fifty pounds of explosives had been taken, along with four hundred fifty fuse caps and two hundred feet of fuse. Authorities were now even more concerned. That much dynamite could cause massive destruction.
The terrorists struck again on Thursday, hitting two police substations. Once again, good fortune limited the damage to the buildings with no personal injuries.
So far, Arthur Price Roberts had been proven correct. Police knew that and, in desperation, turned to him for “advice.” He told them the last explosion would come on Sunday, November 3, somewhere south of the Menomonee River.
Could he identify the criminals?
No.
Did he know precisely where the explosion would occur?
No.
Regretfully, that was all the information he could “see.”
That Sunday an army of police officers flooded the city south of the river. Sharpshooters kept watch from rooftops. Every officer was told to shoot first and ask questions later. As the countdown to Roberts’s predicted catastrophe began, all suspicious persons were stopped and questioned and abandoned buildings searched.
Somehow the police missed the old shed behind a house at 2121 West Mitchell Street.
Inside, two young men with long petty-crime records hunched over a potentially deadly arrangement of dynamite and fuse caps. They were concocting their “final surprise” for Milwaukee.
Then something went terribly wrong for them.
Whether the youthful bombers incorrectly set a timing device or just grew careless no one knows for certain. But at 2:40 p.m. on Sunday, November 3, 1935, an estimated forty sticks of dynamite exploded in that shed, leaving only a gaping hole in the earth, charred rubble, and smoking timbers.
The two men inside were Isador Rutkowski, twenty, and Paul Chovenee, sixteen. They were blown to bits. Tragically, there was the first innocent human casualty in this final blast. Little nine-year-old Patricia Mylanarek, of 2117-B West Mitchell, was playing in her second-story bedroom, overlooking the makeshift bomb factory, when it exploded. The blast collapsed her bedroom walls on top of her.
At least ten other persons were injured, the fronts of buildings were blown out for a hundred yards around the shed, and windows were knocked out of houses for several more blocks around. One witness said the area looked like a war zone.
Rutkowski, the apparent ringleader, was an unemployed auto mechanic with a police record. He was identified when cops found his head leaning against a garage thirty feet away. A later investigation showed he had some imagined grievances against bankers.
Chovenee’s death was not discovered until the next day when his father reported him missing, saying he had last seen him with Rutkowski. His father identified swatches of his son’s hair and scalp, along with the remnants of a blue jacket. Police surmised Chovenee was likely an easily duped sycophant, merely following the older boy’s criminal plan.
An additional two boxes of dynamite were found intact in the building rubble, miraculously surviving the massive destruction. Police said that had they exploded, the results would have been even more catastrophic.
The deaths of Rutkowski and Chovenee ended the bombing terror in Milwaukee. Investigators were unanimous in their opinion that Rutkowski and Chovenee had been preparing another bomb when it accidentally exploded. Doc Roberts’s premonition was accurate, even down to the final accidental bombing that would end the fear gripping the city.
Doc Roberts was probably frightened on occasion by the future he “saw.” Would that have extended to his own intimations of mortality?
It is said—but lightly documented—that a small dinner party was given in his honor in November 1939. He told the gathering how very pleased he was with the tribute and proceeded to reminisce about his own incredible life-solving mysteries. He was elderly now and though he seemed to be in good health, his psychic senses told him otherwise. Or perhaps he had a terminal illness that only he knew about.
As the group planned for their next dinner together after the New Year, Roberts expressed his regrets. “I won’t be with you beyond January 2, 1940,” he confided with a tinge of sorrow.
Less than two months later, on the morning of Tuesday, January 2, 1940, Arthur Price Roberts died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-three. His Milwaukee Journal obituary noted that he had been ill for two months. He is buried in Milwaukee’s Wanderers Rest Cemetery. The secrets of his psychic ability—if indeed that is what he used to “solve” the cases—were buried with him.