In the End

Alice Gray Wilson—to uncounted thousands, ”Diana of the Dunes”—is dead.168
—the Evening Messenger, 1925

Throughout the day on Sunday, February 8, 1925, the weather was unsettled outside Wren’s Nest. Shifting winds prevailed, and the already cold temperature was expected to drop. Rain or light snow was forecast for the hours after dark. Icy foam marked the shoreline of Lake Michigan, while ice floes dotted the wild waves. In the midst of yet another difficult winter, Alice Gray lay seriously ill on her pallet, as she had for nearly a week, refusing medical treatment. Sometime late in the night, she slipped into a coma.

Frantic, Paul finally left Alice’s side to run for help. He knocked on the bedroom window of developer Samuel Reck, the nearest neighbor who owned a car, to waken him and ask that he fetch a doctor.

Reck dressed immediately and headed into Gary, where he picked up Dr. DeLong. The sand was still so frozen he could drive his car on the beach and park close to Alice and Paul’s shack, thereby saving valuable time traipsing across the dunes.¹⁶⁹

The doctor diagnosed Alice with uremic poisoning (kidney failure) and treated her with hot water bags and “stimulants.” Despite his best efforts, she did not regain consciousness, so Reck and DeLong went back to Gary for additional medicine. That too, was ineffectual. After several more hours of bedside vigil, Alice died the morning of Monday, February 9, just before dawn. She was forty-four years old.

A Fisherman’s Home, etching by Earl H. Reed and published in his book, Voices of the Dunes. Courtesy of the Westchester Township History Museum.

The news spread quickly and with nearly as much imaginative reporting as when Alice was first discovered in the dunes. Within two days, newspapers across the United States reported her death by featuring variations of stories printed by dunes-area and Chicago newspapers. Among others, readers in Montana, Michigan, California, Nebraska, Tennessee, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Virginia and Texas read about Alice’s last days, whether they had previously known her story or not.

The national headlines ranged from the straightforward, “Diana Dead,”¹⁷⁰ to the romantic, “Diana of Dunes Is Dead, Dancing in Moonlight on Sands of Shore at End.”¹⁷¹

A sampling of headlines written by local editors highlighted their favorite details from a long history covering Alice: “Diana of Dunes Reported Dead in Her Lonely Shack,” “Mystery Woman of Dunes Dies,” “Earth Claims Diana’s Body,” “Diana of the Dunes Dies at Her Little Shack Nestling in Duneland,” “Diana, Dunes Nymph, Is Laid to Rest in Oak Hill; Friends to Donate Flowers.”

Even the venerable New York Times published a six-paragraph article on the life and death of Alice, under the headline and bold-typed subheadline, “Diana of the Dunes Dies of Privations: Chicago Woman Who Took Up the Primitive Life in 1916 Refused Hospital Aid.”¹⁷²

Almost every news account featured two simultaneously tragic and romantic notions. The first was that Alice died in Paul’s arms. In one example, a headline printed on the front page, top fold of the Syracuse Herald read: “College Honor Student, Who Led Cave Girl Life, Dies in Giant Mate’s Arms.”¹⁷³

The second theme helped set the foundation for later ghost stories about Alice. Her one fervent wish, often expressed to Paul while she was living, so he claimed, was to be cremated—her ashes scattered on the northwest winds from the majestic dune called Mount Tom. Located at then Waverly Beach (now Indiana Dunes State Park), Mount Tom is the highest dune in the region. But cremation was unusual and therefore expensive and, even then, available only at some inconvenient distance from the dunes. Paul had no money but attempted to follow through on his promise by beginning to build a funeral pyre on Mount Tom—until Samuel Reck convinced him to let Alice’s family have their say.¹⁷⁴ Ultimately, the family took over planning the funeral arrangements and refused to allow cremation.

One local newspaper article put it bluntly: “Diana of the Dunes is to be buried quietly and ‘horribly respectably’ late today from a little undertaking parlor in the sooty city of Gary.”¹⁷⁵

A brief obituary published in the March 1925 issue of the Prairie Club bulletin was sympathetic to Alice’s struggles and kind in regard to the woman they had known:

A Tragedy of the Dunes
     With the death of Mrs. Paul Wilson, long since printed the woman of mystery, “Diana of the Dunes,” the curtain has fallen upon a tragedy whose stage was our own Duneland. Formerly Miss Alice Gray, a brilliant science scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Chicago, and an editorial secretary of accomplishments, her pleasant voice is well remembered by those with whom she dealt, and her fresh spirit and fair-mindedness left its impress, incorrigible individualist though she was. What cataclysm led her, ten years ago, from academic walls to the shelter of inclement skies and a shack on the wildest portion of the Dunes, we do not know. She lived alone summer and winter in the Dune wilderness, but finally received odious publicity through some avid sensation-monger. Her life for a time was shadowed by various conflicts with the society she had tried to escape.
     She knew and loved every native plant and animal, every mood and color of lake and dune. Three years ago she married Paul Wilson, a native son. Early in February she died, after a short illness, among her loved sands.

The funeral attracted the public eye, and not surprisingly, newspaper details of it vary. Just one story reported that schoolchildren brought flowers to place on her grave.¹⁷⁶ The fact that Paul brought a gun, however, is consistent throughout the retellings.

As her body lay in a parlor of the Williams and Marshall funeral home in Gary, Reck recalled,¹⁷⁷ a crowd of curious people gathered outside, while a smaller group of relatives and friends sat on benches inside the chapel. Reck sat next to a visibly grieving Paul, who was alone in the back of the room. He noticed that Paul’s hand was covering a revolver in his pocket.

The funeral, which began at 2:00 p.m., was presided over by the Reverend James Foster, rector of Christ Episcopal Church. It was brief.¹⁷⁸ As those in attendance made their way forward to view Alice’s body before the casket was closed for burial, Paul joined them. At the sight of her, he dissolved into a grief-stricken spate of shouting, drawing his gun and waving it in the air above Alice’s bier. Two people said he yelled a threat, although they each heard something different.

One of them heard, “Diana, I’ll get that damned newspaperman!”¹⁷⁹ The summer before she died, Alice was busy preparing for her libel case against the Chicago newspaper company,¹⁸⁰ which was set to be heard in the spring of 1925. The pall of accusation had hovered over them for two long years, and the couple was anxious to have their say. But Alice’s death effectively ended the lawsuit.¹⁸¹ Paul—acutely aware that the news coverage of the 1922 murder had devastated Alice and weakened her not only spiritually, but physically—was wracked with resentment.

A second threat from Paul—“Anyone who takes her body will be sorry!”—was also reported.¹⁸² His frustration with his inability to fulfill her wish to be cremated, her ashes cast from atop Mount Tom, would account for such a wild outburst. As it happened, he did not see her buried in the Gary cemetery, either.

Still waving the gun, Paul pointed it at Alice’s nephew, Chester Dunn, the relative who signed her death certificate and paid for the funeral.¹⁸³

But Paul gave up passively when the authorities arrived. He was escorted to Gary’s police station and held for a short time. Once his Diana was laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery, Paul was freed.

The memory of her, and the plans they had made to leave the dunes region and move to Texas, haunted him. Paul supposed he would make the trip alone, but he wasn’t making any promises. He was literally lost without Alice.¹⁸⁴

Reck left little choice for Paul; he had to make some sort of move. Just days after Alice’s burial, Reck cut Paul loose. “We agreed that a good revenge on the curious would be to burn down the shack and remove all traces of it. When he agreed, I carried out the destruction of the shack at once, having no desire to harbor a wild man on the property.”¹⁸⁵

But for another decade, a single, visible trace of Wren’s Nest would remain:

After this, Paul and Mr. Reck burned and destroyed the last vestige of one of the most romantic episodes in the history of Ogden Dunes. No, not all, for still to be seen in the hollow where the couple lived is the twenty-two-foot steel stack of a tugboat that served as a chimney. To see this is to fill one with awe at the strength of the man who placed it there. To visit this spot on a quiet moonlit night is to make one wish history could turn back and permit one to converse with this couple who knew and loved the handiwork of Nature as she was to be found here in Ogden Dunes.¹⁸⁶

Eventually, Paul became embroiled in other adventures that landed his name in the columns of newspapers; but after Alice died, his free-spirited life in the dunes ended without reprise.