Read on, and see if you sleep well tonight
Uh-oh. It's Halloween time again. When strange things can happen. Ghosts. Monsters. Unexplained lights in the sky.
Lucky
you live in good old normal Wisconsin where nothing weird ever pops up.
Where you can sleep soundly at night. Where you're nice and safe.
As long as you don't look behind you.
Because
Wisconsin has had more than its share of strange goings-on. For almost
200 years, the history of the state has been peppered with incidents
that sound like outtakes from "The Twilight Zone."
Look back, for instance, on an odd day in Oshkosh. Remember it the next time you pass that town. And watch the skies.
The
day was March 19, 1886, a bright and sunny one in Oshkosh. But little
did the residents of that city realize what the weather forecast really
was for March 19: "Darkness at noon."
It started around mid-day
- the strange feel in the air, the restlessness of the animals. Then at
3 p.m. it hit, a sudden blackness that blanketed the city.
Dogs panicked and residents ran for shelter. Driverless carriages careened down the streets behind hysterical horses.
Then, 10 minutes later, it was over. There had been no unusual wind. No freak weather systems. No eclipse.
And no explanation...
Fall
is the perfect time to take brisk hikes through the Wisconsin
countryside to see the wonderful colors and the geese and ducks flying
overhead.
But you could get some unexpected company in those woods. The Ridgeway Terror would just love to join you.
For
more than 100 years, this fellow has been materializing at the most
inappropriate times around the Dodgeville area. Like the day two
Pokerville gents were walking down the road carrying a heavy plank on
their shoulders.
They were heading into the woods when a white
apparition jumped onto the plank between them. The men turned white
themselves and started to run, holding onto the plank with the ghost
bumping along for the ride.
The men finally dropped the wood and
cowered on the ground. When they looked up, the apparition had
vanished. But it would return; the Ridgeway Terror reportedly has
milked cows dry, hampered railroad construction and even has taken the
empty chair in a local poker game.
Maybe Wisconsin always has
been a little weird. There is, after all, the problem of "Wisconsin
Rockhenge," that 2,500-year-old spot near Wisconsin Rapids that
whispers of ancient Egypt.
At least one investigator, James
Scherz, an engineer and mapping specialist with UW-Madison, feels that
the stone piles at the site were a calendar system used to predict
solstices and equinoxes. This in itself is not all that odd; ancient
people tended to be into star-gazing.
The difficulty lies with
the type of measurements used by the ancient Wisconsinites and the
Egyptians. The Egyptians often used measuring units translating to
exactly 100 feet. The Wisconsin builders apparently used a measurement
of - not 100.1 or 99.9 - but exactly 100 feet. There also are
similarities in the two time-calculating systems.
And then
there's the question of what happened to the quarter-million tons of
copper dug out of prehistoric Lake Superior mines. At least one
archeologist has suggested that the metal found its way through trade
routes to ancient Ireland and on to the Mediterranean.
How did
prehistoric Native Americans and ancient Egyptians end up using such
similar calendar systems? Coincidence? Or did some ambassador from the
Nile once sail down the Wisconsin River in the equivalent of
Cleopatra's barge?
Nah. Couldn't be. That would be too unbelievable. And as for those underwater pyramids that divers keep
spotting in Rock Lake, well... We won't get into that.
But
with this
kind of history, maybe it's better to watch your step in Wisconsin.
Better to stick to the ordinary, where nothing strange can happen.
Something safe - like fishing.
Except
that the fisherman angling in Lake Mendota in the autumn of 1917
probably thought he was safe. He was fishing from the shore when a huge
snakelike head suddenly reared up out of the water less than 100 feet
away. The creature had large jaws and fiery eyes. It headed straight
for the fisherman.
He froze with fear, but managed to get
control of himself before the creature did. He ran off, sure that
nobody would ever believe his tale.
Nobody might have believed
him if several other people hadn't reported seeing strange things in
the lake soon afterwards. And if earlier in the year a university
professor hadn't been given a large rough object that a student found
on the Mendota shore.
The
professor wrote down his identification of the object: "Sea Serpent
Scale."
Well,
no matter. Just sit down in your parlor and have a nice cup of tea and
forget all this strangeness. That's what the Richard Lynch family was
doing in the Town of Cady on Aug. 13, 1873. Of course, that was before
the poltergeist struck.
The family was eating together when they
heard a loud thump coming from a cabinet. They looked up to see a
teacup being hurtled to the floor by invisible hands. A moment later
another cup dropped to the floor and whirled around. When one of the
men tried to grab it, the cup sped from him and zipped under the table.
That
was only the beginning. The Lynches were soon ducking self-propelled
eggs and potato mashers that flew at them. A quarter of beef
disappeared before their eyes. A table, according to witnesses,
"started across the room, bounded up to
the ceiling and back to the floor hard enough to split one of the
leaves."
The Lynches were never able to discover what caused their
furnishings' restless behavior.
But that was long ago. Nothing like the angel hair that fell out of the sky on Milwaukee in 1881 could happen these days.
Oh,
there was a little incident about the chunk of white-hot metal that
plopped itself down in the front yard of a Northwest Side home in 1974.
There was a perfectly logical explanation for that. The metal came from
a metal-processing plant across the street, everyone said.
There's
a perfectly logical explanation for everything. A logical explanation
for the unidentified flaming ball that streaked across the night skies
in 1977. For the 30-inch crocodile caught in Pewaukee Lake in 1971 and
its five-foot cousin found in the Rock River in 1892. For the mystery
meteor that once dug a 55-mile hole across the western part of the
state from Eau Claire to Winona. For the terrifying howl that for 30
years rang out from a South Side graveyard whenever the moon was full.
Just remember all those logical explanations tonight when you're in your cozy little Wisconsin bed.
And try to keep them in mind - when you turn out the
lights.
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