Magazine Writing

There's No Such Thing As Ghosts...Right?
By Julie Shea


     I always knew something was going on in that old house. Something bad. I haven’t been in the house in 20 years, but I remember it like I was there last week. Some of the details have faded, but the aura of the house remains permanently etched in my soul. Being only 13 the last time I was in the house, I couldn’t describe my feelings exactly. Now I can. The house felt heavy, oppressive, angry, and dangerous. At the time, all I knew was I didn’t want to be left alone in the house. Not anywhere. Not ever. To learn the house is haunted comes as no surprise to me.

     My cousin, Jesica Schwarz, 10 years younger than me, remembers little about the house. “I didn’t want to be left alone,” she recalls. “I went [to the house] a few times with Grandma and spent the whole time hanging on her pant leg.”

     My mother and aunt also felt anxiety in the house when they were kids. Both remember feeling uncomfortable in certain areas of the house, particularly the closets in the upstairs bedrooms. My aunt, Lynne Austin, says, “Now I could describe the uncomfortable feeling [in the closet] as being watched or feeling heavy energy. Then, I couldn’t know what I felt.”

     My mother, Judy Gasser, notes, “I just felt uncomfortable in certain spots in the house, I couldn’t tell you why.”

     My grandmother, Helen McHalsky, is less convinced. “Great-Grandpa Foss had a really gruff voice. He always sounded angry and he scared the girls. That’s probably where their fear came from.”

     The house belonged to my Grandmother’s parents and is, basically, one huge side-by-side duplex. Grandma’s sister-in-law, Barbara Foss, still lives on one side of the old house, and a couple with a young child rent the other side where my great-grandmother lived until her death in 1989.

     The tenant’s side holds a smaller kitchen and full dining room. The dining room is spacious enough to hold a large china hutch and credenza, as well as a table that sat fourteen people. At the east end of the dining room a doorway lead to the living room and staircase to the second floor. The second floor holds four bedrooms and a bathroom.

     Also on the east wall of the dining room was a door leading to the basement.

     The side Barbara lives in looks nothing like the other. Her kitchen is larger with no formal dining room. The basement is accessed through the kitchen, and the stairs leading to the second floor bedrooms are in the back hall by the kitchen. Interestingly, there is a door in the basement that connects the two units together.

Unusual Activity

     Ed (the tenant) woke in the middle of the night feeling someone crawling into bed with him. His wife, pregnant at the time, wasn’t home — she was staying with her mother that night. Other nights he and his wife often hear pacing when they are in bed. Someone with heavy footsteps paces back and forth across the carpeted floor of their bedroom.

     They have also heard the sounds of loud banging, “like someone knocking on the basement door.” Concerned Barbara needed something, they went to the basement door to let her in. When they got there, the knocking stopped. Opening the door, they found no one.

     In fact, Barbara herself has been in the basement and heard the sounds of items dropping to the floor upstairs when she knew no one was home. My great-grandmother had a habit of accidentally dropping knives on the floor and Barbara was hearing the same type of sound, years after Great-Grandma died.

     Encouraged by these incidents, Ed and his wife called FM106. The radio station was looking for haunted houses for Halloween and came out to the Foss home in October of 2002 with a psychic named Mary Ellen. Barbara explained the details of the psychic’s visit to the old house.

     Mary Ellen’s feelings about the house began in the kitchen. There was heaviness there. But Mary Ellen was sure that if you were accepted by the presence in the kitchen, you would be fine throughout the rest of the house. She didn’t suggest what might happen if you weren’t.

     The second floor of the tenants’ side of the house turned out to be a virtual vortex of ghostly activity. Mary Ellen got the sense that there had been a hallway on this floor that, at one time, connected the two units together. She was also convinced there was a room in the attic. She didn’t say why she believed either to be true, but she was right. About one hundred years ago there had been a hallway connecting the two ends of the house. Barbara’s grandson and his friends went looking for the room in the attic and found a space where the floor below them had been lowered about three feet from the rest of the attic floor. Was this the room Mary Ellen saw? If it was, what happened there that caused her to mention it when she hadn’t even been in the attic?

     In one of the bedrooms, the psychic could feel the spirit of a big, angry man. Wearing a black hat and long black coat from an earlier time, he spent his time pacing from one end of the room to the other. In the corner of that same room sat a meek female presence. “All is well with her,” Mary Ellen commented.

     In the second floor hallway, she could feel “hostility” and that “something tragic happened on the stairs.” Mary Ellen felt someone had fallen or was pushed over the railing and died. Mom recalled a time when Great-Grandma had fallen down the stairs. Did she really fall or had unseen hands pushed her? Could a bitter spirit, having stumbled to her death, seen an opportunity for revenge?

     Moving into the basement, Mary Ellen went to the south end of the house. She had strong feelings of heavy chains in that part of the basement, suggesting this is the center of the haunting. Everything seemed to be radiating from there.

     Mary Ellen moved on to the grounds immediately surrounding the house. She went straight to where the old sandbox was that we played in as children. She felt “anger and chains being used to restrain.” A short distance away, the garage also filled the psychic with “anger and chains.” There were feelings of hostility everywhere.

     Barbara informed me later, there had been a three story building years ago where the garage stands. All the windows of the building had bars over them. Obviously my aunt’s home had a mysterious past.

The Past Unfolds

     Intrigued by Barbara’s story, I did some research and learned some surprising facts about the old house.

     Even without the haunting stories, the window opened in the house’s history is the stuff scary movies are made of. With the help of Ellen Rohr’s web site of Waukesha County’s genealog (www.linkstothepast.com), I discovered in the mid-1800s the property belonged to a gentleman by the name of Findlay McNaughton. He lived in a small log home on the property and appears to have made his living as a farmer – at least until he made a deal with the government to house county paupers.

     The paupers were people who were unable to care for themselves and were either poor or mentally insane. The county government auctioned them off to others who were willing to provide for them (www.poorhousehistory.htm). The winning bidder was the bidder who was willing to house the paupers for the smallest price. The county was paying the winner to care for these paupers, so inexpensive equaled winner.

     McNaughton, who lived in the Town of Vernon on Big Bend Road, was the low bidder in Waukesha County and housed small numbers of paupers in his home for several years. In return for his support, the paupers were expected to help farm the land and help with other household chores. Before long, McNaughton’s small home could no longer house the ever increasing numbers of paupers, so he built a larger building that could accommodate his residence on one side and the poor house on the other, including rooms for his hired help. This structure is almost identical to the home that currently stands on the property. It’s unclear how much of the original building makes up the current house, but the resemblance is uncanny.

     The center of the original building had been a large dining hall. It was eventually cut out, moved down the street, and turned into Guthrie Store. The two remaining ends of the building were pushed together to create the home on the property today.

     “When we re-shingled the roof a few years back, we had to remove everything down to the bare wood. Spots of it were pretty rotten,” Barbara recalls, “But I was able to find a line in the wood that didn’t match up right. It must be where the two sides were attached.”

     In 1866, McNaughton sold his farm to the county and in 1874, a new three-story building was constructed to house the mentally insane. The rooms had grated and barred cells. Many of the insane were listed as incurable and weren’t allowed to leave their cells. Waukesha County’s genealogy site doesn’t state where this new building was located, but it seems it occupied the space where the garage is now.

     “When it’s really dry in the summer I can see where the old foundations were,” says Barbara.

     The sandbox is no longer there, but I played in it as a child. I’m unable to recall any specific feelings about the sandbox because my primary objective was only to not be in the house. While I felt uncomfortable everywhere on the property, it always felt better to be “beyond the clutches of the house.” I am, however, quite unnerved to imagine mental patients chained and perhaps dying on the very spot where I once built sand castles.

     If that wasn’t enough, a cemetery had been created on the property in the wooded area west of the buildings. Anyone who died at the poor farm, stayed there.

     By the early 1900s, it was clear the poor farm was not properly equipped to care for the mentally insane. Waukesha County purchased land on the other side of town to build a new asylum. By 1903, the mentally insane were moved into the new building. The poor were also temporarily moved into this new building until a separate building was completed for them the following year.

     The cemetery on the original property was relocated by summer of 1905. Bodies with grave markers were dug up, moved to the new asylum, and reburied. About 22 bodies were left behind. Burials between the years of 1881 and 1903 were dug up and moved to the new asylum. Burials from 1858 – 1880 were not moved and left in the woods of the old Vernon poor farm. Dug up graves were never completely refilled and indentions could be seen in the ground where the dead once rested.

     Chills went up my spine when Barbara said with a chuckle, “The psychic refused to go up to where the cemetery was.” It must have been horrible if the presence was reaching out to her down at the house, causing her to not want to go there. For me, the scariest part was looking at the list of inmates. I found Christ Gasser — birth date unknown, death in 1907. Could he be a distant relative of mine?

     My great-grandparents purchased the home from the Falk Corporation in November 1952. Falk seems to have purchased the property as an investment and had a caretaker run the farm for a number of years before my family bought it from them.

Creepy, But…Haunted?

     Can footsteps and knocking be explained rationally? How about the eerie accuracy of the psychic about an additional building that no longer exists?

     “I never experienced anything strange,” my grandmother assures me. If Great-Grandmother realized she was sharing her home with ghosts, she never mentioned it.

     “Nobody knows for sure,” says Lisa Krause, from the website, www.ghosts.org. “Anyone who tells you ghosts definitely exist is either misguided or just plain lying.”

     “There is no hard proof of ghosts, spirits, etc.,” Krause says, “but [don’t] automatically discount the weird stuff reported by millions of people all over the world.” Personally, Krause believes everything can be explained scientifically – even if we haven’t come up with the terms to express it yet.

     “My view tends to be that ghosts are probably not the lingering spirits of dead folks, but rather some as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon.” Krause admits to not being an expert in the field of paranormal activity, just an interested amateur, but many scientists share similar views.

     A neuroscience graduate from UCLA wrote to Krause and explained some phenomenon is caused by neural activities in the brain. As an example, the graduate who identified herself only as Hilli says, “a memory of a relative will influence visual stimuli, and the patient will report having seen the relative.” So really, she’s saying it’s all in our heads. Are the tenants in the old house letting their imagination get the best of them? Can the footsteps be real? Did the psychic really feel the ghost of an angry man in the bedroom?

     Lynne Austin, Registered Nurse and massage therapist would say yes. She believes ghosts do exist, although she differentiates between ghosts and what she calls “helpers.” In general, Austin classifies both as, “Souls who have not passed to a level of understanding that they are dead and are stuck in our reality…or have chosen to be our helpers in our lives.”

     Ghosts, according to Austin, tend to be angry or confused. Helpers could be described as guardian angels. Austin has always been a spiritual person, and over the years had a number of experiences with what she calls “other dimensions of reality.”

     Austin explains one of her encounters. She was in the process of going through a divorce. In preparation to meet with her lawyer, she was trying to locate some tax information she needed to show him. She’d hunted everywhere in the house she could think of looking for the paperwork. Discouraged at not being able to find the papers, she sat down at the kitchen table. Suddenly, she had a vision. Her grandfather, dead for several years, appeared in her mind’s eye and told her exactly where to find them. Getting up, Austin went to the hall closet and, in the back on the floor, found the papers. She knows spirits are real.

     The house appears to be full of what Austin classifies as ghosts. Needing to live at a poor farm, or insane asylum, must have left many residents feeling angry and humiliated. Residents who were chained were also probably in constant pain. It’s not so far fetched to believe these angry spirits are still restlessly roaming the old poor farm.

     Who’s right? Maybe we need to consider a blending of the two beliefs. Another web site, www.zerotime.com, created by Trent Brandon, from his book, The Ghost Hunter’s Bible, The Definitive Edition, suggests both sides could be right.

     The argument from scientists is usually, “There’s no scientific proof of the existence of ghosts.” Scientists appear to be overlooking a basic principle of science discovered by Albert Einstein – energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form. With that in mind, consider the human body contains electrical energy. According to Zerotime’s website, our bodies are “organically designed to carry our electrically charged brain and nervous systems.” When we die, our body goes back to the organic materials from which it was created. But what happens to the electrical energy in our brains and nervous systems? If energy really cannot be created or destroyed, it must go somewhere. Simply disappearing defies the laws of science.

     What does this mean? In most hauntings, electrical currents are used to determine ghostly activities. Remember the movie GHOSTBUSTERS? Egon carried around a handheld instrument that measured electrical activity and the higher the reading, the more likely they were to see a ghost. Real world ghostbusters use an Electromagnetic Field Detector (EMF) to monitor the electrical activity in the area of a haunting. Everything – living or not – has some level of an electromagnetic field. The EMF detector picks up even the smallest one. Its function is to record changes in the amount of electrical activity in an area. When a ghost is present, electromagnetic fields become highly distorted. The distortions can be so high they interfere with the normal working of electrical equipment such as computers.

     Seventy-five graves were moved from the poor farm to the new insane asylum – to say nothing of the graves left untouched. The energy from all 75 inmates must be somewhere. Most likely, the psychic clearly saw only two of the hundred or so ghosts that are actually there! Could the other 98 be in the second floor hallway, or pacing the grounds? Is it any wonder I dreaded visits to Great-Grandma’s house?

     Another scientific fact used to prove ghosts exist is temperature change. Ghosts are often noted for creating cold spots. On his web site, Brandon states, “It’s a scientific fact that there has to be some form of energy present to alter the temperature.” The belief is that light and heat tend to be absorbed by the ghost. Because the ghost takes light and heat into itself, the area surrounding it will be cooler. Obviously there would be other things to be considered, such as windows, cracks in walls, heating vents, etc., but it’s interesting to see scientific facts used to prove the existence of ghosts.

     The debate about whether ghosts exist or not is probably many years from a solution. Certainly many paranormal activities are in the observer’s mind or can be explained rationally. Some strange noises are made when water pipes rattle and houses shift and settle on their foundations. Shadows cast from lights on passing cars can take on various shapes. But even the most hardcore skeptic must admit there are phenomenon that cannot be easily explained.

     Is my family’s house on Big Bend Road haunted? We’ll probably never know for sure. Personally, I can’t remember enjoying one visit to that house. In fact, it occurred to me that perhaps I should drive over there and take a picture of the house for this story. The fear of being in arms’ reach of the house quickly changed my mind. It’s a fear I still can’t quite explain, but in my mind, the house’s history is a building block of proof.

     Someone still inhabits the house from bygone days.

     Someone angry at the world for locking him up.

     Someone whose dignity was lost.

     Someone, perhaps, looking for revenge.



Sidebar information:

For further reading, the original sources of the information obtained through Waukesha County’s genealogy web site are:

The History of Waukesha County, Wisconsin
Chicago: Western Historical Company, 1880.
(Information about McNaughton)

The Waukesha Freeman Newspaper
Waukesha, Wisconsin
(several articles: 1904–1920)

Article originally published in Paperclips, Mt. Mary English Department