Haunted Wisconsin

Confirmation

All the young teen was thinking about was that he had to go to the bathroom. He jumped out of bed and headed toward his bedroom door. But the boy never made it to the bathroom. Instead, he got the shock of his life. An apparition hovered in the hallway less than ten feet away from the doorway where he had stopped cold in his tracks. The transparent object hovered in the air a couple of feet off the ground. He could see that it had a head with some hair, perhaps even a pair of glasses. The face itself was featureless. As much as he could see led him to believe it was female. It had, he said, a maternal bliss, a kindness about it. The pale, billowing mass seemed to undulate as if a gentle breeze swept down the hallway. There were no discernible legs or feet. It filled the space between the two walls. “Where the arms would be there was a bit of a bulge, like its arms were crossed or it was holding flowers or something. But I couldn’t see its arms. It seemed to be turned in my direction, looking at me. I didn’t sense any hostility. It didn’t move toward me or away from me, it just stayed where it was,” the boy, now an adult, remembers. The boy could not think of what to do. What he wanted to do, of course, was get to the bathroom, but to do that he needed to get past this thing. The boy really, really did not want to go down there. “I remember seeing moonlight coming in from one side of the hallway, and I remember wondering if that could be moonlight bouncing off the mirror at 42 Confirmation the end of the hallway and coming back and creating a reflection. But I looked at it and decided that no, that was not possible. It couldn’t be a reflection off the mirror because it wouldn’t look like that. That’s when I decided I’d have to stay in the bedroom for the night. I dropped to the floor, stretched my arm out, and closed the door. I went back to bed and stayed there.” Suddenly a young boy’s physiological needs were of far less urgency than trying to figure out what in heaven’s name loitered in the hallway just beyond his now firmly closed bedroom door. It wouldn’t be until much, much later that an answer came. Long after he’d left that house in which he grew up, long after he had left the town of his youth and gone on to make his way in the world—it would only be then, decades later, that he would realize the figure he saw on that night had probably been his own grandmother comforting him, saying good-bye to him. The young boy’s name is Tom Blair* and the small Wisconsin community in which he grew up and where his parents still live in that split-level house provided him with a fairly typical childhood. He went to public schools and then attended UW–Madison, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a double major in German and geography. That youthful encounter with what some would dismiss as a figment of teenage imagination or a particularly disturbing dream might be expected to be forgotten or even laughed at as young Tom entered adulthood and put away the fantasies and nightmares of childhood. That would be the natural reaction to a story like this, but Tom Blair is no ordinary witness to ghostly encounters, nor did he ever forget what he saw on that night so long ago. Dr. Tom Blair is a scientist—specifically, a soil biochemist, with a master’s degree in geography and a PhD in soil science from the University of California. His curriculum vitae lists nineteen refereed journal articles, seventeen book chapters and published proceedings, and five manuscripts either submitted for publication or in preparation. He worked for eight years as a consultant and visiting scientist for an international rice research institute in the Philippines before taking his current position in Iowa as a soil scientist for the federal government. Blair’s formal education and fidelity to the scientific method make him a particularly credible observer of matters supernatural. But that doesn’t mean he entirely understands, even now, his experience...