Haunted Wisconsin

A Quartet of Wisps

W ill-o’-the-wisp: n.A phosphorescent light that hovers over swampy ground at night, possibly caused by rotting organic matter. This is what a dictionary says, but Wisconsin pioneers often placed the willo ’-the-wisp in the same category as ghosts. Within the vast, dark forests, along riverbanks and lowlands, the eerie dancing lights would move and jump as if they were living, breathing creatures. No theory about “possible rotting organic matter” could shake from those hardy settlers the conviction that nothing short of Lucifer himself could be the culprit. Mrs. Adele Cline of Eau Pleine recalls that the lights had the appearance of a man walking along in the dark, swinging a lantern, not an uncommon method of travel in the early days. Mrs. Cline’s father first saw the phenomenon on a homestead near the Big Eau Pleine River in the 1880s. The first encounter took place one night on his way home from a visit to his parents’ farm about a mile from his own cabin. The will-o’-the-wisp suddenly appeared beside him and shadowed him nearly to his doorstep. Mrs. Cline’s parents eventually built a barn on the land and surrounded the yard with a timber fence. The will-o’-the-wisp never entered the yard once the fence was erected. The family homestead was quite near a widening of the Big Eau Pleine River. Between the barn and lake was a large area covered by rock the children 85 A Quartet of Wisps used to call “the acre of stone.” All around this section the land was cleared and under cultivation. Mrs. Cline said the light would come up from the river and cross over this stony expanse usually at twilight, although her mother once watched as two lights chased each other until the early morning hours. The light would sometimes travel very fast, “as though it was really in a hurry,” while at other times it might hover and slowly fade. A few minutes later it might reappear hundreds of feet away and continue its strange, nocturnal gyrations. On one occasion Mrs. Cline’s young aunt, twelve years old, and an uncle, who was only nine, came to visit the family. The children had been assigned the job of bringing in the livestock. Twilight descended and the youngsters had yet to complete their tasks. As they walked across a pasture, the will-o’-the-wisp appeared floating beside them. Their dog took one look at it and bolted for home. He hid for several days under the front porch. The cows wasted little time in returning to the comforts of the barn. A few days later Mrs. Cline’s grandfather was returning home at dusk when he saw the glowing will-o’-the-wisp bobbing along. At the same instant a thunderous roar bellowed from deep within the earth. The old man had been a soldier in the German Kaiser’s East Prussian Army. He was familiar with the roar of cannon fire, yet the sound on that night was more frightening than anything he had ever heard. Could there have been an underground landslide? Perhaps a minor earthquake? A neighbor boy returning along the same path heard something similar several years later. From that night on he carried a gun whenever he was out after dark. Mrs. Cline’s family eventually moved to an adjoining farm, and their original homestead was rented out. The new tenants periodically reported a man walking along with a lantern in the acre of stone. The last sighting occurred after a bulldozer operator who was clearing stone from the farm told Mrs. Cline’s father that he was surprised to see the old man out walking all alone the previous evening with only a lantern. “You could have seen the field by riding with me on the bulldozer,” he offered. Mrs. Cline’s father looked at him and smiled. He knew the will-o’-the-wisp had been abroad in the land once again. The stereotypical ghost of legend may arise in the dark, brooding silences of cemeteries. But it wasn’t exactly this ghost that appeared to Buffalo County pioneers but rather a fireball that hovered above a grave of an old lakeshore Indian burial ground. The size of a large orange, it swayed, like an eerie 86 Part I: The Haunted North pendulum, thirty feet above the ground. As...