Haunted Wisconsin

The Pendant

Her name was Jan. She was a pretty girl. Gold-tinged hair framed a cameo face. Her large, gray-green eyes held the sunlight of today and the dreams of tomorrow. She fell in love; she fell out of love. She knew joy and despair. She studied art in college. During the summers of her young womanhood she loved to swim, boat, and picnic at her parents’ lakeside home near Spooner. Although shy and sensitive, she had the restless, searching mind that longs to know the world, to hold it close. Those who knew her hoped that all good things would come to her. At age twenty-eight she was dead, the loser in a three-year battle against mental illness. Her life had ended at the moment when doctors said that complete recovery was within sight, when bright tomorrows were again within her grasp. For her parents, Marion and Dick Stresau, and their other children, the tomorrows were filled with the particular sadness that attends the death of one who has been taken too soon. But that sadness was overshadowed by a series of puzzling incidents that began to occur in the Stresau home—events that, in time, changed the lives of every member of the family. It was Marion who had the first experience. Less than two weeks after her daughter’s death, she had been sound asleep when she was suddenly awakened. She glanced at the clock. It was just after three in the morning. Then she felt it—a soft touch upon her arm. She was certain that she hadn’t been dreaming. 98 The Pendant Her husband, deep in slumber, lay beside her. Drifting into sleep again, she felt once more the light touch upon her arm. A spider perhaps. Although by now fully awake, Marion was surprisingly unconcerned. She felt only a strange sense of peace and relaxation. She drifted back toward sleep, but her husband had awakened and wanted to know what was troubling her. After she muttered something about a spider, Dick got up and turned on the light. Marion got up also, and both searched the bed, but found nothing. Many months later, on a trip east, Marion was to learn that her mother had also been awakened on that same night at about the same time to see an oval blue mist float slowly across the end of her bed. The older woman, who had been close to her granddaughter, was convinced that the mist was Jan. Later on that morning of Marion’s experience, Dick was not able to go back to sleep. He awoke his wife with his restless squirming. “Hey!” he shouted. “There’s something moving under my arm!” Both leaped out of bed, pulled the bedding, pillows, and mattress off the bed, and examined everything thoroughly. Dick had been sleeping on his side. Had he had a muscle cramp? Had his arm gone numb? No. He was positive that something had been crawling under his arm. Unable to find a logical explanation, they put the matter out of mind and never discussed it again. Marion kept to herself the strange feelings she had that both episodes might have something to do with Jan. Was that possible? That likelihood strengthened a short time later when a friend sent Marion a pamphlet with her sympathy note. Although Marion was not one to be consoled by what she calls “commercialized words of comfort,” she was intrigued by the author’s statement that sometimes the personality of a deceased loved one seems to make contact with the living in the form of a touch. Was Jan really trying to communicate with her parents? Or was Marion merely the victim of “fantasies of a mind recovering from grief,” as she wrote in her personal diary? Neither she nor her husband gave credence to psychic phenomena or superstitions of any kind. Yet there was that persistent feeling that someone was trying to communicate with them, a sensation that Marion thought had something to do with the circumstances of Jan’s death. She vividly remembered the details of that day two weeks earlier: that dreadful phone call from the mental institution saying that Jan had escaped, that she’d attempted to cross a busy highway and had been hit by a truck. It might have been suicide, as she had made previous attempts. Or was it a tragic accident? These were questions Marion could never answer. A few weeks later, only days before...