Haunted Wisconsin

Marie

The old two-story, brick house in the sixteen-hundred block of Milwaukee’s National Avenue looks out of place in a neighborhood of undistinguished apartment buildings, light industrial firms, and small businesses. The place is easy to miss—lofty buildings on either side seem to cast it in perpetual shadow. Sitting rather forlornly as it does atop a raised yard, the house looks every bit its age of a century and a half. But even so there are indications of its once grand appearance—little touches of filigreed wood trim and some decorative patterns in the brick facade around the narrow windows. Thousands of Milwaukeeans pass along that block every day, ignoring this house just as they would most any other inner city dwelling long past its prime. Certainly Gerald Cummings was in that category. A retired trucking company executive, he lived only a few blocks away. But for the man whose friends call him Jerry, all of that changed late one September night. As he drove down that block of National Avenue, his attention was suddenly drawn to a young woman standing in the street frantically gesturing to passing traffic. She appeared to be in some sort of difficulty. Jerry stopped to see if he could help. The young woman jumped in the van without a word and silently pointed down the street. What occurred next will stay with Jerry for as long as he lives. He believes he picked up a ghost. Not just any ghost, mind you, but a revenant known as Marie who haunts that particular house on National Avenue. Although Jerry 184 Marie Cummings isn’t entirely certain it was the ghostly Marie he encountered on that late summer night, his bizarre experience raises intriguing questions not easily answered. The story of Marie, and the one that Cummings would eventually learn, began a quarter of a century earlier when two men—the late Paul Ranieri and his partner Jeff Hicks—found the perfect house to which they could apply their considerable restoration abilities. They’d looked for nearly a year before discovering what was reportedly the oldest brick home in Milwaukee still on its original foundation. Built between 1836 and 1840, about a decade before Wisconsin became a state, the house had at various times been a private home, an inn, a restaurant, and, its last incarnation before Ranieri and Hicks bought it, a rooming house. But during the summer of 1977 when the men found it, the house was unoccupied, neglected, and in desperate need of repair. Although it had been scheduled for demolition, the pair saw its architectural and historical value. After negotiations with the owners, Ranieri and Hicks bought it in August. Within just a few weeks, it became apparent that along with the house came a ghost who called herself Marie, a young, attractive lady the men eventually suspected may have lived in the house decades earlier and, according to some records, had either committed suicide or inexplicably disappeared without a trace. Marie was not shy about making it clear she loved the house, even carrying on a conversation about renovation plans. More often than not, however, Marie was an unseen presence, a hovering custodian whose arrival was signaled by a sudden, sweeping coldness in a room, as if all the windows had been thrown open on a January day. Over the ensuing months and years, Ranieri and Hicks became, if not entirely comfortable with Marie, at least tolerant of her infrequent forays into the corporeal world. The condition of the house was such that the men knew they could not move in for some time after their purchase. However, a separate, two-story, attached apartment at the rear of the house was in good condition and could be leased out. Donald Erbs was the renter. He was the first person to “meet” Marie. “I didn’t see her come in,” Erbs recalls of his first, startling experience of seeing an attractive young woman unexpectedly sitting in a chair across from him. “I don’t know if she appeared . . . but all at once she was there.” He wasn’t frightened. For a few brief moments, he thought there was a perfectly natural explanation for her being in the house: an outside door was Marie 185 not far away, and she had simply wandered into the second-floor living room of his apartment, which was separated from...