Haunted Wisconsin

Cassandra

Not all family ghosts are kept in the closet or stalk about the house frightening residents or startling visitors. Take the case of B. T. Jutes* of Crawford County for example. Hers was the live-in kind of ghost: a friendly, solicitous woman who watched over the children and helped B. T. with her genealogical research. According to B. T., the ghost’s name was Cassandra and she first appeared in a kind of psychic tableau on a bedroom wall one frosty January night. She wore a shimmering, swirling red dress and, with her bearded companion, stood before an open, horse-drawn carriage. Her jet-black hair was parted severely down the middle and pulled back tightly over her ears; dark eyes twinkled above a veil that concealed the lower half of her face. She suddenly dropped the veil and stepped into the carriage with her partner. With that, the image vanished. “I kept thinking I was dreaming, but yet I knew I was awake,” B. T. said. “My husband was snoring all the while this was going on. I was awake. And I was frightened.” She got up, checked on her children, and then walked through the entire house, examining the security of each window and door from the basement to the top floor. Still uneasy, she went back to bed but slept poorly. The next night the identical scene returned to the wall, but this time in black and white rather than the colorful depiction of the night before. This 233 Cassandra time, however, there was a new twist—the mysterious woman lowered her veil, turned to B. T., and smiled. Sometime later, B. T. was invited to attend a séance. When she told the story of the mysterious woman and her companion, she was warned by the others present that because of the veil the woman was a negative spirit and not to be trusted. They suggested she put a mental “red circle of truth” around herself, her loved ones, and her home. It was after midnight when she returned home. “I was scared to death. I wanted to leave all the lights on,” she recalled. The mental red circle of truth she had been advised to create didn’t seem adequate. “I knew I wasn’t keeping anybody out because they were already in!” As B. T. opened her front door, the woman from the ghostly montage was standing in the hallway. She looked exactly like she had looked on the wall, except that B. T. could see through her. “Why are you so afraid of me?” asked the vaporous visitor. Before B. T. could reply, the specter sprung another surprise on her: she was, she said, B. T.’s great-great-great-grandmother, Cassandra, and she had lived as a child in Virginia and Maryland a century and a half earlier. B. T. thought she certainly didn’t seem like an evil spirit; in fact, Cassandra offered to guide and protect the family. Later that day, B. T. told her husband and children about their spectral guest. Although none of them would ever see her, they sometimes felt her presence, like that of an invisible babysitter. Little Danny, four years old at the time, was particularly unperturbed. “I know she’s here to help me,” he said. One morning the boy awoke in his top bunk bed with his back bruised and cut. The ladder to his bed was on the floor and there was a fresh dent in the bedroom wall that B. T. believed was made by the force of the falling ladder. Neither B. T. nor her husband had put their son back into bed after his apparent tumble. Danny had no recollection of the incident. The boy also survived a near drowning in a local swimming pool, B. T. maintains, with Cassandra’s help. B. T. was a veteran genealogist when Cassandra first made her appearance. However, she had been unable to trace several branches of her family. B. T. found that in those years before the explosion of interest in genealogy and the advent of the Internet, some birth certificates could not be found and important marriage records were seldom available. Her ancestors had not kept a family Bible in which they might have noted family names and significant dates. B. T. claims Cassandra supplied the missing links, providing facts about family members that she was later able to verify through official documents. 234 Part II...