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Weird Wisconsin

Ghosts in Racine? Paranormal sightings reported at Racine B&B

BY MICHAEL BURKE
Journal Times

RACINE — It’s just possible that someday a guest of Hughes House Bed & Breakfast could glimpse something otherworldly or hear inexplicable bumps in the night.

Several people say they have seen and/or heard apparitions and other strange phenomena at 1500 S. Main St. Dan Dashner, co-owner of the house with Mike Reynolds, is one of them.

“Mike and I both have seen things and heard things,” Dashner said. He realizes that, in some people’s eyes, uttering that makes him crazy or a liar. But he stands by his statement.

Those who do believe in the supernatural take note of the fact that a previous resident of the house, Helen Kearney, died there in a fire in 1945. Another former resident, a man, died there after a long illness.

Dashner has several stories about odd occurrences during his three years in the house.

One of them starts with the night he awoke to a crash at 3:15 a.m. The glass of water he keeps on a side table each night was on the floor, shattered. Dashner had never knocked it off before but figured that’s what had happened.

The next night, the glass fell off again and broke. Dashner said he had been sleeping on his side, facing the other way, at the time. Again, the clock said 3:15 a.m.

The third night, against his better judgment, Dashner placed a glass of water on the side table. But he put it on the other side of the lamp from him, seemingly well out of reach.

When he was startled awake that night, the glass had been smashed onto the floor, with some shards of glass ending up 12 feet away. The time was precisely 3:15 a.m. Then Dashner stopped his glass of water routine.

About a year ago, he said, he was loading the dishwasher early in the morning and caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a white, misty, formless shape moving toward the bathroom.

What Reynolds saw from inside the bathroom was a man; then he was gone.

People have also heard footsteps coming from the west wing when no one could possibly have been there, Dashner continued. He called them “definite footsteps — deliberate, very real.”

Rob Tomes, a carpenter, said he had his own strange experience in the house’s west wing about two years ago, as he worked on the second-floor landing.

“I saw some kind of movement down the hallway,” Tomes said. He thought he saw in the hallway someone who then went into the small rear bedroom.

“I thought somebody had got in,” Tomes said. “I walked down there, saying, ‘Hello, hello.’ It was upright, like a person. I thought maybe I caught a shadow of someone going into the room.”

When he entered the room, it was empty, although there is no other way out of there.

“After I heard that a lady died in the house, I thought it might be something supernatural,” Tomes said. “I’m not positive, but I know I saw something.”

Those accounts, and more, sound much like what Joyce Wilde of Racine saw while she rented part of the circa 1899 house.

About the man who died there, she said matter-of-factly, “It was his ghost that we kept seeing in the kitchen. ... It looked like him, and had the outline of his head and face, and was the same height.”

Wilde said whenever changes were being made to the house, the sightings and strange sounds would increase. “These spirits, whenever there was any kind of upset, we would see them a lot.”
“You could just get a sense of their curiosity ... about what’s being changed.”

Wilde added, “I think if people were aware of the history of that house, and they open themselves up to it, I’m sure they can see (spirits).”

Dashner said he doesn’t plan to mention the strange occurrences on the Hughes House Web site. “But if people ask or comment or see something, my plan is to keep a journal.”

The Racine Report - The Journal Times
 
I actually plan to attend a meeting of the SWPRG group this May 20th, now that I live in Janesville. BTW, did you know that ages ago an alligator was found here, washed up on the banks of the Rock River, frozen?
 
Weird Wisconsin on film:

So far I've got Thunder Rock - very odd one in which mad lighthouse-keeper John Mills battles the bottle and ghosts from a ship of pilgrims bound for Wisconsin.

Wisonsin Death Trip - of course! One of the great Fortean movies, using old newspaper cuttings to suggest strange forces at work at a certain time in a certain place.

Stroszek. Where does Werner Herzog take his crew of dysfunctional Berliners, when they all want to escape things at home. Why rural Wisconsin - where else!

Further contributions gratefully accepted. :D
 
JamesWhitehead said:
So far I've got Thunder Rock - very odd one in which mad lighthouse-keeper John Mills battles the bottle and ghosts from a ship of pilgrims bound for Wisconsin.

Not John Mills but Michael Redgrave. I love the way the ghosts walk at an angle in this, a nice touch of weirdness there.
 
Oops!

I think I know why I was thinking of John Mills in connection with the ocean though.

An anecdote I am sure is made up but attributed to Noël Coward:

Passing a movie poster one afternoon, he paused to read it:

"Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, The Sea Shall Not Have Them! Well I don't see why it shouldn't, everyone else has!" :splat:
 
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