What’s the worth of an unsubstantiated claim?

These days, many people make bold claims with little to no evidence. A statement in a book or found online can quickly be repeated as fact without scrutiny. However, my trust issues compel me to dig deeper, always seeking the origin of a claim before I pass it along.

Recently, this approach led me down an intriguing rabbit hole:

Jerome Clark recounts an article from the Dec. 20, 1896, edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel in his 2010 book, Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds, about a fae-like being tormenting a family. 

Paraphrasing, Clark writes: One day, the widow Olson and her 14-year-old son received a visit from an unfamiliar boy asking for directions to a local farm in Deerfield, Wisconsin. The farm in question was a three-mile walk around Stump Lake. Mrs. Olson instructed her son to ferry the boy across the lake in their rowboat as it was a far more direct route. 

During the trip, the boy acted strangely. He sat facing away from Olson and refused to engage the 14-year-old in small talk. Olson then noticed that the boy had odd features – his ears were abnormally large and pointed, his hands small and shriveled, and his head oddly shaped like that of a dog. When Olson dropped the stranger off, he walked backward out of the boat as if to purposely keep Olson from seeing his face. 

Thoroughly rattled, Olson rowed swiftly back home. He relayed the stranger’s oddities to his mother, who at first thought the boy was exaggerating. When she turned to face him, she not only saw how serious her son was, but she spied the strange boy from the window over his shoulder. He was in the Olson’s field, chasing their sheep. Yet, he couldn’t have made it back so quickly.

Both mother and son rushed out to stop the strange boy from harming their livestock, but he was nowhere to be seen when they got to their sheep. All they found were the sheep huddled together and shaking from fear. It was as if the boy had vanished into thin air. 

Clark quotes the article as stating, “[The Olsons] firmly believe there are still a few left of the old-timey elf family.” 

I first encountered this case in Albert Rosales’ Humanoid Database, which quotes Clark’s entry near-verbatim. The case intrigued me immediately as I grew up in Deerfield. However, Deerfield lacks a major body of water – or so I thought. It turns out I grew up in one of two Deerfields. The Deerfield this story comes from is a tiny town in Waushara County, surrounded by several lakes. 

Work took me to Waushara County recently, and I wanted to determine which lake this story happened on so that I could take a detour to photograph it. Unfortunately, my research has called the entire tale into question.

Strike one – though Waushara County is home to 138 lakes, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), none are named Stump Lake.  

Strike two – I have scoured three separate newspaper archives for the 1896 article Clark cites and found nothing. 

Strike three – there doesn’t appear to have been an Olson family living in Deerfield in 1896. 

Lacking the 1896 article Clark cites, the best I can do to substantiate the claim is to point toward Augustus Edward “Oley” Olson. Born in Mount Morris, roughly 15 miles east of Deerfield, Oley Olson would have been 14 in 1896, just as the Olson boy in the story is said to be. Additionally, Oley’s father’s death date is unknown, meaning his mother could have been a widow in 1896 – again, just like the woman in the story. I can’t find anything stating they ever lived in Deerfield, though.

Adding to the mystery is the below map of Deerfield from the 1878 Illustrated Historical Atlas of Wisconsin (Compiled and published by Synder, Van Vechten & Co., Milwaukee). As you can see, there are three bodies of water. I suspect the two on the right are Hartford and Marl Lake, with the other being Crooked Lake. 

If there was a Stump Lake in Deerfield in 1896, it could have been renamed in subsequent years. It could also have been a colloquial name; the DNR lists Waushara County as having 41 unnamed lakes. Locals may have referred to one of these unnamed lakes as Stump Lake.

It’s also possible this entire story is a fabrication. 

It’s troubling that I can’t find the 1896 article. Unless the Dec. 20, 1896, edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel has never been digitized, and the story never reprinted elsewhere, it’s a huge hole that needs to be filled if we’re to trust what Clark writes. That’s not to say Clark is making the story up whole cloth. I suspect he may be quoting another source “quoting” the newspaper.

The more significant issue is how this information has been subsequently propagated – citing the Milwaukee Sentinel lends the story credibility. 

This supposed credibility is likely why Rosales has retained the story in his database over the years. I’ve noted before that Rosales has weeded entries from his database for its official publication, likely due to substantiation issues. 

It’s a near-impossible task to ask that all claims be fully vetted, especially given how far removed most researchers are from the time of their sources. There’s also the problem of these sorts of topics being ethereal. Folklore and the paranormal’s unsubstantial nature make them what they are.

However, some effort has to be made to separate the entirely fictitious from authentic folklore and supernatural occurrences. The interest of these topics comes from their supposed reality. Each is a step up from the outright made-up. A spooky story about a boy ferrying an elf across a lake is fun, but being able to point to an actual time, place and person it happened to is what makes a story intriguing. 

Furthermore, some are trying to research anomalous phenomena based on these kinds of stories. For example, work is being done to turn Rosales’ data into a digitized database to easily search for trends that might provide insight into how these phenomena operate (see Barbara Fisher and Christopher Diltz’s essay in Deep Weird). Apparently credible claims like that of the Olson story could skew those efforts. Depending on how many more unsubstantiated examples are in the data masquerading as credible accounts could make any insights gained worthless. 

Everyone wants to believe something and have a little fun while they’re at it – and the worth of an unsubstantiated claim may just be that it checks both those boxes. One can hold onto it for fun and as a talking point, trusting someone else has done the work to verify it. The problem is too many people are eager to turn talking points into data points. We’re forgetting to trust but verify. An unsubstantiated claim in these fields doesn’t necessarily mean untrue, as almost all evidence comes from eyewitness testimony and other anecdotal sources. But when something claims to come from a credible source like a newspaper, we need to verify it. Otherwise, we run the risk of unwittingly parading campfire stories as researched facts.