Summer’s over. Kids are back in school and meaningful football games are back on TV. The days are still finding a way to push into the mid-80s for now, but the nights are growing cooler and cooler. Autumn’s creeping in.
September marks the fifth month of Driftless Times Media’s (DTM) official existence. I put the money down to secure the domain name in May. As a thought, DTM is nearly a year old. I formed the loose idea sometime in October of ’23, then clipped the first newspaper article on November 15 researching Lake Mendota. Time flies when you’re having fun.
To celebrate five official months of DTM, I’m looking back at some of the discoveries I’m most proud of having made or that hold intrigue for future projects.
Yup, this one’s a listicle.
Who Saw the Serpent First
When the idea of DTM formed, I knew I didn’t want it to be another campfire story site – a place that retells the same stories copied and pasted from some other website or podcast. I think it’s fun to know where a story comes from and track its growth. Plus, ghost stories are always scarier when you can prove some truth to them.
The story of the Lake Mendota Sea Serpent/ Bozho was the first case I tackled and it put my research mettle to the test.
Sightings of the serpent are typically said to date back to the 1860s when Madison resident W.J. Park claimed to have encountered the monster. However, this is something of a retconning of the serpent’s timeline. Park claimed he had his 1860 sighting in 1892 – long after the serpent had become popular Madison lore.
Instead, as I detail in the article linked below, William “Billy” Dunn was the first to encounter and thus popularize Mendota’s serpent. However, locating Dunn’s story was a challenge. Finding the retold details of Dunn’s story was easy as they pop up in nearly every retelling of the serpent, but locating the original copy of Dunn’s tale was almost impossible. It wasn’t until putting the finishing touches on the article that I finally found Dunn’s story printed in the June 23, 1883, edition of the Madison Wisconsin State Journal.
Searching newspaper archives is tricky. You plug in every keyword and combination you can think of with no luck. Then, one day, try your luck again and have it smack you in the face just in time to rewrite everything you already worked on.
Snakes, Water Spirits and Trickster Gods
My own views on the paranormal are convoluted. I’m just as eager to believe in the supernatural as I am to throw my hands up at it. I fall into the “I want to believe” category of researcher.
Occasionally, I stumble across something too strange to refute, tipping me from wanting to believe to thinking there’s something more going on. There’s a web of strangeness centuries old around Lake Mendota that pushes me over that edge.
There was a belief amongst the Ho-Chunk people living around Mendota that ornery water spirits inhabited a part of the lake. These spirits were horned, spotted and had extremely long tails. The serpent Billy Dunn fought was also oversized and spotted.
These water spirits were said to cause disturbances on the lake, like creating waterspouts. Bozho – the name of Mendota’s sea serpent once it became local legend – was said to be horned and create waterspouts.
There are shades of the Ho-Chunk’s beliefs throughout, but then factor in the name Bozho. It’s short for Winnebozho – the Ojibwe’s trickster god.
It could all be a coincidence, but if you’re familiar with the trickster aspect of paranormal phenomena, you’re likely stroking your chin quizzically by now. Then throw in the UFO and bigfoot reports and it makes you wonder if there isn’t something to it all.
Migratory Bigfoot
This is an interesting tidbit I stumbled upon while looking for patterns around Mineral Point while researching the city’s infamous vampire. From the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization’s (BFRO) website comes a report from a man who sighted a sasquatch in his backyard. He mentions he’s heard vocalizations and wood knocks for years – usually between October and November – and suspects that’s when the creatures migrate south.
Bigfoot’s not my bailiwick and I’ve only done cursory research into the idea that they could be migratory. It’s certainly intriguing notion.
When writer’s block struck recently, I began working on a map plotting Wisconsin bigfoot reports to see what, if any, pattern emerged. The work is in its infancy; I’m only partially through BFRO reports, let alone other sources. Once it’s completed, I’ll share the map and have a write-up on what I find.
A screenshot of the map and its currently plotted points are below. Notice anything?
Debunking the 2000s Mineral Point Vampire Sightings
I’m not a debunker. As I said earlier, I want to believe. Yet, sometimes as you dig into a story, all you find is wholly fabricated bullshit.
That’s what happened when I set out to discover where the 2004 and 2008 sightings of the Mineral Point Vampire originated from.
I went in hoping to find some truth to the sightings, as they were yet again a case of blog quoting website quoting blog as the source for the stories. That should have been my first tip-off that the tales were toast.
The Wayback Machine was a huge help in getting to the bottom of these mysteries. I ultimately was able to trace both of them back to a now-defunct Facebook group. Humorously, the dates got mixed up as the stories were copied and pasted over the years by various blogs, websites and podcasters. The poster on the Facebook group wrote both sightings took place in 2008, not separate years.
I also put my community journalist hat on and contacted the police station and a local historian to verify the tales, and neither knew of nor had records of the sightings.
However, that doesn’t mean that the original 1981 sighting of the vampire is untrue. There’s plenty of mystery remaining in Mineral Point.
To conclude, I’d like to thank everyone who has been with us since DTM began. I’ve had to adjust the schedule of newsletters, and balancing professional and personal responsibilities has seen projects take longer to complete than I initially hoped. I’m having a good time, though, and I hope you are too.
Currently, I’m wrapping up writing on a feature looking at the philosophy and work of an underreported Wisconsin UFO researcher. The two-part feature should be out by the end of the month.
I’m dreaming up some fun ideas for DTM in October. Fingers crossed, I’ll be able to see them through. Ray Bradbury alludes to autumn as the dying season in Something Wick This Way Comes, but it’s always when I feel most alive. Hopefully, it’ll be a good season for all of us.
Keep Curious.
–Walker
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