The Driftless Region is arguably one of Wisconsin’s more intriguing features, which is why I adopted it as part of our name. At the time, little did I know just how well the region and the subject matter we cover at Driftless Times Media would align.

The Driftless Region is a peculiar place, as it turns out. It features many spooky staples you know and love, such as ghosts and UFOs, but there are other, more outside-the-box anomalies – gnomes, hellhounds, lake monsters and more.

The region may be driftless, but it’s not free of high strangeness.

What Makes the Driftless Region Driftless?

The Driftless Region gets its name from the lack of glaciation it experienced during the last ice age, meaning it’s free from the sediment and debris glaciers leave behind, referred to as drifts. Most of the 8,500 square miles of the region are found in Western Wisconsin. However, the Driftless extends into parts of Iowa, Minnesota and the very edge of Illinois.

Exactly why the glaciers failed to crush this pocket of the Midwest is unknown.

The liminal-minded will enjoy hearing that the region doesn’t have formal boundaries but is defined by geological makeup. Anyone who has driven from Madison, WI, to Iowa will know precisely what this means. One minute, you’re in flat farmland; the next, the highway is cutting through the jagged rock remains of mountains as the landscape rolls with valleys and bluffs. The terrain is commonly compared to that of the Appalachians – though it’s not an exact match. Nowhere is quite like the Driftless.

I’ve driven throughout the area numerous times and admit, there’s a vibe. First off, it’s gorgeous. A recent road trip took me down through Iowa, and the beauty of Dubuque in the fall is hard to understand.

The city is hidden at the bottom of a valley. You have no idea it’s there from the vantage point of the highway as you approach until you round down through the bluff. Then, you’re hit with the rolling hills and their autumn-burnt trees, with Dubuque nestled at the very bottom along the shore of the Mississippi.

That, however, is just one side of the Driftless. I have also often found myself driving along the Wisconsin River in the early morning, where the mist and fog can linger longer after daybreak in the valleys. It’s eerie being the only car on the road then, blanketed by mist nearly too thick to see through, with the river on one side of you and the Ocooch Mountains on the other. If there is any spot in the state where a person could find Bigfoot, it’s there. Every bone in my body tells me there are monsters in those hills.

And as my research has shown so far, I’m not wrong.

There Be Monsters

When I had the idea to look into the oddities of the Driftless Region, I figured it would be a quick turnaround for this week’s newsletter. Instead, this has turned into a feature article-worthy project for driftlesstimesmeida.com.

As I began digging, I uncovered far more than I anticipated. I started with UFOs, taking the National UFO Reporting Center’s sighting map of Wisconsin and overlaying it with a topographical map of the Driftless Region.

It’s not perfect, as every red dot doesn’t represent a singular UFO event but where any number of reports have come in from, but it gives a decent idea of concentration. For being sparsely populated, the Driftless seems to have a higher concentration of sightings compared to other rural areas of the state.

With that discovery piquing my interest, I turned to my bookshelf to see what other oddities I could discover from the region.

In Chad Lewis’ The Wisconsin Road Guide to Mysterious Creatures, seven of the 26 anomalies Lewis covers are in the Driftless Region. They include Blackie, the shadow being of Caryville; Pepie of Lake Pepin; the Monster in Devil’s Lake; the Mysterious Beast of Eau Claire; Hellhounds of Meridian; the Devil’s Punchbowl Gnomes; and, of course, the Mineral Point Vampire.

Then, in his book co-written with Terry Fisk, The Wisconsin Road Guide to Haunted Locations, there are at least 20-sum other accounts of oddities located in the region.

After those discoveries, it struck me that in my haste to create the above UFO map, I hadn’t even considered checking if Durand, WI and nearby Elmwood – sometimes listed as the UFO capital of North America – are part of the Driftless Region. And of course they are!

The Driftless Region holds endless intrigue.

The Tension Builds

This is going to require a greater deep dive than Substack can afford. For today, I can only question.

Why would this part of the state hold so much strangeness? Is it that ghosts and goblins dislike the cold, so sans glaciation, they found a home in the Midwest? Or is there a George Hansen-esque trickster aspect at play – the Driftless Region’s uniqueness naturally giving rise to strange phenomena?

Additionally, Wisconsin’s strangeness doesn’t end with the Driftless Region. The state is home to a unique tension zone – an area where two or more biomes converge. The S-shaped tension zone splitting Wisconsin in two is unique for several reasons, such as its size, the differing varieties of vegetation that collide and more.

If liminality plays as much of a role as folks like Hansen suggest, then this tension zone – a quite literally liminal area – should be rife with uncanny occurrences.

It is all something I’ll be digging into more over the coming weeks and intersects nicely with an ongoing project of mapping Wisconsin Bigfoot sightings.

So, for now, all I can say is this: If you ever find yourself driving through Western Wisconsin, watch the road. Something otherworldly might be around the next bend.