Winter — it’s dark, cold and a little spooky, marked by long, snow-driven nights. The official first day of winter is December 21. However, in Wisconsin, winter can arrive one day and then be gone the next, defined by a certain combination of cold and snow. Sometimes, winter pops in early near Halloween, sending kids trick or treating in snow pants. Other times, it’s not until mid-January that the season shows up in force. Mentally, I’ve always anticipated winter to begin after Thanksgiving and last, at least, until April.

Whenever winter arrives, it does so with force — bitter wind chills, black ice, and ditches full of snow and careless drivers. Winter is a punctuation in a field obsessed with the liminal; it’s either freezing or not. Yet, despite the absoluteness, the denizens of the liminal realms do drop in during winter’s dark hours.

Therefore, in honor of winter, my fellow chilly Wisconsinites and the things that stalk our long, fridged nights, here are five cases that occurred in either November or December in the Badger State.

The Walker House Haunting

Located in Mineral Point, the Walker House is one of Wisconsin’s oldest inns. Its original two buildings — a separate inn and saloon — were constructed in 1836, with a third addition added later on to connect them. As Linda Godfrey details in “Strange Wisconsin: More Badger State Weirdness,” the mishmash construction “gave the Walker House an unusual floorplan with an almost mazelike quality.”

The Walker House’s hauntings kicked off with William Caffee, who shot and killed a man not far from Mineral Point. Caffee fled the authorities and hid out under the floorboards of one of the inn’s rooms. However, he was discovered and subsequently hung from scaffolding set up near the Walker House on November 1, 1842.

Godfrey writes, “His execution was quite a spectacle, drawing a crowd of 5,000 people. Even in his last hours, he [Caffee] was an audacious and unrepented fellow. To show his contempt for the crowd, he mocked them by sitting astride his own coffin. Then, with an empty beer bottle in each hand, he thumped a beat to his own funeral march on the lid all the way to the gallows.”

Since then, the Walker House has been plagued by otherworldly activity. Objects reportedly move on their own, and guests and staff have claimed to see ghostly apparitions, such as the figure of a headless miner.

Caffee, too, lingers at the site of his once hideout and execution. Authors and researchers Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk write in their book “The Wisconsin Road Guide to Haunted Locations” that Walker Calvert, the inn’s manager and chef from 1978 to 1982, claimed Caffee often played pranks on him. Calvert also said they had routine interactions with the ghost of an old man dressed in tattered clothing, whom they claimed to have spoken with multiple times.

However, Lewis and Fisk cast doubt on the entire story of Caffee and his execution out front of the Walker House. They cite an article by Jack Holzhueter of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which provides evidence the Walker House likely wasn’t constructed in 1842, as the land wasn’t bought from the government until 1845.

Today, current proprietors Dan and Kathy Vaillancourt downplay the Walker House’s haunted history. The website states, “Dan and Kathy have worked and lived in the Walker House since March 6, 2012, and they have experienced no encounters with the paranormal. Moreover, more than a thousand people have worked, eaten, or slept in the Walker House in 2012—some of them self-proclaimed ‘sensitives’—and not one of them has seen, heard, or felt the presence of a ghost.”

So, are the Walker House’s ghost stories just a marketing tact or do otherworldly oddities haunt the mazelike building? If you’re cold and in need of a hot bowl of soup this winter, perhaps visit the inn and decide for yourself.

West Algoma’s Stalker

This short tale comes from Robert E. Gard and L.G. Sorden’s collection of folklore, “Wisconsin Lore.” Titled “The Lanky Night Walker,” no date is given for this strange occurrence, but it likely occurred sometime in the late 1800s.

The two authors recount that one winter — after all the men had left for logging camps, leaving the women and children by themselves — an unknown man of “fabulous” height and wearing a long, black cape walked through the town’s streets every night at midnight. Aided by a can, the odd man’s pace through West Algoma was slow, walking each night for precisely an hour and a half with no variation in routine.

One night, a boy from the town ran into the man and was so terrified by the stranger that he was unable to describe what the man looked like up close.

Gard and Sorden write, “His appearance must have been bizarre in the extreme, because no one in the entire settlement slept at night until he had come and gone, and not a soul in all West Algoma offered to interfere with him or investigate him in any way.”

When the town’s men returned from logging in the spring, the stranger ceased to be seen. Who he was, where he’d come from and subsequently left to remain unknown to this day. Was it simply an older gentleman enjoying the cold evening air or another of Wisconsin’s cloaked, otherworldly visitors?

Ferrying the Fae

I covered this story in length in my article “The Fine Line Between Ghost Stories and Data Points.” Read that article and my evidence to decide for yourself if the following tale is true:

Jerome Clark, recounting an article from the December 20, 1896, edition of the “Milwaukee Sentinel” in his 2010 book “Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds”, writes about a fae-like being tormenting a family one winter.

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. The farm was a three-mile walk around Stump Lake, so Mrs. Olson instructed her son to ferry the boy across the lake in their rowboat as a shortcut.

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 soon noticed the boy’s odd features — abnormally large and pointed ears, small, shriveled hands, and a head shaped like a dog’s. When Olson dropped the stranger off, he walked backward out of the boat as if to purposely keep Olson from seeing his face.

Olson rowed back home and relayed the stranger’s oddities to his mother, who at first thought the boy was joking. However, when she turned to face him, she saw how serious her son was and 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 the return trip so quickly.

Both Olsons 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 instead 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.”

Rice Lake’s Sasquatch

Slowly but surely, my progress in mapping Wisconsin Bigfoot sightings continues. To my surprise, the state has more Sasquatch in it than one might have imagined.

The following story was printed in the November 6, 1997, edition of the “Janesville Gazette,” detailing footprints found around Rice Lake in northern Wisconsin. Coming from the Associated Press, the article is titled “Do Big Tracks Mean Bigfoot is in State?” and is presented here in full:

RICE LAKE—Bigfoot in Wisconsin?

That’s the possibility under investigation in the Rice Lake area, about 70 miles northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Brad Mortenson of the U.S. Expedition and Exploration Society said Wednesday that three tracks found Monday could be from the mysterious —some say mythical—ape-like creature known as Bigfoot.

He describes the tracks as about 16 to 17½ inches long and 8 inches wide at the widest.

Asked about the shape, he said: “It looks like a bigfoot. It’s very distinct.”

One print showed five toes, he said, and the impressions indicated a creature with a stride of about 4½ feet, typical for the Bigfoot.

Mortenson, 41, Sarona said he started receiving reports about possible bigfoot activity after a local newspaper story two weeks ago told about his work with the society, based in Doris, Calif.

“After that, we started getting the reports of people coming across the tracks in the Blue Hill,” he said.

That’s the hilly, wooded region around the Barron County-Rusk County line where a preliminary search turned up the tracks this week.

He said he planned to do more preliminary searching, and if enough signs are found, the society would bring in equipment and personnel for a full search.

“I’d like to be a little more certain … before I would commit the society to the expense of a full-scale expedition,” he said.

The Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is said to inhabit remote regions of the Pacific Northwest, but Mortenson said there also have been a lot of sightings in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maine.

I’d add Wisconsin to that list too; I’ve plotted about 20 of 105 Wisconsin BFRO reports on my map and still have yet to see what accounts I can find in newspaper archives. As I work on the map, I’m discovering that November is an active month for the Wisconsin brood of Sasquatch.

Holiday Lights in the Sky

What would wintertime be without a little festive lighting? So, to close out, the following is a two-for-one UFO holiday special.

This first UFO sighting comes from the archives of Wisconsin researcher Allen R. Utke, as detailed in his 1968 article to the “Appleton Post-Crescent” titled “Flying Saucers, Cigars, Triangles—Even Beehives Have Been Reported by Observers.”

Utke writes, “Mr. D is a technician stationed at a large television transmitter near Eau Claire. When he heard I was in the area, he called me and told me of the flat, black object he had seen fly directly over the tower in December 1966. He said he ‘had never seen anything like it’ and that it ‘wobbled’ as it flew.”

Eau Claire is 45 minutes from the infamous Elmwood, WI — which, as I detailed in my article on Utke, was a region he investigated and wrote about long before Elmwood was put on the UFO map in 1976. Utke’s work also showed UFOs to be most common in late fall, but they seem to have a soft spot for Christmas festivities, as shown in this report and the following report.

This report, from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and dated November 11, 1986, describes two people out admiring Christmas lights who witnessed a dazzling display overhead instead. The witness recounts:

“I was a student at UW-Madison in the late 80s & early 90s and was coming home for Thanksgiving vacation to be with my family. I caught a ride with my cousin who also lived in Madison and liked to take the ‘back roads’ home to look at all the Christmas lights in the small towns. I recall that we were heading west on a country highway at night when my cousin pointed out some odd lights far in the distance. I agreed they looked strange, and we continued to watch the progress of these lights. As it happens, our course turned in a North–South direction and it was clear that the lights were getting closer and if it continued on the same course, its path would lead it right over us.

I told my cousin to pull over to the side of the highway so we could get a better look. Insanely, I recall opening the front passenger window and sticking my head out to look up and was mesmerized by what I saw. What I recall seeing was ‘layers of lights’ moving slowly over our vehicle at a low altitude. What struck me most was that this large form was ‘silent.’ As the UFO moved over our car, I pulled my head back in the vehicle and said to my cousin excitedly, ‘you have got to see this!’ When I looked back out the window seconds later – it had vanished.”

The witness added that they mostly kept this account to themselves over the years, as they’ve faced ridicule when sharing their encounter in the past. A friend convinced them to share the report with NUFORC after hearing on Coast to Coast that of additional sightings around the area at the same time as the witness.

So, there you have it—five odd wintertime encounters with the unknown. Whether rooted in folklore, eyewitness accounts, or the otherworldly, these tales remind us that even in the quiet chill of Wisconsin’s snowy nights, high strangeness never hibernates.