There were two sets of bedroom critters. The first came with the house, I think, so I’ll tell you about them first. We had a variety over the years, and I don’t think that any of us saw the same thing twice.

Edith woke me up at around 2:00 one morning because she saw a shadow shaking my bed. I had a twin bed with an iron frame, and the squeaking woke her up, but I never heard it. She said that it was standing at the foot of my bed and shaking it violently up and down, not side to side. When I woke up, my bed was moving, but the shadow was gone.

I woke up one night and saw two children sitting up by the head of Edith’s bed. They were looking at me, but didn’t say anything. They looked frightened or sad, I’m not sure which. I covered up my head until morning.

Karee saw spiders running up and down the walls and screamed the rest of the house awake, but there were no spiders when we looked, of course.

We all saw things coming and going through the closet, but they were hard to describe. Just dark figures that moved quickly. Sometimes they would dart under one of our beds, and sometimes out of a window. When I was six or seven, Karee and her friend Kathy locked me in the closet one afternoon. It was very dark, and I didn’t see anything, but felt cold hands on my back.

Karee saw slow-walking figures in the middle of the night. Edith saw something dark with boots on and heard horrible laughter. We all heard voices and saw curtains blowing when the windows were closed, closet doors opening, and sometimes when figures would leave the closet we would hear them on the stairs. The dog noticed, too.

In my upstairs bedroom, aside from the lady, there were voices and strange sounds too. Most of them came from the walk-in closet, but the window facing the road seemed to let things in and out occasionally. We’re convinced that the basement room must have something to do with the activity in the house, but not being familiar with the history, we can’t know how.



The second set seemed to stay in the shared bedroom. I was in my early teen years and was curious about the things that I’d grown up with. I wanted to understand what else was out there and get a feel for what I couldn’t see, so I went to the library. I checked out books on hauntings and demonology and out of body experiences. One afternoon I put myself into a trance and five hours passed in what seemed like five minutes. Karee finally snapped me out of it and yelled at me for scaring her. She said that she’d been yelling and shaking me for hours, but I just looked at her like I wasn’t there. I guess I wasn’t.

I believe now that in opening my mind to these things, I invited some of them into my home. This group of beings didn’t seem to bother anyone else. I woke up on several occasions feeling like the air was being squeezed out of me. I felt something pressing down on me, but there was nothing there, and I couldn’t catch my breath to scream. I don’t know if I fainted or fell asleep, but I always woke up the next morning. There were nights, too, that I’d wake up to screaming that wasn’t there. I would hear it in my ear and even feel it echo after I woke, but then nothing. I heard my name whispered and hissed, and I felt something kicking up from under my bed. I woke up to see my bedroom on fire, and then the flames were gone. That may have been a dream, but it was so real that I could smell the smoke, so I don’t know.

Now, even though I was the only one who was bothered by all of this, Karee did see something, at the very end. She said that she didn’t know what it was, but it looked like the picture of one of the saints in her children’s Bible… a man with white clothes, but huge and fierce-looking. She said that he floated out of the closet one night and hung over my bed. I can only guess what it might have been, but having a mother who could pray the devil out of even a TV evangelist, I’d probably guess well. That group never came back.

The old bunch was still around off and on after that, but I never felt threatened again. Sometimes I think that it would be nice to go up and visit one more time… just to see

I mentioned that my summer bedroom was directly above my winter bedroom. The basement of the old house was an unfinished cellar with stone walls and stone floors. We only went down there when there were tornadoes, when the water softener needed salt, or when we were storing or retrieving canned vegetables from the shelves on the walls. It was dark and spideree… just a cellar. It did not cover the entire area of the upstairs or the area right below the two bedrooms, but we didn’t think anything of it. Why would we?

Mom and Dad moved out of the house around 1994. It was sold to a family from DeKalb, Illinois who seemed to love it, and it made us all happy that the new family was so happy there and that they were remodeling. (It needed it badly.) I guess that the home that you grow up in is always a part of you, so (one at a time) we all ended up going back. When I pulled into the driveway the new owner came out and greeted me. He saw my license plates and said, “You must be one of the Rheinschmidt girls… come in and see what we’re doing with the house!” Oh my gosh, these were some of the friendliest flatlanders that I’d ever encountered! (No wonder they felt the need to move to Wisconsin.) Anyway… they gave me a tour of the house and showed me what they had done and told me what they were planning to do. Being the mouthy psycho that I am, I asked them if they’d seen anything strange. Nope. Not a thing. They invited me to come up and spend the night with them once the house was finished, but I haven’t taken them up on it yet.

When my sister Karee went up to see the house, she was greeted in the same friendly manner. Well… she was actually greeted in a MORE friendly manner, since the man of the house came out in purple boxers and did not bother to put his pants on before the tour… wooo! He told her that they had been working in the basement and found something really interesting, and he wanted to ask her about it. Now, personally, I don’t know that I would have followed an excited stranger in his undies to the cellar, but she did. He said that they were redoing the walls down there and when they pulled some wood out they found a sealed door. It opened up into a spotless cement room that sat directly below my bedrooms. It was hidden so well that nobody knew it was there, and from the looks of things, it had been boarded up since almost day one. There wasn’t a mark on any of the walls or on the floor. It looked as if it had just been poured into place. Because of everything that we’d seen in the upper rooms, Karee ran over to tell me as soon as she made it back to town. We compared goose bumps for most of an hour before we sat down and tried to understand what it might have meant.

I’ll finish this a little bit later… I’ve got some more work to do…

There were a total of eight rooms, four on each side, in the circle that led to the back room upstairs. There was a large closet in the very back, and one window that looked out over the garden and a cornfield. The light never seemed quite right back there. The sun hit the room the same way that it hit the kitchen below it, but while the kitchen was always bright, the back room upstairs was always full of shadows. I spent a few afternoons up there, because that is where Mom stored all of her old books. She taught in a one room school before my oldest sister was born, and she was also an avid reader, so she had an amazing collection. I loved to look through them, but she didn’t want me to “drag them all downstairs”, so I would sit in the shadows and read.



Whatever stayed in this room was not like the lady, and not like what moved between my summer bedroom and winter bedroom. There were other things in the house for a brief time, but I don’t think that they were native to the property. I’m pretty sure that I accidentally called them in… but that part comes later. The inhabitant of the back room felt more like those things than anything else, though. I never saw this one, but it was cold and angry. Even now, just writing it back to the front of my mind, it gives me chills and I remember feeling it when I’d get close to its room. It didn’t really DO very much of anything. Once a pile of books fell while I was reading. They fell from the middle, though, like they would if they were kicked. On several occasions, I heard a very high-pitched, screaming whistle while I was up there, but whenever I got close to where it seemed to be coming from, it moved. The worst was the day that the closet growled at me, and I don’t remember going into the room after that. I wish that I could be more specific on this, but this is the only one that I never actually saw, so I don’t know what it looked like or what it was. Just that it was angry.

I don’t think that it left its room, but you could feel it sometimes in the rest of the house. I remember having five or six friends spend the night one January, because we were leaving the next morning for a skiing trip. We were all sacked out in sleeping bags on the living room floor, and at about 2:00 (everything seemed to happen at about 2:00), we woke up. There were some scuttle-and-scratch type noises coming from the upstairs. Since it was winter, we knew that nobody was up there, but squirrels in the attic of an old house like that weren’t unheard of. Still, we all felt unsettled, so we decided to sneak outside to smoke cigarettes. We walked around the house so that if my folks woke up and opened either the front or back doors, we’d hear them and have time to hide the evidence before they made their way to where we were huddled in the snow. I didn’t see anything that night, and neither did my friend Susan, but Tia, Shelby, Wanda and Doreen all swear that they did. They were facing the window to the back bedroom, and they said that they looked up and saw a smoking face that looked like a red lion-dragon (don’t ask me… I was facing the other way). They all screamed at the same time without any warning, and we ran into the house. None of them but Susan ever came over again. Could have been mass-hysteria, but like I said, the household inhabitants weren’t something that I talked about with people, so I can’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised, I guess.

Gotta get back to work again…

I grew up on an old farmhouse outside of Orfordville, Wisconsin. It was built to be a carriage house, probably around 1840, by a Norwegian family. About twenty-five years ago, the grandchildren stopped by and wanted to see the house and take pictures. I wish that I’d been a little bit older and a little less shy, because there are so many questions that I’d like to ask about the original family, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking now. The house was built in circles… I’ve never seen another one like it, and it was thoroughly haunted.

We all knew, but I guess we got used to it. It wasn’t something that we talked about, generally, but we all commented matter-of-factly to one another once or twice. It wasn’t a matter of shame, and not really fear, even, that kept us quiet. Looking back, I can’t come up with a reason. I remember Dad commenting that he knew there was something there and he felt it watching him when he came home from work, but he felt like it was a harmless, even friendly, presence. Mom spent a lot of time walking around the house with Holy Water when she thought that we weren’t looking.

When I was old enough to really grasp what was happening, my oldest sister and my brother had already moved out. We had propane heat and did not heat the upstairs rooms in the winter, so I shared a large bedroom downstairs with two of my sisters during the winter months. My (summer) bedroom was directly above that room. As far as we knew at that time, there was nothing below those rooms.



THE LADY...

seemed to stay upstairs. She wore a dress that looked like it was made out of wool, and her hair was in wavy curls, close to her head. Sometimes she smelled like roses. Now… when you went up the stairs, there was a large bedroom on each side at the top stair. The bedrooms led to walk-in closets, and then another room, and it just went in circles like that. No halls at all. The lady seemed to stay in the front two bedrooms, as far as I could tell. Sometimes you could see her looking out of my sister Karee’s window, over the farm buildings when you pulled into the driveway, and sometimes she sat in my bedroom, in the old rocking chair that used to be in my great-grandmothers parlor.

I’m pretty sure that this is the one that Dad felt, and I’m sure that he was right… she seemed harmless. I was still afraid, of course, when I’d wake up in the middle of the night and see her sitting next to me in the chair. Once or twice she said something to me, but I was afraid to hear her, and I covered my ears and my head (I spent a lot of time with the blankets pulled over my head). To this day, I can’t sleep without covering my ear. Mom was the same way, and I never asked her why, but maybe she heard her too. Sometimes we’d hear her walking back and forth between the two bedrooms, but never on the stairs or in the back rooms. There was something else in the very back room, though, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to be back there with it.

I'm at work, so I'll pick this back up when things slow down a little bit.

IT'S SNOWING... LOTS!!!!