A local farmer claims Ghost-Boy has been making away with his livestock… a dozen chickens and Guinea hens and three suckling pigs to boot. That he has found the remains of the animals scattered in the woods. A very hungry ghost, indeed.
But if you’re inclined to laugh this off, consider Mabel Willard of Old Pond Road, just outside Haymarket. Mrs. Willard, a staunch and independent widow of 83, says, “I’m not like the others… I ain’t afraid to admit there’s funny business in this county and always has been. Problem around these parts is that folks are afraid they’ll be laughed at. Not me. Laugh all you want, but it don’t change things. Folks around here have seen plenty they won’t even admit to themselves.” And Mrs. Willard, apparently, knows of what she speaks, for Ghost-Boy has made more than one appearance on her property. “First time, I was getting ready for bed when I hear a sort of scratching at the door,” she claims, “and then a scraping at the living room window. That’s when I saw that awful, grotesque face. Just white and grinning with a big mouth of teeth. I saw it, all right.”
So if you’re inclined to dismiss this as sheer fantasy, just remember, you’ve been warned. If Ghost-Boy comes scratching at your window, you have no one to blame but yourself…
MAUSOLEUM VANDALIZED
October 15, 1977:
Pigeon Lake—In what local officials are calling “simply a horrendous travesty,” a family mausoleum at the Angel of Hope Catholic Cemetery outside Pigeon Lake has been broken into by person or persons unknown. The perpetrators gained entrance by smashing the lock on the outside of the vault door. Whereupon, they rummaged through the contents of the Goodchild family mausoleum, pulling caskets from their berths and smashing them to kindling. Cemetery caretakers found the atrocity early this morning and immediately contacted the county sheriff. “I hope I never see something like this again,” John Pastula, caretaker, said. “Coffins smashed and skeletons tossed to the four winds. There were bones everywhere, dozens and dozens of bones.” The sheriff’s department revealed that no one had been interred in the Goodchild vault in over thirty years and the last remaining member of the Goodchild family lives in another state. “I’ve heard about some pretty nasty Halloween pranks in my time,” Deputy Sheriff Matthew Godfrey is quoted as saying, “but this is just profane.” And profane it surely is. Authorities say they can think of no reason someone would commit such a vile act of desecration…
BOY SCOUTS STILL MISSING
June 10, 1982:
Bayfield County—
For the fourth straight day, sheriff’s deputies and no less than 100 volunteers beat the brush in the Ghost Lake area just off County Highway M searching for three Boy Scouts from Ashland who disappeared there June 6 on an overnight campout. According to scout master Roger Halen, the troop had set up on Ghost Creek for two days of fishing and hiking and woodcraft. On the night of June 5th, apparently Mike Trombly, 13, and Douglas Kestila, 11, both of Ashland, ventured out after the other scouts were asleep with Troy Bakely, 13. Bakely was found the next morning, wandering up the side of Highway M in something of a daze. He is currently under observation at Hayward Memorial and is expected to make a complete recovery. According to Bakely, he and the other boys had heard stories from older scouts that if you went up to the junction of Ghost Creek and Ghost Lake after midnight, you would “be able to see Indian ghosts coming up out of the ground.” Although Bakely is obviously distraught, he claims that both Trombly and Kestila were pulled down into the mud by what he calls “white, scary hands.” At this point, Bayfield County Sheriff Albert Susskind said he will not “overlook anything, even the wildest speculation…”
A YULETIDE MYSTERY
December 24, 1985:
Haymarket—Just in time for Christmas, yet another tragedy to fill our overflowing cups with. A sparkling new log home outside Haymarket has been found empty. Gone are Richard Shoen, his wife Ruth and three children. The children reportedly told friends of seeing “weird, spooky figures looking in their windows at night.” Police are investigating…
SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT
January 13, 1989:
Pigeon Lake—Paul Barrington, a retired Ashland councilman, was rushed to Hayward Area Memorial Hospital after suffering a heart attack. His wife said that “funny things” had been going on around their secluded nineteenth-century farmhouse. That her husband had seen some “weird shape” lurking around an outbuilding and had given chase with a shotgun. He was found in the snow, barely conscious, by his wife. Tracks found in the drifted snow nearby were called “curious, to say the least” by investigating sheriff’s deputies…
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It went on and on. Kenney digested what he could, though he badly wanted to spit most of it back up. And not because he didn’t believe any of it, but because he did. For he could see the thread running through all of this that Godfrey wanted him to see. And seeing it and feeling its pull, understanding it, made him physically ill. Sure, maybe some of that stuff was bullshit and exaggeration, but not much of it, he was thinking. A week ago, he’d have laughed all of it off, but not now. Not after what he’d experienced in Ezren’s field last night.
His sanity might have demanded that he dismiss it all, but he just couldn’t.
Something was worn wire-thin in him now and there was no recourse but belief.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that you people around here have been sitting on a nasty egg for a long time, hoping it wouldn’t hatch.”
Godfrey said that was true. “Thing is, Lou, we’ve known for years, many years, that something needs to be done, but I think nobody wanted to be the first to initiate any of it.”
“Well, now we don’t have much of a choice.”
It would have taken hours to go through the file in any detail, so Kenney just kept skimming, reading over things that caught his eye. Things he figured would come in handy later for nightmares and sleepless nights. He found an interesting clipping from a magazine called Beyond Science, which was apparently some sort of paranormal journal back in the 1940’s. He began to read.
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…And from the upper Midwest comes this elusive and interesting tidbit. Apparently, in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, a most unusual body washed up last summer in the Namekagon River near the town of Haymarket. The body was badly decomposed and had probably been in the water some time, but appeared to be that of a man or something like a man. Sheriff’s deputies and locals that fished the strange cadaver out claimed that it was horribly deformed and subhuman. Its left leg and right arm were missing, and it had been badly worried by fish and local wildlife, but Mr. John Ponce of Haymarket said, “It wasn’t exactly what I would call human… its face was just plain awful and the bones sticking through the flesh were like no bones I’ve seen before.” Ponce went on to say that its face was large and irregular, eyes set in deep, bony hollows and jaws exaggerated to horrible extremes. Officials said the body was merely distorted from decay and gases, but Ponce does not agree. “Now and again,” he said, “some remains’ll turn up in these parts and they’re just horrible to look upon. Whatever they’re from, they’re not men as such.” The entire episode brings to mind a set of bones discovered in Bayfield County some fifteen years previously… bones that were odd and elongated with a skull that was squat and bestial. Bones that local officials claimed must have been those of some sideshow freak, though others claimed that it was from a member of some unspeakable troglodyte race that inhabits the region…