Grand Opera House Investigation summary - 10/31/07

Report from Fox Valley Spirit Hunters

Fox Valley Spirit Hunters, in association with Midwest Preternatural Research (Matt Schenk), Appleton Paranormal (John and Donna Leski) and GRIM (Terre Sims and Carol), was pleased to be able to investigate the Oshkosh Grand Opera House on 10/31/07. What follows is a short summary of our findings.

Personal experiences reported include the following. These may or may not be paranormal in nature but were simply observed. These are listed below by location:

Balcony: footsteps heard behind seated investigators, light control room doors left open by one group and found closed by the next. Do these doors close on their own?

Main floor: a mist seemed to rise from the main floor for a period of a minute or two. This was reported by two investigators but a third investigator on the same team reports seeing nothing. Also, later on a different investigator observed a light flashing briefly above the top ring of the big chandelier after repeated requests to “turn on the lights”.

Basement under main floor: doors slamming, shadows moving, a noise was heard that sounded like a nearby wrought iron wheeled cart being moved slightly. Some of the noises heard could be attributable to traffic moving by outside and pipes running through the area.

Video and photographs revealed nothing unusual.

Audio recordings revealed some possible EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) and unusual noises which are included on a CDROM. What follows is a short explanation of each file and what it contains:

Track01 (Ann) : Despite its name, this file and similarly named files were actually recorded in the “basement” area. Most notable is a fairly frantic dog bark. The presence of a dog was not noted so we must assume the dog in question was not seen. It might be noteworthy to know that one of our team investigators who was not present that morning has spent some investigative time in the theater in the past. At that time she thought she felt what seemed like a small dog rubbed past her leg. The dog bark in this recording sounds exactly like a small dog.

Track04 (Ann) : This was recorded in the basement just as a tour group was entering the room. The singing voice is Katie's but she was in the balcony at the time and didn't sing this particular song.

Track05 (Ann): A small voice saying "hello" can be heard, also a short "dog bark".

Oly_ws10002_1min39sec_echosteps (Katie): Katie is going up the balcony steps from the front lobby. As she is walking, what seems to be a second set of footsteps is heard for a few seconds. The length of this file is to include her statement that these steps were audible.

Oly_ws10002_52min30sec_posTourGroupSinger (Katie): A woman is heard singing as a tour group is exiting the stage. The singer was not heard on video recorded on the stage at the same time. Could this be someone in the tour group? Subsequent discussion with Jeff Potts, who was giving the tour, did not confirm that anyone was singing.

Oly_ws10002_59min20sec_balcony (Katie): What seems to be a young boy's voice is heard on the recording as Katie is preparing to leave the balcony. It should be noted that at approximately the same time, the tour group was passing through the front lobby (per the video) and no voice like this was heard on the video.

It should be noted that any of these files could possibly be attributed to normal events going on in the theater at the time but we simply could not verify them.

It is our consensus that although we didn't get a lot of physical evidence of a haunting, our personal experiences and the possible EVPs lead us to agree that the theater does have some paranormal activity that would be interesting to investigate further. We would love the opportunity to return and try to replicate some of the results we obtained at a time of day where it is more likely that ghostly activity might be recorded. This is usually from around 9PM-3AM although a later starting time might be possible.

We would like to thank Jeff Potts and the Grand Opera House board for allowing us to come and investigate this wonderful, historic old theater. It was an amazing experience that we hope to be able to return to some day soon.

Related Posts: Grand Opera Case Report
Grand Opera House

Plover Restaurant Serves Up Mysteries

Article from the Milwaukee Journal.

Oct. 28, 1985

Haunted Heartland.

7th in a series of 12.

Tim and Louise Mulderink are an energetic couple who always dreamed of owning a restaurant. In November 1982, they bought a 125 year old house in Plover, Wisconsin. As they would discover, not all the former residents of the attractive, two-story clapboard dwelling had moved out. Someone they couldn't see opened the front door, knocked glass off the bar, tramped the upstairs rooms and turned lights on and off.

At first, Tim and Louise were so busy remodelling that they didn't notice any peculiarities. They put in new wiring and plumbing, installed a new roof and insulated the walls. Tim, who had an extensive background in food management and catering, did much of the planning, including the conversion of the former garage into a kitchen. Louise, a vivacious, willowy blonde, supervised the redecorating of the house. The main color scheme of petal pink and burgundy created an elegant ambiance for fine dining.

The Mulderinks named their restaurant the Sherman House to identify it with the famous Sherman House restuarant in Chicago, their hometown. They also wanted to honor Eugene A. Sherman, the most historically significant of the home's previous residents. Sherman had operated a sawmill and general store in Plover, moving into the house in 1891. Now, nearly a century later, the Sherman House restaurant was ready for its first guests. The well attended grand opening in April, 1983, pleased Tim and Louise.

A month later, Louise was standing behind the bar, facing a glass-shelved, glassware storeage cabinet, when a glass exploded.

"It just shattered," Tim remembered. "Louise never touched it. There was glass on the bar, everywhere." The glass had been in the center of a row of glasses. Had a vibration of some sort caused it to break? Tim didn't think so, or other glasses in the cabinet would have broken also.

Shortly afterward, two women in the bar ordered drinks. No sooner had the bartender set the first drink down, when the glass exploded, showering one of the women with liquid and glass fragments. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt. The bartender, a waitress and Charles Grachan, Louise's father, witnessing the incident, said no hands had been touching the glass.

On a Friday night, Paul, one of the dishwashers, experienced a similar incident. Five minutes after he pulled a rack of glasses out of the machine to air dry, he heard a loud popping noise. Tim, who was standing near by, said "What are you doing, Paul? Breaking glasses?"

"I didn't even touch it," Paul said, holding a stack of plates he had just removed from another machine.

On another day, during the lunch period, a fourth glass exploded, throwing shards ito the liquid and ice bins. "The pieces looked like a windshield somebody'd taken a sledge hammer to," said Louise.

By this time, Tim, convinced that the glasses were defective, talked to the company representative. The man could not explain the explosions; he said that an occasional glass shatters, but it is highly improbable for several glasses to do so.

Meanwhile, the heavy front door developed a will of its own. It opened six or eight inches by itself. Tim discounted an air current caused by the kitchen exhaust fan because the doors between the kitchen and entrance lobby were always kept closed. There was never any wind on the days the door swung open, and the Mulderinks never found anyone who might have opened it as a prank, or carelessly failed to shut it.

The restaurant opens at 4:30 on Sundays, and one afternoon, Louise's father was alone in the house answering the telephone and taking dinner reservations. Suddenly, he heard someone unlock the front door and open it. He called out jokingly, "Come in, Mr. Sherman. I'll buy you a drink."

No one came in. Thinking it must be a cleanup man, Grachan went to check. The door opened just wide enough for a person to slip through, but no one was in the house.

"Only a few people have a key to that door," Mr. Grachan said. "Whoever opened it had to have had a key. I heard it click."

But that was not the end of Grachan's experiences. Late one evening, he, Tim and a friend named Rick were lounging after hours in the bar. At midnight, the mantel clock in the center of the top shelf behind the bar began striking the hour. The men looked up at the clock and counted. It struck 13!

"I've had enough for tonight," Grachan said. He had bought the clock new in April of 1983, and this was the third time it had struck an extra hour. He examined the battery operated device carefully, but could find nothing wrong with it. "I'm not scared of anything," Grachan explained, "except anything I can't see. I have trouble with that."

Corinne, the cleaning lady, felt the same way. A religious woman who always carried her Bible with her, she reported to work early each morning....until she quit. "Whatever is in there," she told Tim, "I can't work there any more."

"She was scared out of her wits," Tim said, shaking his head. "She would constantly talk about kitchen pots clanging or shadows in the bar; when she was near the entrances she could see shadows going by."

Tim thought it was probably the wind and the old house creaking, although he admits that the structure is quite solid.

Even though other employees besides Corinne were nervous about working in the house, Tim and Louise were not inclined to accept a supernatural basis for the incidents. Tim, especially, sought logical explanations for everything -- but never found them. Louise, however, soon experienced an incident that changed her mind. It frightened her so badly that she refused afterwards, to stay alone in the house.

That night, while John, another dishwasher, finished up in the kitchen, Louise emptied the cash register and went upstairs to the office to count the money and put it in the safe. She kept the office door open. Suddenly, it closed. She got up to open it. Returning to her task, she heard footsteps cross the hall. Then she noticed that the door to the banquet room opposite -- which was always kept closed -- was open.

Louise raced downstairs to ask John if he had come up. No, he said, he had not left the kitchen. Louise went back upstairs, turned on the banquet room lights and checked the room. Nothing was disturbed. By the time she returned to counting the money, John was ready to leave.

"I counted very fast," Louise remembered, "put everything in the safe, made sure the back (fire escape)door was locked, turned off the lights in the office, and made sure all the upstairs lights were off. John and I walked out the door together and he got in his car and left. My car was parked in the back, so I had to walk around the building and......I heard this tapping on the upstairs window.

I got in my car, locked all the doors and backed the car up to see if the branches of any trees were scrapping the window. I looked up and the office light was on. I knew I'd turned all the lights off, and I wasn't about to go back in. So I went home and woke Tim up. I had to tell him what happened."

In the morning, the office light was off!

Louise said her father had a similar experience while managing the restaurant when she and Tim were out of town. Grachan finished counting the money, put it in the safe and turned off all the lights. While walking to his car, he looked up and saw the office light was burning. He went back inside and the light was off.

Louise was not the only one who heard footsteps. One Friday night, Tim and Louise and four of the employes, were gathered in the kitchen when they heard distinct thumping noises overhead.

"Stop talking for a minute!" some one shouted. Heavy footsteps crossed the upstairs hall as if to enter the banquet room. Tim searched the entire upstairs. He found nothing.

On a fall night in 1983, Louise witnessed a second disturbing incident. She was upstairs when the fluorescent lights in the office flickered, but did not go out. Then Louise heard a tinkling noise. On the back of the office door is a rack holding light weight metal clothes hangers. As Louise turned from the safe, she noticed the hangers swinging back and forth, including one that held a shirt of Tim's.

"It was as if somebody had brushed passed them," she said. But she was alone. No air was moving, nor was the air conditioner running. Louise could find no explanation for the movement of the hangers.<.p>

"I went home and told Tim that the ghost was here again," she said.

But who is the ghost?

The Mulderinks still hope to find out. Wendell Nelson, a Portage Country historian, provided the couple with much background information on the house and its residents. And Louise also gathered information from customers familiar with the place. The only person known to have died in the house was a two day old infant.

However, all of the families who have lived in the house were Methodists, and teetotalers. Especially the Pierces who owned the house from 1903 until 1945. James W. Pierce was a grocer in Plover. The deacons and the Men's club met in his house, and Mrs. Pierce regularly entertained the ladies' sewing circle. Louise thought the Pierces were probably offended by the transformation of their homestead into a restaurant. Especially after she and Tim unwittingly converted Mr. Pierce's old bedroom into a bar!

"He's probably just having kittens over that!" exclaimed Louise.

Does the ghost of James Pierce haunt the house? If so, he was there long before the Sherman House began operations. The Mulderinks believe the house has been haunted for at least 25 years. The last residents, the William Sowiaks, who owend it from 1957 until 1982, also witnessed strange phenomena. When the Mulderinks bought it, Tim and Louise became aquainted with Mike Sowiak, son of the owners, who had grown up in the house. Mike told them this story:

The rear portion of the upstairs banquet room was once Mike's bedroom. (Tim and Louise had removed a wall.) The Sowiaks had a friendly dog who was also fearless...except at certain times when it refused to go upstairs. It would stand at the foot of the stairway and bark and howl. Once, Mike pushed the dog up a couple of steps, but it came right bak down.

In the 1970's, Mike married and moved to Chicago. Each time he and his wife, Sue, returned to visit Mike's parents, they slept in Mike's bedroom. But they got little rest. The couple would hear someone enter the room and approach the bed. It was as if a parent were coming in late at night to check on a sleeping child. But no one was ever there.

After a few such nocturnal checks, Sue refused to sleep in the room anymore. Mike stuck it out until one night when something awoke him He refused to say what had frightened him.

A few sensitive Patrons of the Sherman House may suspect that someone invisable may be watching them in the oak-trimmed bar or in one of the comfortable dining rooms. But luckily, since the bar glasses shattered, there have been no further incidents involving customers.

They also know that the front door, secure as it seems, may open mysteriously at any time....that someone prowls the banquet room upstairs....that the mantel clock in the bar can't be depended upon to chime the correct hour. And that the woman who lives next door may greet Tim and Louise in the morning by asking, "Did you know your office light was on all night?"

Meanwhile, the Mulderinks are working hard to complete the restoration of this lovely vintage home. Eager to forge a link with the past, they're named the various dining rooms in honor of previous residents and they are collecting pictures of the families. They have little time to ponder what their resident ghost might do next.

Louise's father, who believes in ghosts, offers the last work. "He's just a nice friendly guy."

And hopefully an asset to the restaurant business.

1985, by Beth Scott and Michael Norman, reprinted from Haunted Heartland.

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Sherman House post 1<.p>

At First, It Seemed Like Just A Pleasant Home

This story comes from the Milwaukee Journal.

Oct. 25, 1985

Haunted Heartland

5th in a series of 12.

The Hollywood film "Poltergeist" popularized the idea that the wrath of the dead might be vistied upon the living if a burial ground is disturbed. The unwitting family in the movie lived in a house built on a graveyard. A series of catastrophic events -- including the kidnapping of their young daughter by spirits and a nightmarish march of ghosts down their staircase -- eventually drove the family from the house.

The movie was fiction, of course. But, is it possible thyat a haunting as in the film "Poltergeist" can actually happen? Yes -- events like those described in the movie did occur in Wausau, Wisconsin during the early 1970's!

The split-level home in the Wausau subdivision looked ideal to Harry & Jackie Fischer when they first saw it in 1972. The house was no different in appearance from the other dwellings in the neighborhood, but the couple felt fortunate to find a place they could decorate and complete to their own tastes. The last thing on their minds, and they would have laughed at the idea, was that the pleasant house could be haunted.

For Jackie Fischer, a hint of evil in the house came shortly after they moved in. Pots and pans rattled in kitchen cupboards, soda bottles on the counter swayed -- and some-times moved -- and a ringing, like that of a tiny bell, floated through various rooms.

The couple dismissed the events as coincidences, or vibrations from passing cars, until Jackie's father had a peculiar encounter with his radio. He was spending a few days with them, and had settled down one evening with his radio. He just finished tuning in a station when a high pitched whine erupted frolm the speakers. At almost the same instant, a lighted candle sitting on the coffee table in front of him rose straight into the air and flipped onto its side so that it pointed directly at his heart, then settled back on the table!

He reported the incident to Jackie. She looked at her husband. They both shook their heads.

Soon, the couple realized that what was happening had an origon beyond comprehension. Various household items began sailing through the air, the radio periodically changed stations or emitted the same sound Jackie's father had heard. The local radio-TV repairman couldn't find anything mechanically wrong with radios.

The small hallway just inside the front door, with short flights of stairs leading up to the first floor or down into the lower level, seemed to be the center of a physical presence. The Fischers decided this after their cocker spaniel started to act particulary sensitive there. The dog often sat in the hall, stairing down the steps to the basement. Her hair stood on end as she growled her distress at whatever it was that she "saw". She refused to go down the stairs by herself.

The Fischers almost began to believe there really was a natural cause for everything that happened.....until the footsteps began.

That was in the second year, 1973. The soft treading began at night, in the basement, and proceeded up the stairs, across the landing and up to the first floor. Then nothing more until the next night when the episode would be repeated. But not every night, making the occurrences even more disturbing.

Accompanying the footsteps was a gradual increase in ghostly activity. A warm bath suddenly turned icy.....lights flickered in the middle of the night and doors opened and closed of their own will. Like the gradually-increasing beat of a tribal drum, the house began to vibrate with the hauntings.

Jackie Fischer remembered a particularly unnerving eveing in 1975. She was in the bathroom preparing to shave her legs when the safety razor floated straight up and shot past her head. It missed her by only a few inches. Never before had the family been physically threatened. The Fischer now felt the entity haunting their house had turned against them.

In that same year, the footsteps mulitplied in frequency. On one occasion, Harry Fischer grew so irritated at the incessant stomping that interrupted his sleep that he got out of bed and crept from his room into the hallway. He threw on the lights, hoping to catch a glimpse of their unseen visitor. Instead, the lights flickered off, almost as if they had been a candle blown out by an unfelt wind. But the lights worked again the next morning.

Then there was a second, potentially serious, incident. A fire broke out in the Fischer's basement. Fortunately, it was discovered early and the fire department was able to extinguish it. The fire fighters determined the blaze had been caused by a faulty battery charger. The Fischers disagree -- the charger wasn't even plugged in.

In desperation, the couple turned to their pastor. His blessing, they hoped, would rid the house of its evil.

It didn't work. On the afternoon after the minister's visit, Jackie was washing clothes in the downstairs utility room. She heard a thump-thump-thump from the storeroom a few feet away6. The timid cocker spaniel sat at her feet, growling at the noise.

Jackie walked over and pushed against the door. It struck somethying solid -- an object that shouldn't have been there. Jackie scooped up her dog and flew up the stairs.

A later inspection of the room, found no reason for the door to have hit anything. Indeed, it always swung open easily before and after that day.

The experiences proved to be too much for the Fischers. They decided to sell, and were fortunate to find a couple they knew, Jim & Mary Strasser, willing to buy the house. The Strassers knew of the problems they Fischers had encountered, but thought there was a reasonable explanation.

Whatever haunted the house, however, would not let Jackie Fischer escape without one last jolt. A few days before they were to leave, Jackie awakened before dawn to let the dog outside. As she entered the kitchen and turned on the light, a gray mist evaporated in a far corner. Jackie was convinced it was the "residue" of whatever shared the house with her and Harry.

The Strassers lived peacefully in the house for a time, but then they, too, became targets for the resident ghost.

As with the Fischers, the episodes began infrequently and then grew in number and intensity. First, a loud humming, almost like a song, according to Jim Strasser, was heard in the house. Strasser said it seemed melodic, although it was never loud enough to be heard distinctly. Possibly an Indian chant, he speculated.

The Strasser's 3-year-old daughter, Lorrie, complained that someone squeezed her toes while she slept. When she changed bedrooms, the pinching stopped. But the footsteps, floating objects and evaporating mists continued.

The entity in the house went one step farther with the Strassers -- it made an appearance in Jim Strasser's sleep. In the nightmare, Jim saw himself as an old Indian, wrapped in a blanket, choking to death. He awoke trying to catch his breath.

There was never any physical harm done to either family. But both couples knew there was something in the house.

What was it?

A local historian's research showed that the house had been built over an ancient Indian burial ground. Perhaps the restless spirits of the ancient dead were showing their anger at having their graves desecrated. The Fischers recalled that the hauntings were paticulary noticable between the end of October and Thanksgiving, the usual time for Indians to gather in large numbers to celebrate harvest.

To date, neither the Fischers nor the Strassers have come up with a better explanation.

1985, by Beth Scott and Michael Norman. Reprinted from Haunted Heartland.