The Girl In The Basement

Some people hunt ghosts. You see them on TV, with their electromagnetic field detectors, digital voice recorders, and thermal cameras. They're looking for a voice that will croak their name on the audio file or a blob on the camera that they can Rorschach Test into a humanoid figure. They're looking for proof of the afterlife, they want to meet the “other side” in person.

On television, it all looks pretty exciting, you're constantly seeing people who say they're grabbed or see a shadow in the corner, usually just before the camera can swing over to get the shot. They seem to be able to pick out full sentences from deep growls and static, and when you see the subtitles right before you hear the clip, it’s a miracle, you can seem to understand them too. But those shows are days of investigation edited into a 44-minute "greatest hits" of the whole endeavor. And half of the show is a replay of something you've just seen or a preview of something you will see in a minute. It's only the best moments. Nobody wants to watch a show where nothing happens. That's called life and it's boring. That's why we watch TV.

In reality, paranormal investigations are a lot of walking around places that are freezing (investigators often talk about cold spots, but when nobody is paying for the heat in an abandoned building, everywhere is a cold spot.) An investigation is hours of sitting in a place waiting for something to happen and asking questions in empty rooms. And for all of your efforts and time (and often money, because old building owners have discovered that this can be a lucrative venture), sometimes you get a strange photo with a light anomaly or a whisper in an audio recording that almost sounds like your name.

Oh, I get it. I've done it many times and I’m sure several times in the next year, I’ll be sitting somewhere in a cold, mold-infested basement talking to a rusty pipe and hoping that the readings on my K-2 EMF meter spike the moments after I ask a question. But I’m more interested in hunting ghost stories.

I’ve done enough research to understand that paranormal experiences aren’t something that just happen all the time. They are impossible to replicate on demand. Glimpses of the truly fantastic are few and far between, but they’ve happened to enough people that I trust to know that there’s something to it. I catalog those moments and combine them with boring old historical research to create haunted history walking tours.

I live in Wisconsin and when you grow up in the Midwest, it’s easy to think of it as a boring place with not a lot of history. In the days before ghost-hunting TV shows, my older sister and I would watch That’s Incredible! or Ripley’s Believe it… or Not! and it was always the paranormal stories that enthralled us the most. But they were always somewhere else.

And to be honest, Wisconsin doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of the West Coast or the colonial centuries of the East Coast. And Winter seems to go on forever. But just because no one was talking about it on TV doesn’t mean it’s not there. My sister was a schoolteacher and during her summer breaks, she started doing research in Milwaukee and created a tour there. I live seventy-five miles away in Madison and she helped me start a tour here, and we began what we now not-jokingly call “The Family Business”. A decade later and now there’s tours spread across several different cities and hundreds of miles.

Because there is plenty of fascinating history, intrigue, true crime, high drama, supernatural folklore, indigenous legends, ghost stories, cryptid sightings (like lake monsters and Bigfoot), UFO visitations, and occult activity right in our own backyard. It’s haunted history tours that tap into that and when you see a city through the lens of the paranormal you understand it in a brand new way. It’s a chance to feel more powerfully connected to your own town or to feel a special relationship with a new place. There’s weird no matter where you go and in Wisconsin that’s doubly so.

There’s a vacation town about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago called Lake Geneva, right over the Illinois-Wisconsin border. It’s most famous for being a playground for the wealthiest families in Chicago with massive summer homes built in the late Nineteenth Century, families with names like Wrigley, Maytag, Sears, and Schwinn. When I was a kid, it was famous to me as the birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the GenCon gaming convention, which is a juggernaut in the tabletop-gaming industry was started in Lake Geneva. They gave it the name Geneva Convention as a play on the rules of armed conflict because before D&D existed, they were all playing wargames. It was also about the only place in Wisconsin where you’d see Chicago Bears and Cubs flags flying alongside our beloved Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Brewers banners because the sports bars were trying to cater to the Illinois market.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century though, Lake Geneva was also the home of America’s finest sanitariums. I know what you’re thinking, you’ve seen Ghost Asylum or you’ve seen Zak Bagans scream “Come at me, bro” while investigating Waverly Hills, you know what kind of hellholes these were. But these weren’t some kind of dingy state-run facilities with tiny prison cell-like rooms. These were more like country clubs, like a rehab facility that Ben Affleck or Steven Tyler from Aerosmith would visit. Scenic lake views, and green sprawling grounds, are what these places were like. There was just as much of a high-class hotel as a hospital.

These sanitariums were the brainchild of Oscar Augustus King, a groundbreaking physician who was a mixture of psychiatrist and neurologist. King even studied at the University of Vienna in Austria at almost the exact same time as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (no idea what King thought of cigars, though.) He led the Wisconsin legislature to pass the first bills in the United States regulating mental health treatment and Wisconsin became the mental health capital of America. Indeed, no other state had as many sanitariums in the late Nineteenth Century. It wasn’t just one big lobotomy nightmare like horror movies have led you to believe.

So, we’ve got a town with plenty of history and plenty of tourists, but no haunted history tour. Opportunity seemed to be knocking, so it was time to get to work.

After a few months of research in the local library, and museum, and walking around talking to various businesses I had a rough script. Through the magic of social media, I met two guides who were up for the job, Rita and Melinda. I met Rita because she had gone ghost hunting with her mother, who I interviewed while researching the tour. Her mom was in a local paranormal group that I had contacted because they had investigated some of the hotels downtown. Melinda came along on a practice tour Rita had run and had said she was interested. Melinda and her mother had recently curated an exhibit at the local museum called Momento Mori, that’s Latin for a “reminder of death”. I said we non-jokingly call it “The Family Business”, didn’t I?

Everyone is into this stuff when it’s Halloween season. It’s like how alcoholics call St. Patrick’s Day “amateur night”. To be into the paranormal all the time means you’re inviting ridicule, particularly in modern times, where people have their teams drawn up politically. Ghosts are anathema to both atheist progressives and Christian fundamentalists. So when you find others in the weird tribe, you stick with them, and often it’s your family members. They’re judging you anyway, right? But they’re stuck with you.

Anyway, we hadn’t officially launched the tour yet because I was still trying to figure out a route through the downtown area that would take everyone near the most scenic parts while not being overly taxing physically, while also getting people somewhat close to their cars when the tour is over. Walking routes seem to work best in a circle and the whole thing usually works best if it’s somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. Think about how long you can make it without going to the bathroom during a movie. I don’t know what I remember more about Titanic, the visually striking images of the majestic boat being torn asunder or the extra-large-soda-sized pressure on my bladder during the last hour of the film.

I took a walking tour in Anoka, Minnesota one time that lasted over three hours and we had to beg some teenager working at a Subway to use their restroom. I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that my back teeth were floating for about 20 minutes of that tour and let’s just say that it colored my opinion of the whole thing. Colored it yellow. So getting the route right is absolutely essential to the whole experience.

So, we wanted to launch our Lake Geneva tour by Memorial Day and we’re walking through the temporary route on an incredibly beautiful day in early May. The lake is a dark blue under the sky’s lighter hue and the temperature is perfect. In Wisconsin, we’ve got five reliably good months outdoors, and in three of those months you are being hunted by mosquitoes, so you tend to appreciate the best days and remember them.

On Main Street, there’s a shop where Rita used to work and she mentioned that she and some of the other employees had had a few strange experiences there. Now this building is on the Wisconsin Historical Registry and was built by one of the pillars of Lake Geneva's early days, Frank Sherman Moore. He established a hardware store there in 1903 that would last through most of the Twentieth Century. Frank was a fairly diverse fellow, considering that not only was he a local hardware store owner, but he was the mayor of Lake Geneva in 1898 and served as postmaster for a decade. Frank was also a founding member of the Lake Geneva Knights of Pythias. Now that’s a sweet-sounding name for a secret society and I wish I could say that the Knights of Pythias were on par with the Freemasons for diabolical conspiracies secretly in charge of the world. Famous Pythians do include Presidents Warren G. Harding, William McKinley, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as jazz legend Louis Armstrong and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Seems like they could be lizard people, but the most nefarious thing about the organization I could find about them was that you weren't supposed to drink.

And anytime you’re talking about teetotalers, you’re talking about Prohibition. Local Lake Genevans talk about boarded-off tunnels underneath the downtown connecting all the buildings and going out near the lake and they're often rumored that they were getaway tunnels used by gangsters during the era when alcohol was illegal. The most famous mobsters during Prohibition were from Chicago, so you can bet that the nearest vacation destination had plenty of goombas running booze to the city. When the law comes knocking at the Speakeasy door, tunnels make sense. It’s a much safer escape.

All over Wisconsin you hear stories of gangsters, in particular, Al Capone coming for a visit or spending the night at their inn or drinking at their bar. If Capone spent as much time vacationing in Wisconsin as people say he did, there is no way he would have had enough time to be a gangster kingpin in Chicago. However, you can see the entrance to underground tunnels in the basement of the store, and Rita did find an extremely old gambling ledger full of numbers down there.

Now, when the shop had haunted stories from when she was working there, it was called Bouquets. Rita said they felt it was a feminine presence and then nicknamed the spirit, "Jennifer". That made me laugh because it was a shop that featured some Lake Geneva touristy-type gifts, and in the early Twentieth Century, the nickname for the sea serpent people had seen in the lake was “Genny”. Lake Geneva, Genny The Lake Monster, Jennifer the ghost… I was thinking that the locals could just try a little harder when it came to naming their specters and cryptids.

Ghost Jennifer loved to cause mischief around the store, especially customers who were rude and she didn't seem to like. Jennifer even almost made a lamp fall on a customer one time, but generally would just move around candles, turn lights on and off, and make little noises when no one else could have made them. However, the only physical manifestation that was seen was a male-looking phantom who was seen on a security camera one time.

And as far as males go, Frank Moore, himself passed away on November 10th, 1936, but his building was a hardware store for decades and while there were new owners, it was even called Moore Hardware. Who knows? Maybe it’s Frank and not Jennifer who’s annoyed with the rude customers? After all, the building was his, and kept his name long after his death, maybe he’s still looking after it from beyond?

There is a stone header with the carving, "Paints Tinware F.S.Moore Hardware" that still sits above the Classical Revival columns in front of the structure, and the whole thing is faced in Bedford Limestone. Bedford, Indiana bills itself as the “Limestone Capital of the World” and its stone has been used in famous places like The Empire State Building and The Pentagon. But it was extremely important in rebuilding the Windy City after the Great Chicago Fire and that’s also the period where many of the buildings in Lake Geneva were constructed.

Among paranormal researchers, limestone buildings seem to have more ghost stories than others. Well, that could be because it was extremely popular in architecture in the late Nineteenth Century, so the buildings made with limestone seem really old. And really old buildings are, of course, the best breeding ground for ghost stories.

Another theory about why limestone is more paranormally sensitive is from Illinois author Timothy Yohe. Because limestone is partially made up of skeletal fragments of coral and other marine organisms, former living things, it might contain some residual living energy that spirits might be able to tap into. Because it’s calcified bodies of sea life, he refers to it as "paranormal plankton".

And when it comes to haunting experiences, you have particular types of them. Sometimes, the ghost seems intelligent, like when you seem to be communicating with an entity through an Ouija Board (the gateway to Hell available at every toy store in the country.) Sometimes the ghost can’t speak, but it reacts to things, like when a poltergeist throws a plate across the room. Sometimes, people just see a vision that seems like a replay of something that happened before, like when a Civil War soldier walks across an old battlefield. The phantom seems to walking through things and not paying any attention to the new world around him. The proper term for that is “residual haunting”.

There was a BBC movie from the early 1970s called The Stone Tape written by Nigel Kneale, the man who invented Professor Quatermass, one of Britain’s great science fiction hero scientists. In the movie, a research team working in an eerie Victorian mansion postulates that ghosts and hauntings are like tape recordings and that electrical mental impressions released during emotional or traumatic events can somehow be stored in rocks or walls and then will replay under certain conditions.

Because of the influence of the film, the idea of residual hauntings is often called the “Stone Tape” theory. So when you see that Civil War soldier, you’re not seeing a ghost that refuses to step into the light, you’re just seeing a recording of an event, like watching an old home movie that will only play on a very particular VCR. That's how old records work, you scrape a needle over a vinyl groove and you can hear the Beatles. What kind of material would work better as a “supernatural vinyl” than the “paranormal plankton” of limestone?

So, combine a historic limestone building with the strange stories from the employees and we have enough for a stop on the tour. I had only been on the route in the nighttime and hadn’t been in the store yet when it was open. As we were passing it walking through the route, Rita wondered aloud if the new management had any ghost stories. I am feeling hurried at the time to get back on the hour-long drive to Madison to see my screaming 18-month-old, so I am just about to say “Let’s find out another time” when Melinda opens the door and goes in.

Okay, I’ve done this before, so let’s see what happens. I’ve had to start many conversations with the introductory phrase, “I know this is gonna sound weird” and then proceed to ask about the ghost stories. Paranormal experiences in particular often seem to get a strong reaction out of people and business owners, especially. They are either incredulous about the whole thing and have never had an experience or they’re all in and their business is like when the containment unit bursts in Ghostbusters, there’s spirits oozing out of every crack in the wall. Either way, you’re not getting a great story. If they don’t believe it, then you have to cross the place off your list. If they’re into it too much, then you’re left sorting out the good tales that have some history and credence from the BS that often follows the paranormal field.

When you’re talking about ghosts and hauntings, I feel like we have a responsibility to be careful and stick to the “facts”. Get the history right, get the details of the experience right, and don’t hypothesize about what you think the haunting is. Rule Number One for our tours is Don’t Make Stuff Up.

In the movie The Crow, the bad guy Top Dollar (the wonderfully gravelly voiced Michael Wincott) says the line, “Childhood is over the moment you know you’re gonna die.” I remember the exact moment I realized that I was gonna die, and so was my sister and my mother and my father and all of my friends. I was six years old and I was reading this Charlie Brown children’s encyclopedia. My parents got it free as a sample from a book store and it was the volume that covered the human body. In the book, it talks about death and how it happens to everyone. My parents didn’t realize it, but that Charlie Brown encyclopedia was much more terrifying than any Stephen King or Clive Barker novel. After I understood the implications of what I was reading, I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. It was my first existential crisis, but everyone goes through one of those eventually. Mine just happened earlier than others.

People want to know there’s another side. They hope they can see their loved ones again, they hope that they don’t just end. That there is something besides oblivion waiting for them and the people they care about. It’s easy to take advantage of, and I’ve fielded more than one call to our “Ghost Line” (Right, I know, it’s a silly way to make people laugh to have them call our tour phone number) of someone distraught after the loss of their loved one, hoping that the human soul survives physical death.

When people are grieving and desperate for answers, they’re easy to take advantage of. The frauds and hoaxers out there make everyone involved in the field look like immoral charlatans, willing to prey on the weakest among us. So many out there already think that anyone who is into the paranormal is a fool, do we want them to also think of us as shysters?

Hauntings can be really good for making money and some business owners understand this and some don’t. There’s a whole world of paranormal travel out there and people, like me, will pick one restaurant bar or hotel over another because it has history and stories. If it’s got too many stories, I’m wary of the place, because then there’s often no scrutiny involved and you know it’s probably just a marketing ploy. What makes a true-life ghost story exciting, to me at least, is its verisimilitude, not its outrageousness.

And often, it’s the employees who tell the best stories. They’re the ones that have the least to gain and the most to lose by telling their tales. No one is going to stake their reputation on something that didn’t actually happen to them because they think they’ll get a few more customers in their gift shop or a couple more patrons at the bar they wait tables at. So, while owners are often worried about losing their credibility or they’re hoping to make extra money, their employees are usually just trying to get by.

So, it’s a fairly unassuming shop full of designer plates, vases, soaps, and other types of homewares. It’s the kind of pleasant-smelling store that usually bores weirdos like me to death, but it’s perfect for frazzled moms can duck into during a vacation to get away from the street noise and the bustle of a daytime downtown right off the lake. By the time I got in there, my guide had already started talking to the lady working behind the register.

She was in her forties, with auburn hair running to her shoulders, and she had a friendly smile for us, even as I overheard her telling my guide that she had never experienced anything like that in the store. And of course, she doesn’t believe in that stuff anyway, because she’s Catholic.

That’s not the first time I’ve heard that. I grew up in the Church, in the kind of family that didn’t eat meat on Fridays and went to Mass every Sunday (and you better believe we didn’t miss a Holy Day of Obligation) and I’ll tell ya, I don’t remember ever talking about ghosts. I did ask a priest about the Ouija Board because I thought it was totally cool, but he said that we weren’t supposed to try and “conjure” the dead. So, that means that visits to mediums and psychics are out too, I guess.

I’m not gonna talk about the “Holy Ghost” because that’s just supposed to be the spirit of faith and not some disembodied soul running around. But the Church teaches about “The Communion of Saints”, and it’s a phrase we used to repeat that we believed in during the Apostle’s Creed every week. The Communion of Saints is the idea that every member of the Church, living or deceased, is connected to each other through “The Mystical Body of Christ” (which sounds a lot cooler in its Latin form, Mystici corporis Christi). They teach that we’re actually connected to the dead except for the souls that are damned to Hell.

And don’t forget about Purgatory. There’s actually a place where the dead go when they’re not bad enough for Hell or good enough for Heaven. The Church even says that sometimes the souls will have to make up for their naughty deeds in Purgatory and can appear on Earth before they can go to Heaven. So, boom. There’s officially plenty of room for actual ghosts (not just demons masquerading as ghosts) in Catholicism, it just has to be part of God’s will. And I guess if you’re religious, everything is God’s will anyway. So, next time a Catholic tells you that ghosts are a no-go, you can hit them with the one-two punch of Purgatory and the Communion of Saints.

I wasn’t about to engage in theological fisticuffs with this nice lady in the store, though. I was already running late and I wanted to make this visit as short as possible. She says she’s never had any experiences there at all and doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff, to boot. That’s good enough for me.

But Rita, who used to work there, mentions to the woman that she used to be employed in the store and is hoping we can take a look around in the basement. Since there’s no one else in the place, the lady says that’s completely fine and offers to take us down there. I think that’s great anyway because it’ll help me visualize the location where they found the gambling notebook while rewriting the story for the tour.

We go down the stairs cheerfully and the lady is perfectly lovely about everything. It’s the early afternoon, it’s a beautiful sunny day at the end of Spring. This is the time of year in the Midwest where everyone is naturally in a good mood. We’re laughing and joking a bit as I take in the surroundings. Not too musty, and it’s got a cement floor at least (there are plenty of old buildings where the basement has a dirt floor.) Random items from the store fill the shelves and are placed strategically across the ground. There are no basement windows or anything, so the light comes from a few bulbs with pull chains, but it’s not too dark or dim, or particularly spooky. I was hoping that Ghost Jennifer might come jumping out at us from a hidden corner, but she was nowhere to be found. The walls are old and of course, it feels like it’s been around for a century, but that’s pretty standard for the area.

All in all, a regular old basement with some nooks and crannies. There is a semi-crumbled entrance to what looks like could have been an underground tunnel system, but it seems to have been filled in, which makes sense because that could be a flooding nightmare. My guide showed me where she found the gambling notebook as we crossed the floor.

As we get to a slightly less well-lit area and it seems like the basement goes on for a while in the dark, I notice there’s a section where there are some studs up for a side storage area that seemed like walls were never put up. Or the walls had been taken down. Either way, there’s nothing too exciting about it that I can tell, just an area where the construction remains unfinished in either build-up or teardown. Not strange because it’s probably on the to-do list of the owners as something to get around to eventually.

As we’re walking, the lady from the store is talking happily. “Here’s where we keep the extra inventory and I’ve been down here alone plenty of times. I’ve never seen or felt anything….” And her voice trails off as we get closer to the unfinished storage area. She was at my back and I wasn’t paying that much attention to her because I didn’t think she had anything for us. Because she suddenly stopped talking, we all turned around to her.

Her eyes were watering and she continued weakly, “There’s just something about this corner, I just..” And she stops again. Her eyes tear up more heavily and she starts crying in front of us, openly. Real weeping, like she was watching Titanic and it just got to the part where Leonardo DiCaprio is about to let go of Kate Winslet’s hands on the raft. She is completely overcome with emotion. Melinda, the one who had rushed in in the first place, says, “It’s the little girl, isn’t it?”

She continues, “You lost someone like the little girl. The little girl that’s still here, in that room over there, in the corner.” She points to the unfinished storage area. “That’s why she’s reaching out to you.” The woman weakly nods through her tears. There’s an intense energy in the room, a static electricity that I can feel, like when you finally get to the point in an argument where something has been said that can’t be unsaid. There’s weather in the basement and it’s changed. I know that something is happening to these women, but I can’t see it. They embrace in a kind of hug turn around and walk back towards the stairs.

I look over at the corner, and of course, I don’t see any shadows or ghosts. I’m about as psychically sensitive as a callous, but the natural sympathy when you see someone crying is overwhelming. To my eyes, I just see a corner and an unfinished storage closet. But my breath is taken away by witnessing this woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts and steadfastly insists that she had zero paranormal experiences in this place except for the corner of the basement that makes her sob inexplicably.

So, we walk back to the stairs slowly and you can hear some people chatting. Instead of just us eccentrics, there are actual customers in the store. The woman wipes her eyes, steadies herself, puts on her best smile, and gets back upstairs to talk to them and hopefully make a sale. We thank her for her time, she nods, gets to the real consumers, and we walk out into the sunlight.

At that point, I’m still a little dazed by what happened. Serious people who are non-believers do not have a paranormal crying fit in front of complete strangers. But that lady just did. That’s when Melinda happens to mention that she’s “sensitive” and she detects the presence little girl who was in that corner. It wasn’t the lady’s little girl, but the spirit was attracted to the shopkeeper because she had lost a child close to her.

Okay, well I can’t vouch for any of that, but I did just witness something extraordinary. I told Melinda that her gifts are awesome, however, I don’t know that we want to be in the business of connecting people to their dead relatives. We do haunt history, not séances. But of course, if she gets any psychic messages that we can investigate for new tour stops, I’m all in.

We all looked at each other in amazement for a minute, kinda processing the whole thing, but I was still in a hurry. There were only a couple of tour stops left and we walked through them quickly, after all, everything felt anticlimactic that. We talked about the tour launch and I raced back on the hour drive to Madison. I tried to tell my wife about it, but it was hard to get the words in over the screaming baby and it must have seemed like a crazy story, and I didn’t even write any of it down until the next day.

Since then, we’ve run hundreds of tours now in Lake Geneva, we’ve told that story at several different conferences and I still have no idea what compelled that woman to break down in front of us. There was something non-physical in that basement that could evoke some powerful emotions. Could it be mold or some fungus playing with our brain chemistry? Sure. Could Melinda and the shopkeeper have concocted the whole thing in the few moments before Rita and I followed her inside? Possibly. Could everyone involved be susceptible to this kind of suggestion because we had it on our minds? Absolutely.

But I’m not sure of anything, except glimpses of the truly fantastic are few and far between. 

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Curious about Lake Geneva’s haunted past? Join us on an immersive Lake Geneva ghost tour where history meets the supernatural. Uncover the eerie stories that linger in the shadows of this charming town, from mysterious basements to ghostly encounters with long-lost spirits. Perfect for history lovers, paranormal seekers, and anyone intrigued by the unexplained—this tour offers a one-of-a-kind adventure. Don’t miss the chance to explore Lake Geneva’s most haunted spots with us!

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Dive deeper into the mysterious world of hauntings with our curated collection of paranormal investigations and ghostly encounters. Read more stories like this in “Ghosts of Lake Geneva” by Rita Moore and R. Michael Huberty, a book of Lake Geneva ghost stories written by our own American Ghost Walks team. Click here for more.

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Uncover the haunting secrets of Wisconsin's most enchanting resort town with "Haunted Lake Geneva." This meticulously researched collection of supernatural tales takes you on a journey through the historic mansions, grand hotels, and shadowy shores of Geneva Lake. From the phantom footsteps echoing through the Baker House to the mysterious apparitions at the Maxwell Mansion, each page reveals a new layer of Lake Geneva's paranormal heritage. Perfect for both local history enthusiasts and ghost story lovers, this book combines carefully documented historical accounts with chilling firsthand experiences that will make you see this beloved vacation destination in an entirely new light. Whether you're a longtime resident or planning your first visit, these stories will forever change the way you experience Lake Geneva's historic downtown and lakeside paths.

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