County boasts many haunts, spooky stories
By Kristopher Wenn
Herald Times Reporter
MANITOWOC ? It's Friday the 13th and Halloween is approaching. What better time to look at some of the Manitowoc County sites many believed to be haunted, or at least slightly spooked.
According to "Haunted Lake Michigan: Ghost, Shipwrecks and Scary Mysteries of a Great Lake," a newly published book by Frederick Stonehouse, the ghost of 19-year-old Ralph Clark Houston haunts the USS Cobia submarine.
Houston, a gun loader, was the only man to die on the USS Cobia. He was hit by enemy machine gun fire and killed in combat in the Java Sea during World War II.
Today, the Cobia is the signature exhibit at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and host to numerous tour groups.
The book states:
"Overnight guides talk about hearing footsteps in the officer's wardroom or connecting passageway ? Sometimes the curtains move as if a person were moving through them ? Guides have also reported a feeling of an eerie presence or of being watched."
Karen Duvelle, Wisconsin Maritime Museum education assistant, said many overnight tour guides attribute weird noises or mysterious happenings on the USS Cobia to "Ralph."
"I've heard footsteps and seen the curtains move and I'll get up and look out and think it's a kid and no one is out there," Duvelle said.
Duvelle, an overnight submarine tour guide from 2001-05, said in one late-night incident tour guides heard noises down at the other end of the hall. Another tour guide jokingly said, 'Ralph, go back on the boat' and some motion lights came on and we heard noise by the doors that lead out to the boat, she said.
"I don't know if it's just a story or it got carried away with our imaginations," Duvelle said. "We talk about Ralph and tell his story and then sometimes when we want to scare kids we say that the boat is haunted."
Other spooky stories excerpted from the book include:
One of the largest steamers on the lakes during its time, the Vernon took 36 crew members and passengers to their deaths in the rough waters of Lake Michigan at Rawley Point in 1887. Four vessels reportedly sailed passed the Vernon on their way to Milwaukee, never reporting the wreckage or survivors to anyone who could help. In time, however, each of the four ships that ignored the Vernon was shipwrecked. Scuba divers discovered the Vernon in 1969. The wreck rests 200 feet deep in Lake Michigan.
In July 1978, men from four Coast Guard stations reported seeing a UFO over Lake Michigan. The station in Two Rivers reported seeing a cigar-shaped object with colored lights traveling at a speed in excess of 1,200 miles per hour. The men at the Two Rivers station sighted a white light moving toward the station and flashing in a non-rhythmic manner. The light then turned northeast and went straight up and out of sight. The men at the station reportedly took 10 pictures of the UFO.
In 1997, a man and his two sons sighted a UFO while driving near Manitowoc. The object, reported to be triangular and illuminated with three reddish-orange lights, hovered silently for a few minutes then dove for the ground as if it were going to crash, before pulling up.
Other county haunts
Other locations in Manitowoc County believed to be haunted, according to various Web sites and written accounts, include:
Maribel Caves Hotel
The hotel at Maribel Caves is rumored to be the site of a figure standing at one of the windows looking outward, strange noises and things moving around upstairs and objects flying around.
Other claims include that the hotel burned three times, black witches opened a portal to hell through an old fountain in the front of the building and underground passageways built below the hotel during the bootlegging days contain the lost treasures of Al Capone and John Dillinger.
JFK Prep
The abandoned Catholic school in St. Nazianz is supposedly the site where a nun hanged herself. Also, you can supposedly hear the voices of little boys at night.
Phantom Hollow
In the early 1850s, German Baron Carl von Brause and his son, Carl Jr., traveled on foot from Milwaukee to Manitowoc. They enjoyed the hearty welcome and decided to stay and build a home near Evergreen Cemetery, in an area some 250 feet in diameter that formed an almost perfect circle. His wife and another son, Ernst, joined them later. After a while, however, the baroness died.
Rumor had it that after her death, "a figure in white had been nightly hovering about her former residence and that sweet strains of music had softly floated from there." The music is called "Phantom Hollow," and mists are said to form and float upward when the temperature changes there.
Source: An account in the 1936 Centennial Edition of the Manitowoc Herald Times newspaper
Lincoln High tower
Students are forbidden to go into the tower and in fact the top floor was padlocked and no one seemed to know where the key was. The tower was once used to house the school newspaper and yearbook offices. However, it is rumored that it is haunted by the sprit of a student who supposedly jumped to death from the top of the tower. General uneasiness, cold spots and apparitions have been rumored at the tower.
Source: www.theshadowlands.net
Haunted train rides
There is a story of a man who was an engineer between 1920 and 1950 on the route between Sheboygan and Manitowoc. The man always looked at a certain area of his route because he knew a girl had drowned there. Supposedly, on a night with a full moon, the man saw a young girl there, pointing in the direction he was traveling.
Society of Divine Savior Seminary
Another site in St. Nazianz, the Society of Divine Savior Seminary was supposedly headquarters to a Catholic mystic cult that was forced to flee Germany following various accusations of sexual depravity.
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