The following article was written by Paranormal Investigator Chad Lewis.
Spooky season is upon us. With the chilling air and the seasonal turning of the trees, we shift from lackadaisical summer vibes to those more associated with the darker days soon to come. Personally, I love this liminal time of year when beach sunsets are slowly replaced with visits to the pumpkin patch. It is also the time to wrap ourselves into a blanket and devour some eerie legends that are best told in the dark—and there is no better place for supernatural tales than in Wisconsin.
Our state is filled with all manner of denizens of the dark, from giant werewolf creatures roaming the rural countryside and terrifying vampires stalking a cursed cemetery to residents encountering beings they believe to not be from this planet. No place in Wisconsin is without its own bizarre story.
For the last 30 years, I have trekked the world in search of the strange and unusual—and I blame this odd passion on my home state of Wisconsin. While in high school in Eau Claire, I heard rumors about numerous UFO sightings coming out of the relatively nearby town of Elmwood. So, I decided to venture there and interview people about what they were encountering in our skies. From there I joined the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) at the same time I started studying psychology in college, where I was most interested in students’ belief in the paranormal, a topic that I ended up turning into my master’s thesis.
Once I began giving presentations on my findings, those in the audience would tell me that they needed my help. That they had encountered some odd beast in the woods that left them perplexed. That they had seen something in the sky they couldn’t identify, or that they believed their house was haunted and wanted someone to come and check it out. I began to shift my research away from trying to explain why people believe in these topics to actually trying to discover what these people were experiencing.
This 30-year quest in search of the strange and unusual has garnered some of the strangest paranormal legends that you could ever imagine. But, you don’t have to take my word for it—you can take your own word for it! You can join me on Thursday, September 18, at 6 PM in the Balkansky Community Room at Manitowoc Public Library for Paranormal Wisconsin: Tales of Ghosts, UFOs, and Mysterious Creatures and draw your own conclusions.
My presentations are meant to be stepping-off points into the supernatural—a visual road trip, if you will, to the strangest corners of our state. I will provide you with all the details you will ever need—the background, history, and folklore, the eyewitness accounts, and of course, my personal research into each-and-every place that I talk about. But, the most important part is that when all is said and done, I leave it up to you to venture out to these locations and decide for yourselves whether or not you believe something is lurking in the darkness.
SO, let’s get you started! See you September 18!