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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 9/27/07 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
June 20, 2004 Tom Perry column: By Tom Perry
But here's a bit of spooky news to pass along from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay: Ghostly activity may be on the increase around Northeastern Wisconsin.
OK, perhaps we're over-reaching here, as television does during sweeps. But this much is true: There's been an increase in the number of local residents who've gone on ghost-hunting missions.
Debra Anderson, Area Research Center coordinator at the Cofrin Library, said people are coming in to ask for help because they think their property is haunted.
"This is something new,'' she said. "We've just started to have these requests in the last year or so.''
Increase in queries
Anderson has been at the Area Research Center for 15 years. While there may have been similar requests in the past, she said, "We never got enough to notice.''
There have been about eight requests in the past year, Anderson said. The staff on the seventh floor is now going by the nickname "Ghost Hunters.'' For the most part, the requests for information have followed a similar pattern.
"They'll usually contact us because they have recently purchased a building,'' Anderson said. "Then, either they've been told by the previous owners or as they start to live there, they begin to hear things or witness things, and they're calling us to verify or to ask about the history of the building or who might have lived there.''
Digging up this sort of information can be done, but it does take time and know-how.
"We'll help them do a building history, documenting who lived in the house, when it was built and that type of thing,'' Anderson said. "From there if they hear blood-curdling types of things or scary things, we can do research in our court records.''
To be sure, the Green Bay area has a fair share of buildings old enough to be a cool crib for any self-respecting specter.
But if there are a lot of ghosts in these parts, they're mostly well-behaved. At the Brown County Library, Mary Jane Herber, local historian, said sometimes people are surprised there's not a list of local haunted places.
"I tell them historians deal in hard facts, not things you can't see,'' she said.
'Stigmatized' specialists
Mary Buckman of Vogels-Buckman Appraisal Group Inc. has been appraising property locally for 24 years.
"I've never dealt with a place that was haunted or supposed to be haunted,'' she said. "Maybe that's because if you think a place is haunted, you wouldn't want to say.''
Appraisal firms elsewhere specialize in dealing with "stigmatized'' properties, Buckman said.
"Usually a property is stigmatized because there's been a murder or a terrible crime,'' she said. Meanwhile, at UWGB, Anderson said that most of the people on ghost-hunting missions haven't seemed especially distressed.
"They're usually like, 'Hey, cool,'" she said. "They think it's fun.''
Yeah, until they turn out the lights.
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