And welcome, Rory Graves from the season author who wrote the book, Haunted Racine, an award-winning
author because at the Wisconsin Broadcast Association Awards back in May, amongst
what, how many hundreds of stations in the state of Wisconsin radio stations, this
show won first place for an interview, and it was your interview, May, but this last
year.
I am just floored that that one first place now, it's not like an Academy award, we're
going to get that role based, but I showed it to you.
It's in the lobby, first place, interview, Rory Graves, Haunted Racine.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that because you think about all the radio stations that
have entered and they said, oh, we got to get her to get the award next year.
Anyway, so the book is Haunted Racine, the cover alone is spooky.
Now tell us what's on the cover, then I'll tell you why I'm bringing that up.
So on the cover is Winslow Elementary School, which used to be known as the Third Ward
School.
It's near the lake.
And Winslow Elementary is rumored to be haunted because most of the building was built
over an old graveyard, where scene's first graveyard is it really?
Yep.
They just called it the old cemetery.
That's creepy.
I know, right?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say one of the biggest issues with that build was the fact that they
had to exume the bodies.
And when they did, it's evident that they never got all of them because they still found
bones in the school yard.
Have the kids find them?
The kids found them during recess.
What years are we talking about?
Oh, um, probably the, I believe 1880s, 1890s were most of the, imagine a kid telling the
show until half found this in the front yard, the big femur bone.
I mean, yeah, I, a femur, yeah, the, uh, now I pass that every morning on the way
in the sun 14th Street, right?
If you see, if you pass St Luke's, it's right after that when you're heading toward, um,
West, you'll see it there and every morning, I look, I never, I passed it every morning
for years.
I never thought much about it.
And now I look for that light.
Now that light was not on when you took the picture.
No, no, that was added in post, yeah, but I still look for it every morning to see if
that's on it.
So kids with funny femur bones and just in that eye, that's like the movie poltergeist.
Yeah.
That's exactly what it reminds me of.
You move the tombstones, but they didn't remove the bodies.
Yeah.
And that's super common in a lot of old historic cemetery sites where they'd never
got to all the bodies.
Now, I just went to about a week ago, I went to a, uh, speaking thing in Union Grove.
They had a thing on the pioneer cemetery, which was at the Bong recreation center where
it is.
But Bong is now.
Oh, wow.
And they, before they can build the runways and everything, it was supposed to be a
big air force base and never happened, though, before they had to remove this cemetery.
Now, this cemetery was built in the mid 1800s because locals that live there, they didn't
have, they didn't ship the bodies out 20 miles.
They died to buried right there in between the farms.
So they had to move these bodies and they were, I think, 19 or 20 of them, something like
that.
And they had to find homes for these bodies, you can just dump them so they had a diggy
one up and I was talking to the woman was giving the talk and I said, now, they didn't
have caskets like they do today that are pretty sturdy.
These were just wood boxes they put and there was no bombing.
I said, when they dug these up, I mean, they had, it's just a crumble and they said they
had people do what they hired were very careful on how they remove these bodies.
Most of them will put it far as home cemetery in the walkie if not a spot for them there.
But they got to get rid of these bodies.
Now, the spot, there's no markers where it was.
She mentioned where it was right off their way, the runway is in the bushes.
But that's got to creep you just having to get those bodies out of there.
I can't imagine and Winslow was just one of the places within a mile.
There were two cemeteries.
One was right on the bluffs of Lake Michigan and the same thing happened there where
they, well, they didn't actually want to build there.
But they needed to zoom the bodies because the cemetery fell into disrepair.
Most of them went to mound cemetery, but there were still some left behind and every so
often they would just fall into the lake because of lakeside erosion or the boys at Racine
College, elementary middle school boys would find those coffins jutting out of the side
of the whole building cemetery on the bluff with waves can go give it with that idea.
Even I know that's not a place to build a house yet as cemetery.
Honestly, I can't imagine how much more of how much more land used to be there that
isn't anymore because it had to have been significant for this much erosion to take.
Now there's like maybe 10, 15 feet of land and then the lake.
Well, I looked up to see the difference between a coffin and a casket because they hear
people say both of them and somebody said, well, they're not the same thing.
From what I understand, the casket is like what we see, the big rectangle boxes, but a
coffin is shaped more like it comes down to like a body.
Yeah.
And you see them in the old west.
They had, they used to put these people up and like open the casket or the coffins and
put them on display these outlaws that were killed, they used to display them.
And then we'll be unforgiven with Clint Eastwood Morgan Freeman is on display after he's
killed.
And that's what starts Clint Eastwood on his murder spree to get these people who did this
to his friend.
But yeah, he put them on display.
And I've seen pictures back in the 1800s, early 1900s.
If a person in your family died, they used to dress them up and they used to wire them
so they looked alive and they used to take a family portrait, one more family portrait
with the person and they were dead, but they didn't look dead.
Same thing with the outlaws, they used to take pictures with them and they just wired
them up so they looked like they were alive to put them in nice clothes.
Kind of gruesome when you're thinking about it, but you see those pictures all the time.
Have you ever heard of Elmer McCurdy?
No.
I hope I never, I'm not going to meet this person, am I?
No, I sure hope not.
This is not a recene based story, but your mention of outlaws reminded me.
There actually was a man, Elmer McCurdy, who was a bank robber and nobody ever claimed
his body after he went to the morgue.
And so the embalmer embalmed him as he would any other and put him on display in his
window for a while.
And he had people pay to see Elmer McCurdy, the big outlaw, he wasn't actually that big
of an outlaw and they would put coins in his mouth to pay their admission.
They used to take bodies and put them inside shows famous, you know, what they'd buy their
bodies and bring them around like a traveling side show.
And funny enough, that's exactly what happened.
Two gentlemen came and claimed to be his relatives and the embalmer let them release the body
to them.
They were actually part of the circus.
So they took his body around to the circuses and years upon years past, ownership of
this past, nobody remembered it was a real body anymore.
And he actually ended up being used as a prop in a haunted house.
And that's where they discovered him when they were filming the six million dollar man.
Really?
Yep, they were filming an episode there and they wanted to move one of the props out
of the way, the hanging man.
And when they were filming, they tried to move him and his arm fell off and they saw
ligaments on the inside and they were like, oh, mannequins don't have muscles on the
inside.
So the police had to come and they, it took a long time to figure out where this body
came from because it had moved hands so many times, but it was Elmer McCarty from the
Wild West.
Well, they got to me.
You lived a good life after he died anyway, he's useful life anyway.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So we're talking, we're talking to Rory Graves here from Haunted Racine, we've got some
haunted Racine stories to talk about too coming up in just a few minutes here, including
the Taylor Orphanage, which I just went to about two weeks ago, I was there.
And they wrote a book about the Taylor Orphanage.
It was under the Tarzan tree or the Tarzan tree, which my wife and I read and it kind of
opened her, yeah, it opened her eyes to just the treacher's in the Racine area.
And there is a bell in front of the Taylor Orphanage now.
It's on display.
It's the original bell from the original Orphanage.
That is owned.
It's on loan by a good friend of ours who's in here every month, Jim Macier.
Yes.
I love Jim.
He's in here every month and it's said on, no, he didn't donate it.
It says on loan, which means when the minute he wants it back, he gets it back.
That's a good.
We're talking to Rory Graves and she wrote the book Haunted Racine.
Let's talk about some of the Racine Haunts around here and one of them I brought up only
because I was just there a few weeks ago and read the book under the Tarzan tree or something
like that.
It's about the Taylor Orphanage on Taylor Raven.
You write off Highway 11.
You could see there.
The building is still there, most of it anyway.
And there's a big plaque, giant concrete, yeah, it's massive.
So let's talk about that because it's got to be stories with an orphanage.
Oh, yes, lots of stories.
This is one of the few locations where I actually got to go on a paranormal investigation
with a team to the Taylor Home Orphanage asylum.
And that was the Milwaukee Paranormal Investigators and we went, I want to say it was about 2018
and investigated Cottage number five, which is one of the, I think there's six cottages
on the property, kind of in a semi-circle.
Yeah, these community organizations use them now, yeah.
Yeah.
And at that time, Evergreen Academy was using it for the lower grades, for elementary.
And we went there after dark and did an investigation because a lot of the teachers were hearing
things and seeing things occasionally after hours and, you know, teachers stay late to
work on their stuff.
So there are a lot of spooky stories they had.
Most of them pertaining to the hallway, when you first walk in, you would go to the reception
desk and then directly to the left of the desk is this hallway.
And there is nothing extraordinary about it.
It's pretty short, but that's where most of the classrooms are off of.
And at night, people would be staying late and they would see if their classroom door
was shut lights coming from underneath their doors.
They would hear people running through the hallways and go out into the hall only to
see nobody.
But the creepiest one to me is even sometimes at the reception desk, the receptionist would
hear kids running through the hallway and laughing and the sound of all those papers rustling
on the wall.
You know, kids' artwork, all the things you want to put up on the bulletin boards.
But then she'd look over.
All the papers were exactly still and nobody would be there.
That would creep me out.
I wouldn't go back in again.
Yeah, I don't think I'd be able to stay after hours at least.
We had a story yesterday, the thing that creeps people out when they were in the home and
noises, things moving, you know, the typical things.
I put a four sales sign out in front of my house.
The first time I saw something like that, I heard something like, if I saw a cup and
sauce were moving across in the air, I wouldn't even stay there overnight.
I'd go to the motel down the street, get a room out of care.
How crummy the motel is, it's got to be better than sauces and cups going through the
air.
I don't know how people put up with that.
Yeah.
Now, I showed you a picture in my bedroom of the ceiling and one night I'm reading and
I look up at the ceiling and I see this shadow as a perfect shadow of a woman.
You can see the long hair is your face and it looks like she's looking up and praying
or something like that.
And my wife saw it.
I took a couple of pictures.
I was sure to do the picture next night.
It wasn't there.
Yeah.
And nothing changed in the room.
I would say, well, it's a shadow from the curd, that's not a shadow from the curtain.
Look at it up there.
It is crazy.
It pulled me out.
Yeah.
It 100%.
It just looks like a person.
And my house is over 100 years old, about 120 years old.
So I don't know what went on in the house 120 years ago.
Yeah.
That's part of the reason I love doing historic research as you get to dig on that stuff.
Let's, before we get to the first break here, let's talk about, you said the Taylor
home was an asylum as well.
They called it an orphan asylum.
Boo, fun like that.
Where is asylum?
I, it's definitely a thing of the past.
It was just an orphanage, but that was how they referred to it.
Let's talk about the Racine County Asylum.
Now this was by, where Regency Mall is, right?
Yep, right there.
Oh.
So that was originally the Racine County Asylum for the Insane, as well as it's later
iteration, high-rich hospitals.
And when it was the Insane Asylum, we don't know a lot about what happened there.
That's one of those things, poor record keeping, things get lost.
But we do know that in, I can't recall the year, I just be referencing it, but we do know
that there was a fire and that all of the patients made it out from that fire, which
is remarkable.
However, the records did not.
They also, on the same property, built the poor farm, which was definitely something we
wouldn't see nowadays, where people who were poor, infirm, sometimes just immigrants would
be sent, and they would kind of do labor until they were deemed fit to go back into society
and fend for themselves.
And this is where Regency Mall is now, where Whitman's is now, yeah.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
There's finally something there.
And between the poor farm and the Asylum, people would die, and they had a cemetery on
premises.
And so that cemetery that you can still see to this day, I believe, on just to the right
of target.
Just to the right of target.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
That's the remnants of the cemetery they had.
Yeah.
I've been there.
And there's not a cemetery with tombstones like you would see.
There's a marker there, one marker.
And it's popper cemeteries, what they call it.
And it's just one, you know, all these graves, but they're not marked.
Yeah.
And so they can't build anything there because it's, you know, sacred ground.
It's a cemetery.
Yeah.
But yeah, I've been there before.
And I've, we took a walk through this, right by the soccer fields, just a sound of
the soccer field there.
But you wouldn't know it from the road, other than it's a big, grassy area that no one's
building on.
Exactly.
But it's just to the right of target.
And just to the left of which a purging park, that Richard Park, Richard Park, just
there.
And you, you can go there.
It's, you know, just one marker that tells you what was there, but, whoa, yeah.
And if you thought two asylums were bad, there was three.
We're talking to Rory Graves.
She is the author of Haunted Racine.
And before the break, we were talking about some asylums.
We have the Taylor orphanage, high asylum and orphanage.
I hate that word asylum.
An orphanage.
And we talked about the one where woodmins is now, and you said there was a third one.
You know,
the, the Racine was the city of asylums, what, what, what's going on here?
Sonny rest, which is a really creepy name, in my opinion.
They actually called it sonny rest tuberculosis sanatorium, which is just as bad as asylum.
I, I, those names just give you the chills.
And they weren't as bad back then, but nowadays, but that's where people went when they had
tuberculosis.
Mm-hmm.
They rested it out, whatever they did.
They got away because it was highly contagious, and they went to these places, and they got
out of it when they were all done.
Yep.
As long as they survived, which is unfortunate, because a lot of people did not survive
tuberculosis, especially in the early days.
This sanatorium opened up in November, 1913, and was closed by 1962 when they kind of got
that epidemic under control in the area.
But that was a good chunk of time that it was open.
Who was it?
It was kind of like right behind the high-rich hospitals.
So it was on that same property, most likely where part of Pitchard Park nowadays.
Excuse me.
On my list, it was the high-rich shopping center, which is where Kmart was.
They had an Asian buffet there, they had to go home depots in the area now right around.
So that's what we're talking about that area.
Yep.
All in the same, same chunk of land, all of that, which is just crazy to me.
Yes, because there's a little lake there, right, where Culver's is, and my wife told
me the story.
Now that it's come, now you mentioned it, that there was a home there, the sunny, or
they rest home, was right there on the property where the shopping center is, because you
mentioned that to me when they were eating in the car at Culver's, I don't want to say
about this place with a nuts hung up, but why don't you talk me and lunch with it?
I don't want to hear about it on the side, I'm going to be at lunch, but it was right
in front of that lake.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And the stories they've got around there are great.
Actually, Ron Helmick, founder of Racine Paranormal Investigators, yeah, he used to work
at that cameart before it shut down.
And he said things would fly off the shelves when nobody was around, and they would hear
things crash and come around the corner and see nothing out of a mess.
And some of the other employees also had experiences where Christmas music would just start blasting
when they were closing down for the night.
They had other incidences where carts would just start rolling around the area.
It's crazy.
I used to go there when I was a kid and go to the little Caesars and get lunch.
Yeah.
Little Caesars was in there.
You know, I am, here's the problem.
I never see any of those stuff go on.
I talked to people who claim they have seen it.
But you know, I'm like, you know, the people from Missouri, you know, what their slogan
is, it's the show me state when you, you know, I don't believe it.
So show me.
And that's when I believe so I get a show it to me.
Let me see something go on.
I don't know if I can handle it once I see it.
I think I'll be in the silent once I see it, but people swear these things go on and
you look at them and they look to me like they're telling the truth, but why don't
I see them?
Like my sister-in-law, I'm going to tell this story.
She speaks to the dead.
She could, she speaks to the dead, she can hear them.
And one day she comes up and I want to hear it, I tell her, I don't want to hear any
of your stories because I don't believe this stuff.
Just give it to yourself.
Yeah.
And it's my first wife.
And she, her sister comes up and says, I have to speak to Don right away and he says,
well, you didn't want to talk about this stuff and says, no, this is important.
She says, I spoke to your aunt, but she said she's not really your aunt.
And I said, aunt, but you know, oh, I have an aunt, Lil, who passed away, but she was my
grandmother's friend.
We just called her Aunt Lil because she was always hanging around and you know, she's
part of the family.
Aunt Lil, I said, now go on.
She said she is your guardian angel.
And she said something bad is going to happen, but don't panic and don't worry about it.
You will all come out okay.
Wow.
And I said, can you tell me about it?
She just, she didn't tell me much more than that.
Mm-hmm.
A few weeks later, something, at this radio station, I worked at something really came down
bad with one of the employees and accusations all over the place.
Mm-hmm.
And it turns out it was nothing as she did.
But anyway, it was, people in the station were kind of upset about it because she was making
these wild accusations against everybody, not about me particular, but about, you know,
everybody in the building.
Yeah.
And she happened to, she just drifted away and she went on the home shopping network
and hosted that for years.
Nothing happened of it.
And I told my boss this and he said, I want to speak to this sister-in-law of yours because
everything she said really happened, how do I believe it?
No.
But they come up and say, you're aunt who's not really your aunt, came up with this story.
And she said, something's going to happen, but don't worry, everything will work out.
And it was, and after everything worked out, I said, you know, I'm going to tell you
a story, Bill.
Yeah.
After it worked out.
I said, well, I got to talk to you, I said, no, you're not talking to her.
But she never gave readings for anybody in the family or children.
No children, no family.
And, but she said this one, she had to talk to me about, do I believe it?
No.
Do I believe it's coincidence?
Yeah.
But.
I don't know.
Heck of a coincidence though.
What a coincidence.
All right.
Let's talk about some more haunted places in Racine that we can go to and see.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of my favorites is actually out in the county in Rochester.
It's known as Chances.
There's a supper club now.
I've been there so many times.
I've eaten there.
Oh, fantastic food, right?
And that's been around since the horse and buggy ate that place.
Yeah.
They actually originally started as a boarding house and tavern.
And this settler Levi Godfrey originally established it as a tavern and boarding house because
it's pretty close to Highway 20.
So this was a main thoroughfare for people traveling through Wisconsin before even was a state.
And they had a plank road that was about where Highway 20 is now.
And because this was such a hot spot that people would stop, they had one of Wisconsin's
first political conventions there.
They called it Godfrey's convention and Gilbert Napp, the founder of Racine Wisconsin, was
also there during that convention.
But it is one of the oldest bars in the area.
And there are seven ghosts supposedly on premises, seven, which is crazy.
Now I've been there and the upstairs, you can't go upstairs, more of a storage area upstairs
above it.
But you can see, you can see it's old and on the menu, they give the stories of this place
chances.
It's a great restaurant.
A wonderful restaurant and bar and now I know things maybe I shouldn't know.
I actually did get a chance to go up to that second floor.
And that's where they have their famed springboard ballroom floor.
Yes, yes.
Apparently you can, they can never host parties up there because you can just hear every
footstep way too well downstairs.
That the springboard was nice back in the day.
But now it's kind of, you know, aged and everything gets really loud.
But that also means when nobody is up there and they hear footsteps, who's dancing?
Who's dancing on the ballroom floor?
And that might just be the lady in green.
Oppositely, there is a woman in green who inhabits the second floor, who may have been
a lady of the night, who was in love with a civil war soldier, who inhabits the first
floor and their two planes never cross.
We're scaring you out of your jammies this morning.
We're talking to Rory Graves, author of Haunted Receive.
By the way, where can people get this book?
I've seen it in different places.
Yeah, absolutely.
Historical society sells it right over here.
Yep.
And also we've seen art museum, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and some wall greens around
the area.
They do, they have a local book section there.
Yeah, I've got to see it there.
There's a whole series of books from Wisconsin and so forth, and this was their Haunted
Receive.
I did see it there.
It's a great book.
And it's an easy read too.
You go right, you know, go for it and go right to the ghosts, right to the book, right
to the way the Haunted.
Do you want to pick out a place?
Sure.
Pick out a place for me.
Then I have some in case you want, but you pick out your place.
All right.
So one of my favorite places, it's got to be the Bell City Opera House.
Now, where was that?
Oh, I know with the opera.
It's on Main Street.
I have a picture of it in my living room, a drawing we bought.
It's right where a con of print is now, I think, there's a parking lot there, empty
a lot.
Oh, different opera house.
That's a different opera house.
Yeah.
Uh, chapter one, uh, and actually, it's on six street in college.
Okay.
So pretty close.
Stone's throw away, honestly.
And it now is the building that used to have the YMCA and Red Cross, or Red Cross Drug
Company in it.
So this one, when I went there, it was ill, um, they had social on sixth, which was owned
by Joan Rory, Perennial Soaps, Long Shot Vinyl, and Roberta's.
The businesses have changed up a little.
I think Dragon Pit Barbecue is now occupied there.
But this whole entire opera house, uh, burned to the ground in 1884, which was two years
after it was built.
And they still have no idea what caused the fire.
Some people think it was intentional.
Some people think it just happened because it was an old building.
They had gas lamps.
These sorts of things do happen.
But it happened around midnight when two explosions rocked the building.
And everyone came running to the opera house just to see people pouring out of the doors.
It was a hotel above.
So there were lots of people in their pajamas running away.
And crazy enough, there were almost no casualties, despite the fact that it was a packed house.
However, on the fourth floor, there was the servants quarters, which the rafters caved
in on almost immediately after this happened.
It was the first area to get cut off from the rest of the hotel.
And one housekeeper died during the fire.
The other two people who supposedly died in the fire were a husband and wife acting team
that had been doing the opera.
And that was Jenny and Russell Glover.
And those two legend has it, although no one would actually know that Jenny didn't want
to go out in her night clothes, so she had to get dressed before she left the hotel.
And that is supposedly why they both perished in the fire.
But they did actually find their bodies a couple days later, and they were still embracing
each other, just in the ruins of this opera house.
They still walking around there, are they?
Supposedly they are.
And I know if you talk to the over our head players at that 6-3 theater, they've got
some stories.
Because we go there to see shows at the 6-3 theater.
Yeah, we just went to go see Lizzie there, and it was fantastic.
We saw a misery there.
Another excellent one.
The actress who played the lead there, she was so creepy, because she's supposed to be
spun the batero, and at one point, I was sitting in the first row all the way to the
side, and she made eye contact with me, and I jumped, I said, oh, don't look at me.
Their stories, even in Chicago, well, we saw Jersey boys, I figured the Oriental, I remember
the theater we saw it in, it just been the Iroquois theater.
Yeah.
And that burned to the ground too, and hundreds of them, they lined the bodies of the
alleyway with all the people, because this is when fire laws weren't like they are
today.
Yeah.
And these people during a performance, the curtain caught fire, and when that happened,
it was just blazes everywhere.
But the theater is still there today, and I got to believe their stories with that Iroquois
theater.
I'm sure there are.
And then it was the Iroquois, I think it was the Iroquois boat that went over.
Remember the one that overturned in Chicago?
It had all the workers from General Electric.
Oh, yeah, I do recall.
I think that was called the Iroquois, I hope it wasn't called the Iroquois, because I'd
never name anything Iroquois after that.
That was like a Titanic.
Yeah, that was the boat that flipped.
And they had all these, because everybody went to go see something and they went to one
side of the ferry, and the ferry all flipped and all the workers from General Electric.
A lot of them were just, they killed the ferry ended on top of them.
You're looking them up.
Yeah, I was trying, but the name of that boat, I can't find it.
Well, I thought it was Iroquois, I hope not, is that I would never want to use that name
for anything else.
All right.
We have time for one more.
Give us a good story here in receipt.
I'm going to, we talked about this last time, but it's something people can relate to,
because they see it on Main Street from the Masonic Temple.
Yes.
They're going to be, look at that smile that came on their face on a Masonic Temple.
They're going to be doing a podcast called Haunted Racine.
They're pretty soon, I think October 24th.
So I'm looking forward to listening to that myself.
Do you do that with your Racine County eye?
Does that have different one?
Yeah, Racine County eye is the one that's putting it on.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not involved, but I'm excited
to listen to it.
Yeah, Denise is here all the time for Racine County eye.
Yeah, Ron Helmick and Wendy Spencer, and she is the caretaker of the building.
And when I went with her through the Masonic Temple for the research for this book, she
had so many stories, just stories upon stories.
Well, it's an old building, a lot went on there, and just the name Masonic Temple, and
it gives you a feel.
Oh, yeah.
And the inside is absolutely gorgeous.
We saw Mel Tormay perform there.
When they stopped using the Christmas sounds for cancer for the performances, they used
them there, and Mel Tormay appeared on stage there, and this guy wrote the Christmas
song and a lot of other songs, and he performed there in their theater at the Masonic Temple.
Yeah, I was going to say, I've seen like a circus performance that, just a photograph
of circus performance on their stage.
And their theater, like area, it's really cool, but they think that Henry Durand, along
with a couple other people, most likely haunt this building.
And one of the most interesting ones to me is Funston, who was at the architect of the
Temple side of the Masonic Temple.
And when Wendy was going through with a medium one day, the medium said that she could hear
this man.
He was a kind of toy-dee guy, and had a scrunch face, and she's like, he's mad.
And Wendy said, why is this man mad?
What's his name?
She's like, I'm not sure, but he built this place, and he says you covered up his door.
And Wendy was like, we have not covered any doors anywhere around here.
And they racked their brains trying to think of it.
And finally, she realized they covered a door on the bottom of the stage, just like a little
trap door.
And apparently, Funston was upset about that.
And he is, they believe his presence kind of just ramps up whenever they're making
changes in the buildings.
And he's just got this kind of oppressive, like irritated energy.
So he's one of my favorites.
Did they cover anything up?
Yeah, they covered a trap door on the stage when they were, yeah, I believe they put carpet
over it.
And apparently, he was mad about that, but Henry Durand, the other supposed haunt of
the building, is known to be really friendly and protective.
And he had a bunch of daughters.
And so he is known to hang around with younger women and be protective over them.
Just because he's like that dad figure.
And that's Durand Avenue.
Mm-hmm.
Henry Durand.
Durand Manchin, we heard about Durand.
And he also was in the Christmas house, too.
So.
The Christmas House of Cancer, which is right across the street.
Mm-hmm.
Beautiful mansion.
I think it was used for nurses at the hospital.
They would stay there.
It's like a rooming house for nurses and so forth.
Is that what it's used for today, do you know?
No.
Today it's used as a venue.
So it used to be a bed and breakfast, but now they do private parties and things like
that.
Yeah, beautiful mansion right there on the lake.
Yeah.
Or just right on Main Street.
Well, thank you for coming in again.
Thank you for having me.
I don't know if I can continue the next hour now, because this building's not the radio
station to 100, just about 100 years old, but the building's not that old.
But some of the places we used to broadcast.
Thank you.
Rory Graves, Haunted Racine, you want to get the book?
You can get it.
Then use around like the, you said the art museum, Ram.
Art Museum, Heritage Museum, and bookstores.
Mm-hmm.
You get it online, too, if you want?
Yep, absolutely.
And everything online.
Yeah.
Amazon's got everything.
We've got right to a local place and buy it.
That's nice, too.
Thank you, Rory.
Thank you.
And thanks for helping us win that award.
I do appreciate it.
We got our big first place award from Wisconsin broadcasters.
Thanks to Rory.
Thank you, Rory Graves.