Odd Wisconsin Archive
The Curse of the Hille Farm
In honor of Halloween, we offer a little-known Wisconsin ghost story.
John Hille came to America from Germany in 1837. Skilled in cabinet making, he made his living as a carpenter and married fellow immigrant Magdalena Jaquitard. The pair soon settled in Waukesha Co., where Hille built them a beautiful farm house and they raised six children. For decades they appeared to be typical Wisconsin farmers: hard-working, helpful to others, respected by their neighbors, and successful.
But in their old age, misfortune struck the Hilles. When Magdalena became ill, the physician accidentally gave her a lethal dose of drugs while medicating her. Their oldest son Michael died unexpectedly in an accident. When John Hille died in 1899 of natural causes, the family farm was taken over by three of the remaining children, Oscar, William and Hulda. In 1916, while Oscar was escorting a bull to the barn, it spooked at something unseen and crushed him to death against a wall.
His siblings William and Hulda operated the family farm as World War One approached. Like many German-Americans, they felt conflicting emotions. The United States was the land of their birth, but their father had filled them with stories of Germany and they still practiced many German traditions. Like many other Wisconsin families, they feared persecution as anti-German sentiment swelled around them. It ultimately killed them.
In 1918 William and Hulda hired a farmhand named Elder Krause. A few weeks into his employment, Krause convinced the Hilles that he was a secret service agent and threatened to turn them in as spies. Although there is no evidence that the Hilles had anything to hide, he demanded payment to keep quiet, and William and Hulda, afraid of prison or lynching, agreed to pay it.
On June 11, 1918, Klause entered the Hille kitchen with a friend to demand his extorted payment. A fight began, and Hulda called a neighbor for help. As this neighbor approached the back door, she heard a blast and was greeted by William, carrying a shot gun. Hulda emerged next, handed her a small wooden box, and told her to flee. The neighbor ran home to call the police. When they arrived, they found a massacre.
William had shot Krause’s friend in the kitchen while Krause escaped. Next, William went out to the barn and shot their five horses. He then returned to his favorite chair and shot himself. Hulda, after giving the box to her neighbor, went upstairs to her bedroom and drank a bottle of arsenic. The box turned out to contain a letter from Hulda stating that she knew she was going to die because she had seen the signs.
After the war, the house was rented twice, but each family who took it was quickly struck by tragedy. It was considered cursed by local residents, and abandoned. It was falling into decay when a Chicago couple named Ransome noticed it while vacationing. They loved it, bought it, and lovingly restored it. But this did not protect them from the Hille curse: their grandson was tragically crushed while playing in the barn. And they claimed to regularly observe the ghost of an old man walking back and forth from the kitchen to the barn.
[Source: Beth Scott and Michael Norman. Haunted Wisconsin (Stanton &Lee Publishing, Inc., 1980)]
:: Posted in Strange Deaths on October 30, 2006
|
