Ghosts of Wisconsin

Source: Frost Flowers on the Windows, Albert Alberg (Chicago, 1899; Public Domain)

There have been a number of studies—perhaps the most famous being the Invisible Gorilla—that illustrate how often we don’t see the unexpected, even when it is literally right in front of us.  Art—in all of its forms—is one crucial way to combat this blindness—to open ourselves and each other to things we can’t explain or contextualize, and to see beyond our current moment.

Arts & Literature Laboratory (Art Lit Lab, ALL) has worked with thousands of artists throughout Wisconsin since our founding in Madison in 2015. We’ve mounted exhibitions; hosted concerts, readings, and film screenings; and offered hundreds of classes for all ages. When we were tasked with identifying artists who could in some way make the real (ie, the unexpected) Wisconsin visible, we had to quickly narrow this list of thousands of artists down to something manageable and find a unifying principle that would be both generative and illuminating.

We wanted something broad enough geographically to apply equally to all parts of the state, and broad enough temporally to capture the state as it is experienced now, while acknowledging the (mostly) buried past (and to do so in a way that doesn’t distort or sanitize any of that history). We wanted the hard-to-see and the even-harder-to-believe.

So we turned to three poets who have shared work through ALL’s Watershed Reading Series, Midwest Video Poetry Fest, and the ALL Review—Sasha Debevec-McKenney of Madison, Dorothy Chan of Eau Claire, and Nikki Wallschlaeger of Viroqua—and asked them: What does it mean to be haunted? To haunt?

In its original sense, haunting simply meant frequenting a place, but over time it began to signify an absence that won’t leave us alone. Ghosts occupy an odd space in the horror genre in that they are remarkably powerless to inflict damage. Vampires (a great symbol for the ultra-wealthy sucking the life blood out of peasants with their unnatural and insatiable greed/appetite) and zombies (mindless death growing in power constantly) will try to hunt you down and kill you, or worse, make you part of the dehumanizing mechanism that you fear so much.

But ghosts don’t chase you down; they just show up. In the words of Wisconsin writer and artist Lynda Barry, “The thing about ghosts is not that they come toward you, but that they have a way of making you come to them.” Ghosts aren’t something you run from but rather drift toward. Perhaps the thing that frightens us most is that thing inside of each of us, that unmoored part drawn inexorably to the thing that also repels us.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney (POEMS, forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions, UK) uses haunting to explore both Wisconsin and herself. She plans “a series of poems (4-8) that introduce the reader to a series of ghosts who have inhabited/inhabit Madison, WI. The ghosts range from literal to figurative, from historical figures to personal demons. Sometimes, I think I will be the speaker of the poems, putting on a sort of museum guide voice—meaning, this series will track some of my own personal Wisconsin journey. I want to mythologize places like the Crystal Corner and memorialize Burrito Drive, as well as thinking about how alcoholism itself has haunted and chased me through the years. Sometimes, the ghosts themselves will be the speakers of the poems. I’m interested in people like Eston Hemmings (a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson), Tony Robinson (who was shot a block or two away from The Crystal), Carson Gulley, Dick Cheney (infamous undergrad), Frank Lloyd Wright, Otis Redding, and others.”

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Ghost stories remind us that all of our stories are permeable, in part because they make death permeable—if that isn’t the end of a story, then where is the end? If we can’t know where the ending is, how do we locate the beginning? We become lost in time while pinned in place.

The scary thing about a ghost story is simply the story itself, and so the narration of it is often built into the story as a frame, which illustrates to the reader that you will never fully leave this story. As with the bite of a zombie, you have become infected by the tale, and you will now share it and help it spread.

Ghosts have also long been a way people without power, sometimes even without the tool of literacy, can keep a story alive—more alive than an official narrative can, because it invites interaction. They are a continual collaboration between the living and the dead. Ghosts often act as hooks that connect us to a place—or serve as crowd-sourced histories with all the potentials and pitfalls that entails. Ghost stories don’t provide facts about the past so much as they provide a view of the people occupying haunted land.

But ghosts, like memories and trouble, can follow us, across borders and through generations. Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme (Deep Vellum, 2024), explores “haunting” within Chinese culture. She says, “My poetry delves into Chinese superstitions, beliefs, and symbols of luck. My father is quite superstitious: when he was a child in boarding school, two of his classmates experienced a bodily haunting from a spirit they bothered. Because of this, my father is very careful not to disturb any spirits or ghosts or mess with presences that feel less ‘tangible.’”

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Ghosts connect us to a messy past and a community in which we are likely not blameless and to a land that is stolen, loved, needed, neglected, and abused.

In some ways, ghost stories can explain away more complicated and troubling current forces. Many dying towns in Wisconsin and across America harbor legends that the original peoples cursed the settlers and their descendants so that they would never be able to leave the land they took by force—that everyone who manages to leave is doomed to return. When you are rooted to a place by family, friends, or just familiarity and find yourself unable to leave, you can feel like a living ghost.

Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Hold Your Own (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), plans a creative nonfiction essay on her long poem “Commute,” which appeared in Pangyrus. “Commute” is about her daily rural drive to work through haunted land and how that “find(s) expression in the natural world.” In Nikki’s words, “Memories haunt and so does history—I would argue that history is the haunting.” Along with history and seasonal cycles, her essay will explore failed relationships and their lingering impact.

One of our mottos at ALL is “Your ideas belong here,” and our programming is shaped by that. Our programs are not about our staff’s vision but about the visions—and the ghosts—of our community. We have recently received a Ruth Arts Wisconsin Special Project Award that will enable us to deepen this work by creating community curation teams, with an emphasis on curation as caretaking. We hope that—like the work of the three poets featured here—their work will haunt us and provide new perspectives on the sometimes inscrutable landscape of Wisconsin.