HALEY HOUSE

Location: The Haley House is located at 282 Hamilton Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the north side of town.

Description: The Haley house is a blue split-level house with white trim. The one-story suburban residence has three bedrooms, a wide back yard and patio and a detached garage.

Ghostly Manifestations: Jack and Dorothy Garland have been long time residents in their Milwaukee neighborhood since 1958. They have seen their children grow up. Old friends that lived on the street with them with them pack up and move on. They remember the good old days when kids used to run up and down the sidewalk and play stick-ball in the street. The times, however, have changed and they are now sure to lock their door because they no longer can be sure of what kind of kids are now loose in the neighborhood, much less what it is exactly that lives with them.

Dorothy recalls things simply after they moved into the house. After getting things moved and set to where they would be for the rest of her life, she started noticing things were being moved around. The pictures of her children on the wall in the hall have always been in the order in which they were born, but once in a while, the picture of her oldest boy, Ray, is moved to the center. The centerpieces from the living room table and the kitchen table have switched places, sometimes seconds after being corrected. A picture of her husband standing in front of his boat has been removed from the bedroom and placed on the wall of her daughter’s bedroom. At one time, she could blame Jack or the kids for the tomfoolery, but now she is not for sure.

Dorothy has also sensed the presence of someone she cannot see. She has seen and heard the tell-tale evidence of someone in the house during the chores of her household duties. The sound of the mattress in her daughter’s room has creaked as if someone was laying on it, but no one is ever there. She just straightens the disturbed blankets and keeps the room straight for her daughter’s visits home from college. However, on more than one occasion, she has returned and the bed is mussed once more and she’s the only one in the house.

She has heard the light footsteps of someone in the hall and even once a while a fleeting shadow hurrying to get out of her way. Not considering herself eccentric enough to believe in ghosts, Dorothy just goes about her business and passes these things off as her imagination. Her husband, on the other hand, honestly believes that there is a ghost in the house.

“I don’t talk about it much.” Jack was interviewed briefly in 1976 for a Halloween newspaper article on the ghosts of Milwaukee. “I don’t like scaring Dorothy, but she’s got her mind set and I’m not going to change her mind. She can blame herself and think she’s getting forgetful, but I know what’s going on. We’ve got a ghost.”

In the first few years living in the Hamilton Street house, Jack recalled he was constantly being waked in the hours between midnight and two o’clock by someone knocking at the door. He answered it several times, but no one was ever there. Police cruises never caught whoever was disturbing the Garlands into the wee morning hours as Jack finally installed a crime light on the front of the house to dispel the practical jokers. However, after their daughter, Penny Garland, came home from college unannounced once and found herself locked outside of the house, they started keeping a secret key under a rock by the back door.

“Afterwards,” Jack answers. “We started hearing someone coming and going through the house. For several nights through 1958 to 1962, we started hearing someone letting themselves into the house, traveling into Penny’s room and getting into bed as we heard the mattress springs creak. Of course, we’d think that it was Penny coming home, and we’d get up to say hello and no one would be there. We just stopped keeping a key outside at that point.”

“Young men also started coming by the house asking for a girl we’d never heard of.” Jack continues. “They’d claim they had just dropped her off the night before and of course that was impossible since our daughter was in her first year at college at the time. In November of 1962, Dorothy found a strange hat from the Choo-Choo Village Fun Park on the other side of town in the house and we didn’t even know that place existed. You’d think if it had been in the house, we’d have seen it before.”

After college, Penny Garland had a first hand experience of the occurrences her parents had in their home. Working in the hospital at the time, she was constantly going on and off the night shift and one night as she came home, the radio came on by itself next to her head. As she looked at it, the knob started turning by itself searching the stations. Too tired to think and wondering if it was malfunctioning, she unplugged it and set it on the floor, but the next morning, it was back where it usually was and plugged back in !

“I don’t know if I’m ready to start believing in ghosts,” She mentions abashedly. “But, yeah, there’s been things I can’t figure out. I’ve heard the floor creaking outside my door, footsteps in the attic above my head and once I heard a car pull into the driveway when nothing was really there. Is it a ghost ? I don’t know. I’m not ready for that possibility.”

History: The house was built in 1945 when Hamilton Street was a new sub-division. Since then, houses have cropped up around the sub-division and the street has been widened and black-topped several times.

Identity of Ghost: It is highly likely that the ghost is that of Nancy Haley, the only child of the previous owners. Pretty, spirited and very out-going, her parents had purchased her a car with the incentive of going to college and a few days after receiving it, she was killed in a car accident as she and her boyfriend were trying to outrace a train. Her parents were so heartbroken that they sold the house to the Garlands. Although Nancy was buried in Milwaukee’s local Resurrection Cemetery, her totaled red 1957 Chevy convertible took on a life of its own. Parts from it used in other cars resulted in those cars having accidents that were connected to the foreign part. The owner from Fonzarelli’s Auto Garage then acquired the car believing he could restore her, but then started having accidents in his shop and bad dreams about a beautiful brunette who took him back to the Fifties. For some reason, he tied everything that had occurred to the car as he hauled it back to the junkyard he had purchased it from and watched as it was crushed right in front of him.

“I, uh, use it as a paper weight now.” He remarks.

Comments: Happy Days, Episode “The Spirit Is Willing,” Phenomenon loosely based on Resurrection Cemetery, Justice, Illinois, the Copeland House in Hingham, Massachusetts and the legend of James Dean’s Porsche Spyder.