November 2019 Newsletter: Murder, Monsters, and Chocolate
Another trip down the weird back roads of Wisconsin in search of Satan and other wholesome family activities.
The entrance still stands to the demolished Mirro Manufacturing Company in Manitowoc, once one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aluminum cooking utensils, whose early offerings were showcased at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Windigo Fest is an annual Halloween gathering held in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. With three days of live music, sideshow performances, haunted cemetery tours, celebrity guests and more, it’s become the largest Halloween festival in the state. Predictably, it sparked controversy from Manitowoc’s Christian community in it’s first year. One local business owner in particular seemed to have made it her mission to save everyone’s souls from eternal damnation.
“Jody Dubinsky, owner of Treasures in downtown Manitowoc, said this festival is darker than it seems on the surface,” the Herald Times Reporter wrote. “She became concerned when her own research turned up old Native American tales of a creature called the windigo, sometimes spelled wendigo, which eats human beings and devours their souls, particularly young children.”
But that’s not all. The festival was held on the first weekend of the Halloween season that year, October 6th and 7th. 6 plus 7 woefully equals the unlucky number 13. And if that’s not bad enough, the costume parade was planned to go backward up a one way street.
Clearly the work of the devil himself.
In addition to holding meetings to pray over the festival, Dubinsky and several others made their plea to the city council that allowing Windigo Fest to happen would be welcoming Satan into the community.
That’s when I decided I needed to be involved in Windigo Fest any way I could.
When my friend Matt Lombard, curator of the Heart of Darkness dark art exhibition at Windigo Fest, invited me to show my work this year, I knew I had to bring some Cult of Weird-brand history and lore to Manitowoc. Not to mention it would be an honor to have my work hanging alongside other amazing local and international artists including Matt himself, whose portfolio includes work with Cradle of Filth and Combichrist.
I chose photos of three Wisconsin locations seemingly cursed by their past and the legends that have grown around them. Places I’ve been researching for years and continue to find endlessly fascinating for their history and mythology. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ve no doubt read about them at some point.
But just showing poorly composed photos of a house, some graves, and a crypt without context was out of the question. The stories of each location’s significance had to be told, so I included cards with brief write-ups to hang beside each print.
I’ll only include a glimpse of that here because the experience of showing my work publicly (in real life, for better or worse) for the first time is not the point of this post.
What I’m actually working up to here is that while some fret that Windigo Fest brings Satan to Manitowoc, the city is no stranger to weird and evil. It is, of course, the setting of the controversial true crime docuseries “Making a Murderer” on Netflix, and, if this guy is to be believed, may even be home to a secret Satanic club comprised of Manitowoc’s elite who hold their rituals in an abandoned haunted school in St. Nazianz.
I decided to forgo dragging my kids to murder houses during our trip to California, but all bets were off in Manitowoc.
Place of the Spirits
Manitowoc, Wisconsin
“In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power,” Neil Gaiman wrote in his 2001 novel American Gods. “Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”
That particular passage was in reference to roadside attractions like Wisconsin’s own House on the Rock, but it’s an idea that can fit into a slightly more broad perspective, as well.
Dotted with effigy burial mounds and brimming with ancient lore, the physical and spiritual landscape of Wisconsin is largely shaped by its Native American heritage and their mystical places of power. The name Manitowoc, for example, is said to derive from an Anishinaabe word for the area that translates roughly to dwelling of the great spirit, or a similar word from the Menominee language meaning place of the spirits.
Is there something intangible about certain places that stirs up concentrated levels of strange activity? If so, the Manitowoc area may be one such vortex of weird.
The city sits on the shore of Lake Michigan and has its roots in Great Lakes shipping and shipbuilding. But for explorers of the strange and unusual like you and me, Manitowoc is significant for a few more peculiar points of interest which I vowed to visit next time I was in town.
But first, chocolate.
Beersten’s Confectionary
If you’re familiar with Making a Murderer and the Steven Avery case, you’ll know why this candy shop is significant to that story. But more importantly, Beersten’s Confectionary is the eastern point of the so-called Wisconsin Candy Delta.
In this Devil’s Triangle of chocolate you’ll find sweets “made from 100-year-old recipes and sold in 50-year-old mom-and-pop bastions — heirloom chocolates fresh from the source” according to a 2008 New York Times article.
Beersten’s in particular feels like stepping back in time, with antique cases displaying a vast assortment of chocolate in unbelievable shapes and sizes. I was so in awe of the place that I apparently only managed to snap a single photo while inside:
That’s right, a life size chocolate telephone.
We purchased strange and wondrous treats (several of them cow-shaped) from the mystical cases at Beersten’s and departed for the next destination, where the quiet streets of Manitowoc were bombarded nearly 60 years ago by cosmic Russian junk.
Sputnik Crashed Here
The Sputnik IV spacecraft was launched into space on May 15, 1960 to study life-support systems that were later used in the manned Vostok craft. Four days later, when it was suppose to return to Earth, the reentry procedure was botched and Sputnik went off course.
The craft ascended into a higher orbit from which it would not return for over two years. The descent module finally reentered Earth’s atmosphere on September 5, 1962, breaking up and scattering chunks of smoldering metal for miles.
Residents of Manitowoc reported seeing as many as 24 pieces falling from the sky that morning, some plummeting toward the ground with a sound like thunder. At the intersection of North 8th and Park, just feet from the Rahr-West Art Museum, a 20-pound piece of debris embedded itself in the street.
Two police officers on patrol spotted the chunk of metal in the street and, believing it fell off a truck, decided to leave it. It wasn’t until later, when they heard the news about Sputnik, that they realized what they had found.
A brass ring in the street marks the exact location where a chunk of Sputnik landed
A brass ring in the middle of the street marks the spot where the debris was found. The nearby Rahr-West Art Museum displays a replica of the debris cast from the original. The annual Sputnikfest is held here, where visitors can enjoy a humorous, vodka-fueled reenactment of the Sputnik control room when things went wrong, the Miss Space Debris pageant, and other “wacky tacky” festivities.
Not far from Rahr-West is a WWII relic that seems to have a lingering member of the crew still aboard.
Haunted WWII Sub
USS Cobia submarine at the Manitowoc Maritime Museum
The USS Cobia was launched in 1943 and sank 13 Japanese vessels during it’s World War II duty. Today, the Cobia serves as an international memorial to submariners at Manitowoc’s Maritime Museum.
And it may still be the home of one particular crewman who didn’t leave his post alive.
“The Cobia did see some action in WW2 and a gentleman was killed on one of the guns,” a Cult of Weird reader said in an email a few years ago. “To this day they say he haunts the submarine. My pastor’s daughter used to be a tour guide on the submarine and can tell you stories about dropping keys through the grate on the floor and returning with them hanging on the wall.”
Making a Murderer
Avery’s Auto Salvage
A few miles outside of Manitowoc is Avery’s Auto Salvage, where the events documented in the Netflix series Making a Murderer played out. Whether the land where Steven Avery’s family still resides is the site of a brutal murder or an appalling miscarriage of justice, once a place has been marked with stigma, the curse doesn’t go away.
Much like the residents of Ed Gein’s hometown, locals here mostly seem to regard the unwanted attention as a wound on their community.
“I’d say the overwhelming opinion is it was just fabrication and just a pain in the butt,” one man told the Green Bay Press Gazette about the series in 2018, “giving the area a bad name through twisted facts.”
But, just like Plainfield, true crime enthusiasts and dark tourists make great pilgrimages to glimpse the infamous salvage yard. Out-of-state visitors frequently stop for selfies with the auto salvage sign, and the town has been forced to explore alternative methods of attaching the Avery Road sign to its post to prevent it being stolen again.
Bonus Weird Thing
Soon after returning from Manitowoc I found an email in my inbox from a couple who encountered a wendigo-ish sort of creature in nearby Two Rivers. I wrote about it here: A Wendigo Encounter in Manitowoc County?
My conversation with the witness began in the comments of something I had previously written about wendigo encounters in Wisconsin. But was it actually wendigo? Does the description even remotely match a wendigo? I dunno. Sometimes writing post titles is hard, man.
Weird News
A selection of the strangest and most fascinating headlines in science, history, archaeology, travel, and more from last month:
- Man drinks cocktail made from his own amputated toe
- Boy dead after man tries to exorcise his demons
- Morbid must-reads fall reading list
- Social media will be the death of folklore
- Diamond within a diamond found in Russian mine
- Mysterious cattle mutilation in Oregon
- “Oldest man ever” claims abstinence and yoga is the key
- World’s largest Ouija board unveiled in Salem
- Meteroite contains stardust older than the solar system
- Why are Millenials and Gen Z obsessed with death?
- The Curious Life and Death of…
- Blood fills Iowa family’s basement
- Stephen King’s house to become museum and writer’s retreat
- Man pranks mourners as body is lowered into the grave
- Digging up weird Colorado history from the grave
- Couple trying to create blood lube for vampire fantasy
- Dutch doomsday cult feared to be satanic
- Buried on the runway
- Keep your loved one’s tattoos when they die
- Rats drive cars to collect food
- The Navy’s new doomsday plane
- Hiding bush with a bush
- Dog runs over man with ATV
- Please don’t kiss your chickens
- Military phases out floppy discs for nuclear launches
- Paris zoo unveils creature with no brain and 720 sexes
- This robot wants to wear your face
- Our brains shield us from our own mortality
- Funding cut for scientists searching for next ebola
- Halloween capital of the world in Minnesota?
- America’s forgotten hobo nickles
- Russian countess who wanted company in her tomb
- Army partners with Tom DeLonge’s UFO research company
- Space contraption parachutes into Michigan couple’s backyard
- Rats surgically remove cane toad hearts
- The legacy of prohibition 100 years later
- Minor offenders can substitute jail time for art class
- Kurt Cobain’s “Unplugged” sweater sells for $334,000
- Unmanned space plane lands after 780 days in orbit
- Secret séance rituals of America’s largest Spiritualist community
- Cultural history of the Addams Family
- What you need to know about selling a haunted house
- Which one is actually the world’s largest Ouija board?
- Missing tortoise found 5 miles away at old home
- Another treasure found from “The Secret”
- Cemetery removes Halloween decorations from grave
November Observances
November 1-2 – Dia de los Muertos
November 2 – All Souls Day
November 19 – World Toilet Day
November 21 – World Television Day
November 22 – Anniversary of the mysterious Max Headroom hack
November 30 – Saint Andrew’s Day
From the Cult of Weird Community
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