- When Robin Olson works late sometimes he hears creaking
footboards overhead. It's usually his wife, Gitta, getting home to their
second-floor apartment just above the Leather Strop Salon.
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- Or maybe it's a visitor to a third-floor flat.
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- Then again it could be "Luke," a reclusive
but congenial phantasm Olson says has inhabited the sprawling, fortress-like
brick house with entrances on Main Street and Buntrock Avenue for 30 years.
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- Relaxing in a fence-enclosed garden next to the house
last week, Olson recalls the spectral presence as he sipped coffee and
smoked a cigarette.
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- Olson bought the house, known to some locals as the Riemer
house, in 1972 and remodeled what had been a landmark downtown funeral
home. Built in 1910, the structure originally was a conventional residence
before being bought by funeral director Louis Bartelt sometime in the 1920s
or '30s. The history of subsequent ownership is a somewhat muddled but
the house was eventually sold to Walter Bublitz and an associate. They
in turn sold it to the Denzow family sometime in the late 1950s.
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- It remained as a funeral home until about 1966.
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- "I heard him for years and years," says Olson,
who has lived in a flat above the salon since buying the place. "You'd
hear footsteps coming up and down the stairs and doors closing when I knew
no one else was in the house. I had a guest one time who told me "What
the hell have you got in your house? I heard footsteps last night."
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- The overnight visitor noted he got out of bed and opened
a bedroom door to see an apparition melting into invisibility followed
by a sudden, steep drop in temperature.
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- "To me Luke the Spook is a happy guy, not a poltergeist.
He kind of guards the place," says Olson, noting he has never feared
the ghost. "He's friendly. Just treat him accordingly. He's happy
he didn't lose his home back in the 1970s."
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- Back then village officials had considered tearing down
the building to make room for a parking lot. Luke, so to speak, got a brand
new lease on afterlife. Or at least a place to crash.
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- But by the early 1970s, the lower floors of the house
sat unoccupied for several years, apparently the victim of the macabre
reputation old funeral homes sometime acquire. (The upper flat, however,
continued to be leased out during those years.)
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- Olson jumped at the opportunity to buy the place. His
plan: turn the main floor of the house into a hair design place, live in
the second-floor flat and rent out the third-floor apartment.
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- The transition from funeral parlor to hair salon had
rough spots, not the least of which was refinishing the oak and birch floors
upstairs.
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- "Right after I moved here I was cutting this one
young fella,s hair and he says, "the last time I was here my grandmother
was laying over there," Olson says, noting the main floor once had
a room with double-wide doors for receiving bodies (an elevator descended
to the embalming room in the basement) and three viewing rooms partitioned
with accordion doors.
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- "The upstairs where I,m living now was a display
room for coffins," adds Olson. "That,s where the families would
go to have coffee."
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- Infamous 'guest'
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- The place had at least one link to scandal. Possibly
the most notorious nonspeaking customer to pass through the embalming room
at the old place was Milwaukee nightclub owner Isadore ("Izzy")
Pogrob.
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- The 300-pound owner of the long-defunct Brass Rail striptease
club in downtown Milwaukee, Pogrob was killed gangland style in January
1960. His bullet-riddled body was dumped into a cornfield culvert near
the Little Menomonee River just off Mequon Road in Mequon.
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- By the time Pogrob's corpse was discovered it was frozen
solid. Reputedly the immense man's remains had to be hauled out with line-and-winch
and taken to Densow's by tow truck.
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- "Chuck (Charles) Densow told me they had to bring
his body into the garage and thaw him out. The FBI was here watching the
cars because all these Mafia members were coming here to pay their respects,"
adds Olson.
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- He doubts Luke was Izzy in his previous life, although
concedes it,s possible.
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- "It could have been anybody really," Olson
says. "It was a funeral home for quite a while."
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- Olson notes it took Luke about 10 years to get around
to showing himself to his easy-going landlord. One winter evening in the
early 1980s, a then-single Olson was watching TV with his two dogs when
one of the canines bolted into the kitchen and began growling.
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- "You could see the hackles on the back of her neck
stand up. Then my other dog gets up and both of them are standing by the
kitchen door," he recollects.
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- Olson says he went to his bedroom and retrieved a pistol
and loaded it, thinking someone might be trying to enter through a kitchen
window.
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- Once in the kitchen, though, he recalls a cold wave passed
through him.
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- "At the time in the back was a pantryway where they
had washing machines and stuff like that. Right in the doorway was a cloudy
image about 5 feet high. It lasted maybe 10 seconds then woosh, gone,"
he says.
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- It was the last time Olson saw Luke, who has heard that
most ghosts only reveal themselves once to a person.
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- At least one other person backs up his account.
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- One other 'sighting'
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- Patsy Ratzel, a nail tech at the Strop, notes she had
an oblique encounter with Luke about 15 years ago. Back then she was renting
the third-floor apartment from Olson.
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- She remembers getting home from work one Friday evening
in December while a Christmas party was going on in the salon downstairs.
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- "I went upstairs and went to bed. I had been in
bed for maybe 15 minutes and I could hear the sound of footsteps on the
carpeting," she says. "They came up to the bed and I knew it
couldn,t have been anybody from downstairs because I would have heard them
come up the steps."
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- Ratzel adds that she was too spoked to turn around and
face the direction of the footsteps.
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- A minute later the footfalls receded in the opposite
direction of its origin.
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- "When I did turn around there was nothing there
so I figure that was my encounter with Luke," Ratzel notes.
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- Beside the occasional groaning footboard or graveyard
whisper, Luke has kept a decidedly low profile in recent years. He never
shows himself to the customers, who now can also get nail work, massages
and tanning sessions.
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- "I know that other (tenants) who lived in the building
have had experiences before mine but I haven,t heard of anything after
that," Ratzel adds.
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- Carole Densow lived in the house for almost a decade
in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s and reports she doesn,t recall
a spirit.
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- "The only ghosts we had were four children,"
she adds. "We were never aware of any ghosts, that,s for sure."
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- Ruth Bublitz Hatzinger, who lived in the house in the
1940s and 1950s, also does not recall anything paranormal about the place.
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- If you don,t believe Olson it doesn,t bother him. Neither
does his wife, who attributes her husband,s experience to one too many
on a cold winter,s night.
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- "No, I wasn't," Olson counters, noting he was
nowhere near being in his cups. " You just don,t forget. If dogs could
talk they would have said something too," he says with a husky laugh.
- This story appeared in the News Graphic on Aug. 18, 2003.
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- http://www.gmtoday.com/news/local_stories/August_03/08192003_01.asp
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- <http://www.gmtoday.com/index.asp>
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