You’ll find that many small towns have a local legend about something that goes bump in the night – a forlorn ghost, a vengeful witch, a hideous beast lurking in the woods.
These spooky stories are thick on the ground in Whitewater, a college town of less than 15,000 about an hour’s drive southwest of Milwaukee. They say that Whitewater’s three cemeteries form the points of a “Witch’s Triangle,” with all the area within its borders under a curse. Under the light of the Halloween moon, the spirit of a bloodthirsty witch (who also happens to be an ax murderer in some versions) named Mary Worth rises from a crypt to stalk new victims.
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Over at UW-Whitewater’s Andersen Library, there’s an ancient, leather-bound spellbook locked in a cage that will drive anyone who reads it (or even asks about it) insane. Elsewhere on campus, a magical altar is said to be buried under a building. A network of underground tunnels is used by a coven to traverse to Starin Park, where they assemble to perform Black Mass on unholy nights in front of the “Witches Tower.” Whitewater Lake has a kraken-like beast lurking beneath the surface, possibly conjured by witchcraft. And on and on.
All of these tales are weaved from a singular source at the center of the web: the Morris Pratt Institute, a unique college begun in Whitewater where communicating with the deceased was part of the curriculum. The legacy of this school, built at the peak of the Gilded Age religious movement of Spiritualism and bankrolled by a prophesied iron bonanza, is still alive today – not just in the urban legends it spawned but also in reality.
Attempts to speak with the dead can be traced through human history, but a uniquely American wave of interest began in 1848. Sisters Kate and Margaretta Fox, aged 11 and 14, of Hydesville, New York, claimed they could communicate with the spirit of a murdered peddler – asking questions and receiving a series of knocks as replies: two knocks meant yes, one for no.
The Fox sisters, and eventually their older sister Leah, rose to fame for their séances and prophecies, and interest in what was soon called Spiritualism exploded in popularity over the next few decades, especially during the Civil War. People were bereft at losing loved ones to warfare and disease, and Spiritualism offered them an opportunity to talk to the recently deceased one more time. Séances even took place in the White House, where Mary Todd Lincoln hoped to hear from her son William, who had died at 11 of typhoid fever.
Spiritualism mixed aspects of Christianity, philosophy and scientific theories of the time to form a new religious movement. Practitioners believed that the spirit lives on and evolves in the afterlife and that you can reach out and get in touch with those in the spirit world through séances or channeling the dead in a trance. Often these “spirit guides” offered the living helpful insights. Spiritualists tended to be progressive, championing women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. There are still followers of this religion today, but interest peaked from the 1850s to the 1920s.
During that time, there were many true believers, but grifters glommed onto the movement as well, using parlor tricks to dupe people in a cash grab. Even the Fox sisters later confessed that the mysterious rapping was actually them cracking the knuckles of their toes.
“The Haunted Book, the Evil Book, the Grimoire. It’s fun to see what people request,” says Jennifer Motszko, head of archives at UW-Whitewater’s Andersen Library. She’s talking about a decades-old urban legend that the library is home to an ancient, cursed spellbook. Gazing at or even talking about the book will cause loss of life, limb or sanity, or even – total bummer – failed exams.
The book, in a twist, is real.
The 126-year-old Graduale Cisterciense measures over a foot-and-a-half tall and weighs more than 20 pounds. It’s bound in leather suffering from “red rot,” the rusty color of book decay. The yellowing pages are bracketed by metal clasps, and there’s a brass crucifix with a heart wrapped in thorns on the cover. Inside, the red and black ink is fading, but you can still make out words in Latin.
The truth, though, is pretty mundane: It’s a Latin hymnbook published by Cistercian monks in 1899, but, as Motszko explains, its medieval-style script and decorative features were designed to make it look much older. The book was donated to the library in the early 1970s, and lore probably grew around it because it used to be locked in a caged shelving unit with other rare books. The library gets frequent requests to view the book from curious students, podcasters and paranormal investigators from far and wide, Motszko says. “It has its own cult following.”
Around the time Spiritualism was gaining popularity, there was also a migration of New Yorkers who headed West looking for new land and opportunity, and they brought Spiritualism with them. Among them was 20-year-old Morris Pratt, who, along with his parents and six siblings, settled near Whitewater in 1840, buying up land to farm. Pratt married his wife, Mary, in 1850, and soon their interest in the afterlife led them to visit Lake Mills, where an intentional community of Spiritualists had congregated.
There, they met Mary Folsom Hayes Chynoweth, who claimed to have God-given healing and prognosticating abilities. It’s said that visitors would pilgrimage to Hayes Chynoweth, who would gaze into their bodies like an X-ray to detect the source of their disease. Then she would begin to speak in tongues and convulse as she absorbed their ailments – tumors, blisters, rashes.
Although she refused money for her healing services, her abilities were said to be lucrative in other ways: Prophetic visions and insider tips from spirits led to solid advice in business investments. In 1883, Hayes Chynoweth had a vision of rich iron ore deposits in a specific spot in the Gogebic Range of northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. Hayes Chynoweth and her sons approached Pratt – by then a wealthy farmer – to be an investor.
“He said that if he made money, he would use it for the betterment of Spiritualism, and that’s exactly what he did,” explains Carol Cartwright, president of the Whitewater Historical Society. The group of Spiritualist investors opened two mines near the border towns of Hurley and Ironwood and struck it rich. Pratt had invested $4,000 of his savings and later sold his share in the company for $200,000 – about $6.5 million in today’s money.
While the Hayes Chynoweth family moved farther west to California, Pratt made good on his word and began making Whitewater into a hub for his beliefs.
In 1889, a three-story brick building opened at the corner of what is now Whitewater’s Fremont and Center streets: the Sanitarium and Hall of Psychic Science, later renamed the Temple of Science. Pratt’s Spiritualist center had lecture halls, living quarters and a space for the practice of séances, mediumship and scrying (visioning the future in reflective surfaces such as crystal balls). The latter was known as the White Room for its entirely colorless paint and furnishings.
The building was originally used for lectures and meetings for groups like the Wisconsin Association of Spiritualists. The citizens of Whitewater were not quite sure what to make of Spiritualism, and they began to whisper about what was going on in the “temple.” There were rumors of practicing magic and speaking to the dead. The locals nicknamed the building the “Spook Temple,” and it’s said a Chicago newspaper reporter dubbed Whitewater “Second Salem,” after the witch-famous town in Massachusetts.
Cartwright has researched Whitewater’s Spiritualist history and believes the temple’s early association with witches had a lot to do with the progressive nature of the religion. “Women held higher offices in Spiritualism. At this time, women weren’t ministers. They didn’t hold high offices in most churches,” Cartwright says. One devoted Spiritualist, Victoria Woodhull, was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement who ran for president in 1872.
Women in positions of power, trying to summon the dead? To the townsfolk of Whitewater, it had witchcraft written all over it.
Pratt’s brusque approach didn’t endear him to the town, either. At the Temple of Science’s opening day, the lineup of lecturers reportedly attacked and ridiculed other religions. Later that year, Pratt placed an announcement in the Whitewater Register challenging leaders of the other churches in town to debate him. When no one accepted, he began showing up at their church services for “highly argumentative, belligerent confrontations that caused him to be shunned and ridiculed in Whitewater,” author Len Faytus wrote in The Spook Temple: The Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater, Spiritualism and the Occult.
Pratt was thrown out of these churches, including at least once literally. His visit on May 24, 1895, to antagonize Whitewater’s Congregational Church so exasperated a reverend that he grabbed Pratt by the shoulders and threw him out the door, causing Pratt to fall down the stairs and rip his clothes. Pratt’s antics led locals to give his temple a new nickname: “Pratt’s Folly.”
In 1901, Pratt, now an octogenarian, had a new vision to repurpose his building. The first generation of Spiritualists like him were beginning to age out, so he had an idea to keep their beliefs alive – a college. The Morris Pratt Institute offered courses like a typical school – grammar, geography and history – alongside classes geared toward harnessing psychic powers and communicating with spirits. The school welcomed its first class of about 20 students on Sept. 30, 1902.
That was the only class of his namesake school that Pratt would meet; he died that December, before the end of the first semester. Pratt’s funeral was held at the Institute, and the school continued successfully until the end of the 1920s, when it was hit hard by the Great Depression. With dwindling staff and students, the school closed and reopened a couple of times in the ’30s. Whitewater saw its last semester of the Morris Pratt Institute in May of 1939.
After sputtering and shuttering in Whitewater, though, the school was soon reborn in Wauwatosa. A house at 118th Street and Watertown Plank Road was purchased in 1946 and renovated into a new, smaller Morris Pratt Institute. Less grand than the Whitewater incarnation, it still stands today, tucked among an unassuming neighborhood.
The school is an auxiliary of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, which is not the only organization devoted to the religion but is the biggest. Today, it has over 60 affiliated churches, as well as state associations in Michigan and Maine.
The institute’s first floor includes two library rooms that are filled with books and bound collections of periodicals dating back to the 1700s, as well as artifacts from séances – a tin spirit trumpet through which the dead were meant to speak, for example. There’s also an office and a small gift shop that sells books and merchandise. The upper floor has a classroom, with walls displaying portraits of spirits, painted by mediums who visualized them in a trance, and a guest room for visiting teachers.
Calvary Cemetery on the UW-Whitewater campus; Oak Grove, about a mile-and-a-half southeast; and Hillside on Cravath Lake, form a triangle, as three points tend to do. Hillside, where Morris Pratt is buried, is home to one of Whitewater’s most notorious legends, a malevolent witch named Mary Worth.
Legend has it that Worth requested to be buried in Hillside, but because of her witchy ways, she was denied the request to find peace in the hallowed ground and was buried in the (very real) above-ground crypt at the highest point of the cemetery. Angry, she used a spell to activate a triangular curse on the town, pinging off the graveyards. Under the Halloween moon, Worth emerges from her tomb, in some stories dragging a bloody ax behind her, to stalk the town that wronged her.
The stories probably started because the cemetery used receiving vaults, where bodies were stored in winter until the ground thawed enough to dig a grave. The legend suggests that Mary Worth was a real person, but the local historical society has found no evidence of her. A member who specializes in genealogy took a deep dive to try to turn up some real counterpart of the infamous ghost-witch-ax murderer, but found not a trace.
The way the school operates has changed a lot over the years. The physical school is “pretty much a museum now,” says Ashley Moore, the institute’s office administrator. Although the school offered in-person classes for decades, it eventually realized it could reach a wider range of students through the mail. It began an online option in 2023.
The school now offers three courses: one on mediumship, another on healing and a third that combines the two. “The courses give the history of Spiritualism, different practices people can use and overall help to develop their gifts and practice,” says Moore, the school’s only full-time employee. She facilitates the coursework for students, maintains the building and accommodates visiting researchers or special events like open houses.
There are two “examiners” who help guide students. One is the school’s education committee chair, Sharon Watson, of Ocala, Florida, who has been with the institute’s committee since 2003. She was raised Baptist but as an adult attended a metaphysical church and soon joined a Spiritualist church. Watson helps update the institute’s curriculum and advises students over the phone and online to field their questions and explain the tenets of the religion.
Spiritualism, Watson says, is “really nothing to be afraid of” and describes it as a science, philosophy and religion. “We don’t just teach that you take things by faith,” Watson says.
“Spiritualism is a science because it investigates the claims of the manifestations of spirit and the communication between this and the spirit world.”
— Sharon Watson
Watson says Spiritualists believe Jesus was a “master teacher and healer,” and do not believe “in the word called sin. We call it a mistake or transgression of natural law.” Heaven and hell exist not as places but as a “state of mind.” After death, a person’s spirit continues to learn and grow in the spirit world, which is considered “an inner penetrating world with ours. It’s just as real to them as our world is to us. It’s just on a vibration that we can’t necessarily see.”
Spiritualists view God as an “infinite intelligence,” not an anthropomorphic being who judges others, Watson explains, adding that a lot of the Spiritualist philosophy follows natural law, like the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Back in Whitewater, the Spiritualist school was gone, but its legacy soon turned to legend. After the institute closed, the temple briefly became a home for retired Spiritualists. In 1948, UW-Whitewater, then the State Teachers College, rented the building as a girls’ dormitory. The property was eventually bought by the Wisconsin Telephone Co., which tore down Morris Pratt’s building in 1961 to make way for a nondescript one-story building that’s now unmarked and appears to be vacant.
Cartwright believes the college dorm era is probably a key factor in the stories spreading from the former Spook Temple to campus, where they took on a life of their own. The dorms were probably abuzz with embellished stories of the “witches” who had previously called the building home. Cartwright believes the “Witches Tower,” an intimidating stone water tower (built in 1889, the same year as Pratt’s building) in Starin Park near the modern campus, became a proxy for the temple after it was gone.
“When a building that has a story is demolished, that story seems to have to go somewhere,” she says. “This is my theory: Because that water tower is near the student population … I think the stories transferred there.” By the 1970s, the legends were perennially reported on by The Royal Purple, UW-Whitewater’s student newspaper. (This is all distinct from the wiccan religion emerging around that time.)
High on a hill in Starin Park, visible to the entire UW-Whitewater campus, is an old water tower nicknamed the “Witches Tower” (sometimes Witch’s Tower or Witchtower), not far from Calvary Cemetery, with stories of a coven that gathers around it under the moonlight to perform a Black Mass. They say there is some sort of demon imprisoned inside the stone structure.
Built in 1889, the 80-foot stone-masonry tower supports a 20-foot-tall metal water tank that held 185,000 gallons of water and functioned as a backup supply all the way until 2022, when a new auxiliary water tower made it obsolete.
Its old stone and narrow, boarded windows allow a little imagination to go a long way. Adding to the lore was a fence that appeared to have its protective spikes and barbed wire pointed inwards – as if to keep something trapped within. But a 2019 episode of the Whitewater Community TV series “Gems of Whitewater” reports that the real reason for the inversed fence, according to a water superintendent, was a goof by a contractor who installed it backward. It has, in any case, since been replaced.
Now, this legend may be on the verge of vanishing. Last fall, a majority voted “no” on an advisory referendum asking whether to continue to maintain the structure. There are no immediate plans to demolish the Witches Tower, but options are being explored. Members of the Whitewater Historical Society and others have been lobbying to save it, arguing the $300,000 cost to tear it down could be used to maintain it instead.
“That’s a lot of money. It seems to me that you could stabilize it instead,” says Carol Cartwright of the historical society. “Whether you believe the legends or think they’re silly, it’s a tourist attraction. Why would you want to get rid of that?”
Some towns embrace their legends to draw tourism, but Whitewater largely hasn’t. The only event related to the lore is the chamber of commerce’s Spirit Tour every October.
One of the few to recognize the potential of attracting ghost-chasing road trippers is Christ Christon, owner of Second Salem Brewing, 111 W. Whitewater St. Christon’s family has been in the local restaurant business for decades, and he bought his building from his father, who had operated it as a family restaurant.
Christon and his partners were stuck on a name and brand for their new brewpub when one of them, who’s not from Whitewater, asked if the town had any sort of “legend like the chupacabra.” Another mentioned the Second Salem nickname. “As soon as he said that, I just looked at him and a light bulb went off,” Christon says. “It gives us a chance to be geographical, edgy if we want.” Their grand opening was in 2014.
Fitting with the theme, Second Salem’s flagship beer is the Beast of Bray Road amber ale, named after the werewolf-like creature that reportedly prowls the cornfields on the outskirts of nearby Elkhorn. Other brews – Witchtower pale ale, Bone Orchard IPA (inspired by the Witch’s Triangle graveyards) and Apparition hazy IPA – also draw from the local legends.
While Christon had no trouble having some fun with his hometown’s spooky legacy, not everyone appreciated his brewery’s theme. “Our brand identity, it was met with mixed reviews. Second Salem was one of those things that wasn’t talked about in Whitewater. It’s weird, because every town has its folklore and urban legends,” Christon says.
Superstitions persist, and there are the garden-variety concerns about being associated with anything too creepy. But some also believe Pratt was tapping into something darker – and that there’s still evil afoot in Whitewater. Christon recalls a tap takeover event around the brewery’s debut at which he was confronted by a woman concerned about his soul. “She had a little bit of a buzz,” Christon recalls, “but she cornered us and was seriously, frantically telling us how we were going to curse ourselves and our families, stuff like that.”
A fear of a witch’s curse, perhaps emanating from a moonlit cemetery or conjured by a coven gathered in front of the Witches Tower. Even 136 years after Morris Pratt got tongues wagging here, the eerie legends of Whitewater still have a hold.
