The library is more than just books, and our series with the Milwaukee Public Library—Books and Beyond—showcases that by sharing resources, book recommendations and just some cool stuff you might not know about.
Today, we are showcasing some spooky Milwaukee history — the haunting of Engine House 35. The firehouse is located at 64th and Fairview Avenue, and the building isn’t that old; it opened in January of 1999. However, it’s what it was built on that reportedly makes it hospitable to ghosts: the former site of the Fairview Mausoleum.
Librarian Dan Lee looked into the history of the mausoleum location in Milwaukee Public Library’s Milwaukee Cemetery Collection. This collection includes historic burial records on microfilm dating back to the 1800s into the 20th Century.
"The Fairview Mausoleum opened up shortly before World War I, 1912 to 1914, and people were buried there up until the 1990s. But it did have financial problems because it did go bankrupt in the 1950s and then finally in 1994 it reached the point where they couldn't maintain the mausoleum and they realized that it was just cost prohibitive to maintain it and also to bury people as well," he notes.
"What happened at that time was that the city, through the Department of City Development, took it over and then the decision was made — what do we do with the remains before building a fire station? And then they were fortunate enough to find that the Graceland Cemetery was willing to become the new home of the eternal visitors at Fairview who were there for, you know, a few decades or close to a century and they were just relocated.”
Fairview isn’t the only cemetery relocation in Milwaukee County according to Lee. There are close to a dozen cemeteries that have been closed in the county dating back to the 1850s.
"We have a map in our collection called the Milwaukee County cemetery map that is kept at the desk in the Frank Zeidler Humanities Room and on one side there's a map of Milwaukee County with all the active cemeteries marked on there, and then on the back there's a list of removed cemeteries," he notes.
Moving human remains takes a lot of planning and work, and an inventory was done at the time the City of Milwaukee took over Fairview. These records (now accessible as the Farview Mausoleum Records at Central Library) kept track of when the deceased were moved from the mausoleum to Graceland Cemetery, as well as the new location of the remains via cemetery block, section and lot numbers. Lee shares a few details in the records that stood out to him as he was going through the cemetery archives:
"Catherine Crosby was a survivor from the Titanic and she died eight years after the 1912 sinking in 1920," he says. "And on the crypt/niche inventory it reads, 'Died July 29, 1920,' and that's on the plaque. And actually, it doesn't have that much information on her. [With] some of the other people there is more descriptive information, but unfortunately that's not the case with Catherine Crosby."
One person moved from the Fairview site that would become Engine House 35 included former firefighter Reinhold Isleb. "And the note here reads, 'Wearing in firefighter uniform with bow tie and the plaque reads 'At Rest'," says Lee.
Other details in the Fairview Records include some specific notes that describe the condition of objects like caskets, or what clothes people were buried in.
"Augusta Isleb, apparently she was dressed with a large ribbon gold colored ring and black shoes," Lee describes. "I guess they found that noteworthy when they were doing this inventory."
Nine hundred ninety-nine people of all ages and backgrounds were moved from Fairview Mausoleum to Graceland Cemetery, so it’s possible some spirits are sticking around Engine House 35. City of Milwaukee Fire Department Chief Aaron Lipski, who has worked in the department for almost 30 years, says there's always been a "very strong collection of individuals that have worked out of there that continues to present day."
According to Lipski, firefighters who first occupied the station in 1999 were very aware of the site’s history. In fact, the fire station’s nickname is the “Crypt Keeper.”
"Nicknames at fire stations sometimes come and go, but that one has stuck," he says. "There's a lot of lore in some of our fire stations about such things."
"They were on hallowed ground, they were on the site where people's family had been interred. So anything that might occur oddball was instantly seized on, and you know, the stories made the rounds very rapidly in the fire department," Lipski adds.
There's been a pretty wide variety of stories over the years, but some paranormal instances include hearing noises when no one's around and pots and pans flying off stoves.
"There was a few reports of actual sightings at night—folks awakening and there being a figure standing next to the bed. I believe the one report was so specific as to they were dressed in the clothing of eras gone by... that it was very obviously not one of their coworkers, so like an apparition," Lipski recalls.
"The one report that was very consistent, and we checked everything over and over again in the building mechanically, was that you could go to take a shower ... and you would end up with just freezing cold water no matter what you did," he says. "Again, maybe there's some weird, oddball thing with that plumbing, but it's built where a mausoleum used to be, so of course it's a ghost."
Lipski says firefighters in general try to stray from superstition, but there are also two other fire stations where similar reports have stood the test of time and even resurfaced over the years.
"Old [stories] can die off — no pun intended. And when it resurfaces 12 or 13 years later ... and all of a sudden you're hearing someone talk about, 'No, I swear to God, someone knocked on the door and there was nobody there!' On an inside door, inside the fire station. That has happened quite a bit at one of our stations on Burnham [Engine 33].
"[Firefighters] try not to be superstitious but, you know, we observe things, we experience things, and we try to make sense of it, and we can't — gotta be a ghost."MFD Chief Aaron Lipski
"And we had one station [Engine 1] where unfortunately a number of MFD members died after coming back from a chemical fire, including the chief of the fire department. But that building is still in service and so there's all kinds of reports of noises and just hearing footsteps, footfalls on the creaky wooden stairs and there's nobody there. So we try not to be superstitious but, you know, we observe things, we experience things, and we try to make sense of it, and we can't — gotta be a ghost," he says.
While Lipski says he's never personally experienced any spooky, unexplainable scenarios, he doesn’t disbelieve other people’s experiences. "They must've picked someone else, they never picked me," he says.
"I will tell you I have seen human beings, beyond just firefighters... I've seen them do super human, unbelievable things in the face of horrible danger and at great risk to themselves. And I've seen our own firefighters do that time and again and I have to believe there are other energies at work. I've seen stuff with my own eyes that I can make sense of ... You have to believe there's some other energy, whatever you call it. Whatever a person's belief system is, there is something larger at work here — I think that's the best way to say it."
Despite Engine House 35's reputation, Lipski says no one protests being assigned there or tries to leave, even if they’ve experienced their own encounters.
"We had the one gentleman at station 35, the Crypt Keepers, reports waking up and feeling a very heavy pressure on his body ... to the point that he actually had a bruise when he woke up," he recalls. But there was nobody there... He was in an isolated area, but none of those folks ever said, 'No, I got to get out.'"
If you’ve had your own ghostly encounter and want to find out more about where they might be buried, librarian Dan Lee says you can start your research by going online to look at the cemetery collection listings before coming into Central Library to dig through the records.
"The actual information hasn't been digitized and posted online, but they know that we have it, so our patrons can come in to come and look at them," he explains.
Happy ghost hunting and happy Halloween.
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