The Demon of Lemont; Or, When a Ghost Orders You to Move, You Had Better Start Packing

On November 3, 1901, the "Chicago Inter-Ocean" carried a lengthy description of a particularly weird haunting that was being endured by the Willmans family of Lemont, Illinois.  The paper noted that the occurrences at the Willmans farm had some thinking it was "the direct work of Satan himself," while others "talk of witchcraft and the annals of certain occurrences at Salem, Mass."

The plagued household consisted of Seraphino Willmans, his wife, three daughters, and a son.  They lived in a large, comfortable farmhouse which had belonged to Seraphino's parents.  Their life was calm and unremarkable until August 1901, when their home was invaded by a ghost who was fond of writing them letters.  Literally hundreds of them.

From out of nowhere, letters would suddenly flutter down from the ceiling and drop to tables or the ground.  They were not pleasant messages, either.  The first note said that the writer was giving the family ten days to leave the farmhouse, or some terrible calamity would befall them.  When the Willmans ignored these orders, the "ghost" became very angry.   The subsequent letters took on a decidedly menacing tone, and some were so obscene as to be unrepeatable.  Some of the notes threatened to kidnap the younger Willman children.  One addressed to 16-year-old Anna warned, "You will not live any longer than your mother [Seraphino's first wife] did.  You don't know what killed your mother.  I did it."  

Via Newspapers.com

Many outside witnesses testified to seeing these notes appear in the air, in a manner which eliminated the possibility of any human being responsible for them.  They were written on all sorts of paper--note paper, wrapping paper, even cardboard.  Some were written in ink, others in pencil.  The messages showed a knowledge of everything the Willmans said and did, including the contents of confessions to their priest, which must have been particularly embarrassing.  They also referred to events involving relatives who lived some miles away--events unknown to the Willmans, but of which the "ghost" was fully and accurately informed.  Even more strangely, the letters correctly predicted future events.  This entity also took to playing malicious pranks on family members and visitors to the home, leaving the Willmans in a permanently rattled state of mind.

Although the spirit warned the Willmans that any effort to exorcise it would be futile, the family had their priest, the Rev. Westarp, perform the ceremony.  The entity was quiet for thirty-six hours, and then resumed its creepy antics with a redoubled energy.  It sent them a letter mocking their efforts at spiritual cleansing:  "Oh, oh, oh!  How I did laugh at seeing you all on your knees and praying!"

Westarp told an "Inter-Ocean" reporter that the whole business had him baffled.  "In this age of the world," he said, "it appears absurd to talk of ghosts or evil spirits, and so I would have said before investigating what is going on at the Willmans' place.  But what I have witnessed there with my own eyes and what has been told me by persons whom I know to be absolutely reliable leaves me no option but to believe that an agency that is not mortal is responsible for them."

Since the haunting began, the Willmans cows had been falling off in milk production.  One night, when Seraphino was driving the cows from their pasture to the barn, he saw a large black cat among them.  He had never seen the animal before.  Feeling a sudden superstitious dread of the creature, he took out his shotgun to kill it.  No sooner had he done so that the cat made a huge leap in the air...and vanished.  The next day, a letter materialized, saying, "Do you want to know why your cows have stopped giving milk?  I'll tell you.  I did it.  Ha!  Ha!  You thought you'd put a charge of shot in my hinder last night, didn't you?  But I fooled you."

More cow-related weirdness was to follow.  One day, as Mr. Willmans and his 12-year-old son were milking the cows, the boy cried, "Oh, father, look here!  My cow is giving cheese, not milk!"

Seraphino saw that his son was not exaggerating.  As soon as the milk entered the pail, it indeed turned to cheese.  When he began to milk the cow, she gave normal milk.  When the boy tried milking her again, he got...cheese.

We are told the incident left Seraphino "rubbing his head until every hair stood on end, in his perplexity," which seems entirely warranted.

In an effort to halt the seemingly endless procession of hate mail, Father Westarp advised the family to remove all writing paper from the home, but this proved to be as useless as his exorcism.  One day, in the presence of a visitor, Mrs. Willmans came across a pad of paper which she had overlooked.  She put it on the kitchen table.  Then, she and her guest observed the pad being lifted off the table by an invisible power.  It was suspended in mid-air for a moment, after which the "ghost" tore it into two pieces and dropped it on the table.  On another occasion, the family was visited by a relative, Nicholas Welter.  Welter was a thoroughgoing materialist who had expressed tactful skepticism on the reported goings-on at the household.  His stay there soon changed his tune.  He was sitting in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Willmans when she went to the cupboard for something or other.  When she opened the cupboard, she saw that her pen was missing from its usual place there.

By this point, its disappearance was no mystery to her.  She told Welter, "The ghost has taken the pen away.  We'll watch and see it brought back."  They sat for a few minutes, and, yes, they saw the pen magically return to the cupboard.

One typical prank was played on Mrs. Willmans' father.  He hung his hat and coat in the parlor, and joined those of the family who were at home in the kitchen.  To enter the parlor, one would have to pass through the kitchen, and all the parlor windows were locked.  When the old man prepared to leave, he found that his hat was missing.  It was eventually found about 100 feet from the house, filled with dirt and decayed apples.  His coat was still hanging in the parlor, but it was completely smeared with butter.  The only butter in the house was kept in the kitchen, where all the family was sitting.  It was impossible for anyone to take out the butter without being seen, but when Mrs. Willmans examined her store of butter, she saw the print of five fingers, exactly as if someone had scooped out a handful.  Another relative, a Mrs. Jungles, was sitting alone in a room at the farmhouse when she observed a pitcher of water slowly tip over, spilling all the water on the floor.  When the pitcher was empty, it slowly resumed its normal position.  Such ghostly activities became a regular feature of life at the Willmans home, many of them witnessed by outsiders.  

On November 4, the "Inter-Ocean" reported that the Willmans' ghost was getting even more destructive.  Shocks of unhusked corn disappeared from the fields in broad daylight, even though no humans had gone anywhere near them.  The family would hear furniture being moved about in rooms where they knew no one was present.  Articles of clothing would be mysteriously destroyed.  On the night of November 2, Nicholas Welter was at the farmhouse.  (A brave move, incidentally: the ghost had written a note warning him that if he visited the Willmans just one more time, he too would become a target of persecution.)  While the group debated the feasibility of performing a second exorcism, the family dog suddenly jumped up and began whining and pacing the room restlessly.  He always behaved in such a manner just before the "ghost" would appear.  A few minutes later, they smelled smoke.  The family rushed into the front parlor, where they were greeted by a mass of flames in one corner.  Fortunately, they were able to extinguish the fire before the entire house burned down.  After this, the family slept huddled together in one room, and the children were kept out of school.

No one could come up with an even remotely convincing explanation for what they were seeing.  Mrs. Willmans noted that the farmhouse was to be sold the following spring.  She theorized that someone who wanted the property was committing these supernatural pranks, in order to give the house a bad name and diminish its value.

And how would this would-be buyer manage to carry out these deeds?  All she could suggest was "witchcraft."

Soon after this, the Willmans moved out of the farmhouse.  Having finally achieved its goal of driving the family away, the entity which had become known as "The Demon of Lemont" was, thankfully, seen no more.