In the shadowy woods of western Wisconsin, hidden behind a façade of churches, schoolhouses, and early American hope, a quiet apocalypse unfolded. Between the 1890s and the early 1900s, the town of Black River Falls, nestled in Jackson County, became the site of a collective unraveling that would later be dubbed The Wisconsin Death Trip. This wasn’t just tragedy—it was psychological collapse on a community scale. A bizarre parade of misfortunes turned the town into something between a ghost story and a cautionary tale.
What happened here? And why did so many lose their grip on reality?
A Town With Promise—And Then, With Plague
Black River Falls didn’t start in darkness. It started with promise. Set along the cold, churning river from which it gets its name, the town grew quickly in the late 1800s. Logging money flowed, factories rose, railroads connected it to the world, and families staked their futures in the thick pine wilderness of Jackson County.
Then the bottom dropped out.
The timber boom ended. Factories shuttered. Crops failed. Stores closed their doors and never reopened. Winter came hard—and never seemed to leave. Roads iced over, coal dwindled, and illnesses moved in like smoke through the cracks.
Disease with a New Name
Among the horrors was “The Strangler”—a community nickname for diphtheria, a disease that smothered children in their own throats. In homes too poor to leave and too cold to warm, families watched helplessly as children gasped for air, their skin going pallid and gray. In one desperate, snow-bound dash, a doctor rode through the wilderness with a vial of experimental antitoxin. It saved a child, but couldn’t turn the tide.
Entire families vanished. Schools closed. Funeral bells rang daily.
By the mid-1890s, the town was no longer slipping. It was sinking.
Madness on Main Street
Suicides followed. Then arson. Then something stranger.
A woman heard voices and torched her home. Another shot her husband in the chest, turned herself in, and spoke not a word more. A boy, hypnotized, whispered for months. Another boy, overcome with something he couldn’t name, soaked the schoolhouse in oil and lit it up—while his classmates recited arithmetic. A woman named Mary Sweeney, possibly high on cocaine, traveled from town to town smashing windows and laughing.
People vanished. Others reappeared days later, walking barefoot through the snow, eyes locked on things unseen. A teacher locked her pupils inside and disappeared. A farmer stood in the snow and watched his barn burn.
There was no pattern. Only decay.
Through the Lens of Charles Van Schaick
Photographer Charles Van Schaick captured the face of this unraveling. The vacant stares of the sick, the mourning, the institutionalized. His glass plates and morbid portraits later formed the visual backbone of Wisconsin Death Trip, the 1973 historical masterpiece by Michael Lesy that ensured this chapter of American history would never be fully buried.
The newspapers of the time read like something out of fiction. “Woman Shoots Husband, Smiles.” “Boy Burns School, Shows No Emotion.” “Child Found Under Ice.”
Each week: a new name. A new disaster.
A Spiritual Epidemic
By the time the town could no longer deny what was happening, the cracks had become canyons. The madness became spiritual. Not metaphorically—literally.
Spiritualism exploded. Séances, mediums, ghostwriting. People desperately searched for meaning in the chaos, hoping the voices from the beyond would explain what had overtaken their neighbors—and themselves. Superstition gripped the town. Candles burned in empty rooms. Salt lined thresholds. Tales of a black dog roaming the woods became common.
It was said that the town had been built on cursed ground. That the river knew what had been done.
When Children Broke
Then came the most chilling phase: the children.
One by one, they began acting… differently. An 11-year-old tried to burn his schoolmates alive. A young girl stabbed her brother, claiming he wasn’t really him. Two brothers, 10 and 13, murdered a farmer and lived in his house until discovered.
These weren’t tantrums. These were echoes—twisted reflections of what the adults had already become.
The Institutional Response
The asylum filled. Then the jail. Then the graveyards.
By 1900, 1 in every 472 residents of Jackson County was declared legally insane.
Judges passed sentence like sandbags against a flood. Ministers screamed about devils. Doctors talked of hygiene and rest. None of it mattered.
People left. Most didn’t say goodbye.
And Then, Silence
What happened in Black River Falls didn’t end with a bang. It faded. Like most horrors, it left quietly—slipping into legend, into whispers, and finally into yellowed newspaper clippings.
The town rebuilt. Technically.
Today, Black River Falls has paved streets, a Walmart, and schoolkids who ride bikes past haunted houses like they were just bricks. But those stories haven’t vanished. They lie buried, waiting for curious hands to turn brittle pages and wonder what darkness really swept through this place.
Because in the end, maybe it wasn’t a curse. Maybe enough people broke in one place that it stained the land itself.
FAQ: Black River Falls and The Wisconsin Death Trip
Q: Is Wisconsin Death Trip based on a true story?
Yes. The events chronicled in the book are drawn from actual newspaper reports and photographs taken in Black River Falls during the late 1800s.
Q: What caused the psychological collapse in Black River Falls?
Historians blame a perfect storm of economic ruin, disease, isolation, and brutal winters. But no single cause explains the full depth of despair.
Q: Who was Charles Van Schaick?
He was a photographer based in Black River Falls whose portraits captured the unsettling emotional tone of the town during its darkest years.
Q: Is the town haunted today?
Locals don’t often talk about it, but the legacy lingers. Many believe something still feels… off. Whether spiritual or psychological, the weight remains.
Q: Where can I read more?
Check out Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy or visit the archives of the Black River Falls newspapers from the 1890s.
