For more than 60 years, Charles Van Schaick (1852-1946) worked as a photographer in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Opened in 1879, he took around 8,000 glass plate negatives, of which approximately 5,700 are studio portraits.
The Charles Van Schaick collection, now housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, achieved national attention in 1973 when the writer and doctoral student Michael Lesy published the book Wisconsin Death Trip. The bestseller features Van Schaick’s images alongside accounts of everyday horrors, several postmortem portrayals of infants laid out in their coffins, gothic moments of inexplicable madness, death and crimes, many taken from the Badger State Banner, a local newspaper active from 1868 through 1926, and the Mendota State Asylum. The book shows the “nightmarish reality which rural America faced when the dream was over”, as critic A. D. Coleman noted in the New York Times.
Some of the stories are included below. The book was made into a film by James Marsh in 1999.
The suspicion of botched funerary procedures led to an investigation at the Rosedale Cemetery. It was discovered there that Mrs. Sarah Smith had been accidentally buried alive while in some kind of “trance,” or coma-like state. Her body was found partially on its side, and the hand was positioned toward the face.
Reportedly, Smith had bitten her fingers half off, and it’s believed this occurred when she realised her fate.
A wild man is terrorizing the people north of Grantsburg. He appears to be 35 years of age, has long black whiskers, is barefooted, has scarcely any clothes on him, and he carries a hatchet. He appeared at several farms and asked for something to eat. He eats ravenously, and when asked where he came from, points to the east. He secretes himself in the woods during the day and has the most bloodcurdling yells that have ever been heard in the neighborhood.
Mrs. John Larson, wife of a farmer living in the town of Troy, drowned her 3 children in Lake St. Croix during a fit of insanity. Her husband, on finding her absent from the house, began a search and found her at the lake shore… 2 of her children lying in the sand dead. The third could not be found. Mrs. Larson imagines that devils pursue her.
After the banks collapsed, a distraught farmer decided to take his own life. Christ Wold did not use common methods of the time, such as hanging himself or using a gun. Instead, Wold dug a hole in the ground and placed dynamite in the hollow.
Then the farmer stuck his head in the opening and lit the fuse.
15-year-old Lydia Berger set fire to her father’s barn and house. The teen sought “revenge” because her father had beaten her for taking off to go to a carnival. When a kind neighbor took in her and her family, Berger then set fire to that property.
The vindictive teen continued to set more structures ablaze until she was finally apprehended. She then confessed to arson.
A traveling group of approximately 50 drifters swarmed a small community. They invaded the Sheldon farm and decapitated 18 of the owner’s chickens. The farmer, believing that Satan had taken control of his property, burned the farm to the ground.
The drifters, however, took to the woods to enjoy their spoils.
A young boy named Nestor Provancher visited a hypnotist. Afterward, he couldn’t speak louder than a whisper for four months. Medical examiners believed that the boy was still under some kind of hypnotic trance, which did not permit him to talk as he once had.
Nestor remained essentially mute until the trance broke months later.
“What was strange was that in the seventy years between then and now, in the time it takes a healthy man to live, learn a few lessons, grow old, and die—in that short time, in one lifetime, all of [these photos and newspapers] were changed from the most ordinary records of the most ordinary events into arcane remnants, obscure relics, antique mementos. What dark thing had changed the ordinary doings of ordinary citizens into messages received by radio telescope from a nebula judged to have exploded a million years ago? How did it happen? Why did it happen?”
– Michael Lesy, introduction to Wisconsin Death Trap
Would you like to support Flashbak?
Please consider making a donation to our site. We don't want to rely on ads to bring you the best of visual culture. You can also support us by signing up to our Mailing List. And you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For great art and culture delivered to your door, visit our shop.
