La Belle Cemetery Investigation
This blog post was written by Whitney Dankemeyer, one half of Two Halves of a Soul.
Residing in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin stands the first Oconomowoc cemetery in the area. Originating May 15, 1851, just three years after the state was founded, this cemetery sat between Walnut Street and Wisconsin Avenue. In 1864, the location ran out of room for bodies, so they decided to relocate the remains and open a new cemetery called La Belle. This new cemetery now sits at 700 E Grove St in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.
Digging up the bodies ended up digging up paranormal activity. The main legend being passed around is that of a little girl at La Belle. On site, there is a statue of a young girl whose spirit will part from the statue and appear to be standing behind it. She is also said to walk to the nearest body of water to drown herself. You may even see her hands or the statue dripping in blood. There is no further explanation of this little girl and why she appears to drown herself in the water.
Other activity includes shadow figures due to the community and tourists bringing in Ouija boards to communicate with the spirits. Other than that, no other activity at this cemetery has been recorded. Our team was especially interested in this case because there is a similar story about a bleeding headstone at Riverside Cemetery, which we uncovered to be a false tale. It was up to us now to investigate and uncover if the activity is disturbed spirits or if these spirits were purely conjured via divination tools.
We arrived at the cemetery mid-afternoon on Saturday, March 18, 2023. There were two locations to investigate that were cities apart, so we needed to be mindful of our time at this cemetery. Because we had no intentions of staying after dark to uncover the mysteries of the Ouija board conjurings, we’d be chased out by local police had we chosen to stay anyways. We figured the middle of the day was just as good a time as any.
The cemetery had a bridge that needed to be crossed to enter it. We drove through the black, metal gates and over the water into the body garden. We followed the path along the left side and down in front of the water. Because there was still no female statue in sight, we decided to use the iOvilus device.
The iOvilus spat out a couple of words, but they were unrelated to our questions about the statue. I eventually turned the iOvilus off and told the girls our best option was to follow our gut. I told them I felt the statue was going to be to the right and straight ahead until we saw it. Swan’s intuition was pulled in the same direction while Nicole nodded in agreement.
We drove to the other side of the cemetery, still moving alongside the body of water that was now to our left. At the next intersection of plots, there she was: the female statue.
The statue wasn’t a monument for one person in particular. In fact, we got out of the car and walked up to it to see it was dedicated to a family of four. Next to the statue was their last name, Nathusius, and in front of it were their four separate plots with markers. Also, on the Nathusius stone were the words “Der Best Freunde ist im dem Himmel,” which translates to “The best friend is in heaven.”
The markers in front of the statue started with Carolina. She was the daughter, born in 1865 and passing away in 1952. To the right of her is her mother, Louise, born in 1832 and passing in 1917. Next is the husband Carl (to the right of Louise), born in 1830 and passing away in 1921. And lastly, we have the son, Wilhelm, born in 1863 and passing in 1945. We noticed already that it was strange the hauntings were of a young girl when the daughter seemed to have lived a long life. We still wanted to be able to debunk this legend, though, so we ran an Estes Method session.
Due to the weather and it beginning to snow, we hopped in our car that was parked on the road in front of this family’s plots. We whipped out the spirit box and headphones while running an EVP for additional possible evidence. I tried starting the session by asking who we were speaking with, but the spirits had already begun interrupting us.
The first response we received was “Move.” I asked them if they wanted us to move the car and they laughed. Puzzled, I asked “So no?” And the spirit responded, “Yeah.” This led us to believe they were jokesters and were teasing us, also making it harder for us to believe the legends were true.
Because the spirits kept setting the temperature gauge off, I decided to explain to them what it was and how it worked (not like they needed to know.) Swan responded aloud, “German,” and I said, “Yeah! You guys are German!” While pointing to the headstone with German words on it. A spirit responded with “Me” before setting the temp gauge off again.
We wanted to get to know the spirit responding to us, so we tried asking a few questions about who they were to narrow down our focus. I attempted to ask if the spirit was male or female, but they interrupted my question by saying, “My book!” I held off of my first question and instead asked if the book was their prized possession. The temp gauge went off as a response.
We obviously wanted to know more about the book now, so I tried asking them what the book entailed. They answered, “Arizona” while the temperature gauge continued to sound. I originally mistook this response for the spirit saying the book was in Arizona, so when I asked them to confirm if it was in Arizona, they responded, “How Could-?” and when I still didn’t get the point and asked if they forgot where it was, they said, “You know better.” Looking back on the evidence now, it’s pretty transparent that the book contained Arizona but wasn’t actually there.
We decided to move on from the book for a while, so I asked if the family was all here. The temp gauge went off a moment later, and Swan responded “Our” and “He’s with.” Not too long after, the spirit box said, “Big Mark! He’s a slave!” amongst us asking about the statue’s legend. It appears the family was not alone during our visit.
We never got a confirming response regarding the female statue legend, so Nicole and I briefly discussed our investigation so far. We brought up the Civil War, slavery, and us needing to see if our evidence connected later. Immediately, Swan asked, “Why?” Laughing at the spirit, we explained that they were giving us good responses and we needed to make sure their answers connected to their past. They responded, “Yeah.”
The next thing we got from Swan through the spirit box was the word “You.” I asked, “What about me?” and Swan responded, “You. You see.” We took this as the spirit bringing up our ability to communicate with and understand them. I said, “Yeah, we all see actually.”
There were a couple more questions we asked the spirit or spirits that resulted in half-answers and half-sentences. One of the half-answered responses was a date: 18 ___. Nicole tried asking them if they could finish the date for us, but these Germans did what they did best and continued teasing us.
The temp gauge went off while Swan cocked her head and asked, “Are you cold?” We said, “Yeah?” And Swan immediately answered, “Got you!” We shared a brief laugh, Nicole thanked them, and I told them they were funny. The response we received from that was, “Everyone, they’re fun.”
I wanted to keep the session from having too much dead air, so I was already moving on by asking more questions. I only knew a few words in German, but I wanted to try saying a few words in their language during our visit. They quickly ignored my attempt and told us about walking West, followed by a few silly comments.
I told the spirits they were pretty funny again and then asked them if they had a sense of humor. One of the spirits responded, “I’ll look” and gave us quite a laugh.
Again, there were more questions and more comedic answers, but we did hear a younger girl say “Um” before a murder of crows flew into the cemetery and started cawing. Shortly after that, Swan mentioned hearing a muffled conversation between a man and a woman.
Nicole and I obviously wanted to know who we were speaking with, so we segued into that conversation by me saying, “You can talk to us about it,” and Nicole adding, “You don’t have to be shy.” They responded, “No.” I said, "I assume this is a personal conversation then," and the temp gauge went off. The temp gauge sounded for a steady couple of minutes, almost like they were trying to keep us from hearing their conversation.
We waited until the temperature gauge ceased before proceeding. When we did, I started by saying, “Just so we’re getting somewhere-“ and a spirit cut me off by asking, “Where are you going?” I told them I wasn’t going anywhere, and Swan shouted, “Woo!”
Without wasting time, I kept going and asked, “Can you please tell us if you’re male or female?” There was at least a moment of static before Swan creepily laughed. She said she heard a woman say, “Fuck you” and a man say, “Hello.” Have we been chatting with the pair this whole time?
I asked if we could speak to the woman and if she was the older or younger female in front of the statue. She responded “Take a walk… TODAY. For a second.” She didn’t seem to be very fond of us.
We asked if she could tell us if the statue legend was true, and she didn’t seem to answer. We did get an answer from the male spirit, though, and he said, “Woo! Women!”
We seemed to be only speaking with the male spirit after this because he was very flirtatious. While asking questions he chose to respond, “Realize me. You’re in heaven.”
I could say he gave us some solid answers in addition to his pick-up lines, but he didn’t really help us out too much. When I asked him his name, he said, “Maybe yellow,” and when I asked him to tell us about his life, he asked us if we were homeless because of our gym bags stacked in the backseat.
The one neat response we did get from our male spirit (whichever he may be, Carl or Wilhelm) was when he told us to look out. We asked him what we were looking out for, and he said, “More. must be able… MEEEEE.” This was his way of saying again that we can see and communicate with spirits. This was also his way of telling us there were more. I still asked him for validation, “More spirits like you? Are there a lot of them here?” And he said, “Maybe.”
We did try switching to a different radio frequency at the end of our first session to see if we could capture better words through the spirit box, however, it didn’t work out. We also were interrupted by a couple cars driving into the cemetery and passersby walking, so we took it as our sign to end the session, pack up, and head to investigation number two.
We didn’t stick around until dusk to see if a little girl appeared out of the statue, but we do find it hard to believe this fun, German family to be responsible for the drowning female spirit. It could even be that the female spirit is offended by the legends and that’s why she was so stingy when asking her those particular questions. We don’t necessarily believe it to be true, but it’s not uncommon for cemeteries to uphold wacky legends. We just believe this legend to be one of them.
Auf wiedersehen.
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