Return to Iverson Park Investigation

This blog post was written by Whitney Dankemeyer, one half of Two Halves of a Soul.

Please believe me when I tell you this is the most bizarre investigation Swan and I have ever been on. Not once on our spiritual journey has this occurred to us, but I suppose we should’ve considered Eclipse Season and the thinning veil when we had this investigation planned; especially the day before the Full Moon in Aries.

Our investigation was supposed to be going to Kate Blood’s headstone at Riverside Cemetery in Appleton, WI. By the end of the day, we concluded our investigation at Iverson Park in Stevens Point. Those who have followed us since our website has launched, you may remember our story about Bernice, the rumored Bloody Bride. Let’s just say she intervened with our plans on Saturday, October 8th, and we ended up paying her a visit instead. By the time you get to the end of this post, you will have your answer as to why.

Our day began with our friend Andy visiting and watching the newest Ghost Adventures episode. Andy had never been to Swan’s house before so we showed him around and of course, gave him the rundown of our eccentric hobbies. At one point in our conversation, we started talking about the spirit board. I went into detail about the homemade spirit boards Amanda made us, followed by, “Let me just go grab it and show it to you instead.”

When I came back into the living room, Swan and Andy were in an in-depth conversation about spirits and haunted houses. I ended up sitting the spirit board down on the coffee table and reuniting with them on the couch. Entering their ongoing conversation, we moved on and I completely spaced showing Andy the board.

When three o’clock rolled around, Swan and I filled up with gas and checked the oil in my vehicle before meeting the girls at the Stevens Point Auto Center. This is my place of employment, and today’s excursion included bringing along three of my coworkers. Two of the three, Allie and Bella, are from the Appleton area. We thought their experience living there would be a nice aspect to have on this investigation. The other tag-a-long was Katie, my A1 at work since the beginning. She’s done board sessions and cemetery walks with us in the past, so this wasn’t her first rodeo with Two Halves of a Soul.

Once we met up at the dealership, we made the drive to Appleton. On the way out, we remembered we were traveling down Bernice’s highway. So before we left, I gave a small shoutout to Bernice to let her know that we said hi.

It only took us about an hour and a half before we were at the gates of the Riverside Cemetery. Confused by suddenly noticing google said they were closed, the gates were open and there were cars inside. Dedicated to the investigation, though, we still took the chance and drove into it.

Within seconds of pulling into the cemetery, we knew there were eyes on us. There was a stone house to the right and a man in a black hoodie watching us from his lawn chair, a red truck parked beside him. He seemed to be a caretaker, considering the stone on the house behind him matched the stone of the building we were taking photographs of. Not once did he wave us down or approach us to ask us to leave. So we kept to ourselves and drove further into the cemetery.

We drove around the back using our heart as our compass, not realizing how close to the headstone we actually were. Apparently Kate Blood’s headstone was one of the first plots in this cemetery, having only been buried four years after the cemetery was founded. She’s down a trail in the back of the cemetery where vehicle traffic is blocked off. The first time driving through, we couldn’t find her.

We continued driving throughout the cemetery, taking a few breaks here and there to look at headstone and wildlife. Thinking we weren’t going to find access to this headstone from within the cemetery, we decided to go back a few blocks to Peabody Park. When googling her headstone earlier in the day, there was note that it could be accessed from a trail through Peabody Park. It was worth a shot to try it out anyways.

We got to the park and found a place to park the car amongst teenagers taking their homecoming pictures at Peabody by the water. When we found the trail to the cemetery, there was private property and no trespassing signs. Shit. We definitely weren’t getting in this way.

We walked back to the car and decided trying the cemetery again was our only option. As we were putting the car in drive to head back to Riverside, we noticed the red truck backing up in a driveway and heading back in the direction of the cemetery. Was this guy following us now?

We pulled back into the cemetery and the man wasn’t there. Neither was his truck. We tried driving around the other side to the back and quickly realized it led to another. We pulled up a YouTube video to see how other tourists found the location of Kate’s headstone, and someone in the car thought they recognized a name on a headstone in the background of the video. So, we decided to go back to the first place we drove to when we got there the first time. On the way back to that spot, we saw the red truck again.

He was sitting with his car running in the middle of the cemetery, and followed quickly behind us while we were driving the paths. As we were driving, we found the headstone someone recognized from the video and stopped. With enough space for the red truck to pass, he pulled up behind us, took our photo, and sped off glaring at us. While we were unsure if we were allowed in the cemetery on Saturdays anyways, on our way to the headstone we passed another visitor at a different gravesite. We also looked ahead of the car and there were no signs surrounding the trail to Kate Blood saying not to trespass. What was it that we were doing wrong exactly?

We ended up not even getting out of the car because the driver of the red truck pulled up to the front and into our field of vision as if he was waiting for us to get out of the car. Just because we couldn’t get a clear understanding of his motives, we decided to leave. There was only one problem now: where were we going to investigate?

It was a little after 6 o’clock and the sun would be setting in a half hour. We googled many other cemeteries in the area, and a majority of them also said they were closed. Was this a normal thing around here? If so, why? We did find one in Menasha we could go to so we decided to pull that up on the GPS next. A twenty minute drive slightly out of the way, but hey, it was an investigation. Not only that, but I had a car full of coworkers itching for an experience.

When we got to the Menasha Cemetery, St. John the Baptist Cemetery to be exact, there was another caretaker present who was pulled up to the garage door in a black car. At first we assumed she was a visitor, so we got out and started to explore. We had the pendulum with us, so a spirit would be able to guide us to their headstone if they wanted to talk. The only problem with this was the lady never left. She got into her black car and she just sat there.. waiting for us to leave first.

Extremely disappointed again, the only other thing I could think of was concluding the Boy Scout Lane investigation and doing a part two. We drove all the way back to Stevens Point and get to our destination. There, we had a weird run-in with a car that was TURNING onto Boy Scout Lane. Again, we were turned away from another investigation.

Apologizing to the girls and expressing my extreme confusion to them about what’s happened throughout the day, Swan and I made the recollection that we said hi to Bernice on our way out of town. Not only that, but she was born in Stevens Point, graduated from the Menasha school district, and died off of the highway that bridged Stevens Point to Appleton (where she was moving to). That was when it hit us. Did she do all of it on purpose?

Immediately, we put Iverson Park into the GPS and rode out that way. When we got to the park, there was already weird vehicular activity going on in the park. There was a white van that never moved, a white SUV that kept coming and going from the exit’s direction, a tan truck that sat behind us in the distance for most of the session, and that same tan truck joined by a tall dark truck next to us by the end of it. While it was extremely distracting to the investigation, we still performed a session.

I started an EVP while Swan conducted the Estes Method. The temperature gauge was turned on, the radio frequencies were sweeping, and we also had the Ovilus turned on. There were patterns in this session considering there would be no activity, and then suddenly a rotation of each device going off would occur before ceasing communication again. Sadly, there were no EVPs captured during the entire investigation. We did get a male and female presence though.

It started with someone saying ME indicating a presence was there. We thought this was Bernice, but Swan later mentioned feeling a male presence standing outside of the car. The one saying ME the duration of the session was also a male voice. The rest were female.

At one point in the EVP session the Ovilus said MEASURE. This was followed by Swan saying GET READY while the temperature gauge was going off. This was Bernice telling us she was amping herself up to communicate. It was too bad the vehicles disrupted this further on. At one point Bernice even said GO AWAY to one of the vehicles pulling into the lot. She just wanted to talk to us.

When trying to get a little more information on the male presence, Swan said repeat. We knew this had to be the same male presence we encountered last time we were there, but we left that first night never figuring out who it was. We did ask if it was her husband Charles, but it was denied. Charles was remarried and buried next to his second wife, so we assumed it was a far stretch anyways. But still.. who was this man then?

All we ended up getting from the man during the park session was ME and AFT. When it came to Bernice, all we got after that was HI over Estes and the Ovilus saying KNIT and HUNDRED when referring to her working at the knitting mill. Our friend Bella in the car also knits, so she stepped forward and shared her interest in knitting as well. But unfortunately, our evidence slowly started to diminish when the two trucks pulled up to each other side-by-side. We decided to conclude the investigation and go home, hoping desperately to hear a voice phenomena on the EVP recording. Otherwise, we had just driven around all day for nothing. And then my coworkers would have experienced all of that for nothing.

When Swan and I get back to her residence, we put in headphones and go over the twenty-five minute EVP recording. As I mentioned earlier, there were no voices that came through or any noises that sounded close to a spiritual encounter. We were disappointed. But as soon as we looked up from where we were sitting, we both looked at the board and got the same idea.

“There a reason we pulled that out today and didn’t show it to Andy?”

“I think we were supposed to use it.”

“You just read my mind.”

We pulled the spirit board close to us and decided to conduct a session. We recorded another thirty minute EVP session in hopes of capturing sound in the second one now that we were surrounded by crystals and had an open bottle of water as an offering. We set our intentions, prayed with our guides, and secured the board. It was time to talk to Bernice.

Let’s just say we got all the answers we were looking for, and the end of the session resulted in tears. We not only figured out why Bernice drove us around the entire state of Wisconsin, but we also found out who her friend is.

Bernice told us the reason she sent us on her route to Appleton, Menasha, and back to Stevens Point was because she didn’t want us to forget about her. When we told her we, for one, could never do that, we also told her this could’ve been done without wasting my gas. She told us she had to and had no other choice. Despite finding this sad, we admired her efforts to get our attention.

We asked Bernice next if she had a friend along with her. She told us she did. And when we asked her the name of who her friend was, the board immediately went to Hello. He told us that his name was Frank.

We obviously wanted to know more about Frank so we started by saying that it was nice to meet him. He spelled “pleasure.” We got into conversation with him and asked about his life. He spelled ocean, and that was when Swan remembered hearing AFT during the Estes Method. She asked him if he was on active duty and he said yes. We asked what war and he said Civil. We asked if he was Union and he said yes. We asked how old he was and his response was 34.

Incredible.

We obviously needed to figure out next how Frank got himself up here. We asked if he died here and he said no. When we asked him how he got here, he told us “portal” and “water''. He came up from the Mississippi and into the Point River. This would make sense considering water is a conductor for energy. This was when we were told he had just found out, and Bernice was with him so they could help each other cope. Could this be why Bernice stopped reaching out to cars over the years? Did she finally accept her fate and find a friend with a similar experience?

Keeping the AFT word in mind, we asked if he was on Union ships. He told us he was on the Aft Deck. He and Bernice kept spelling “powder” after that. When we didn’t understand, they spelled “chemicals”. Was this how Frank died?

We could sense hesitation and that more needed to be said. We knew Frank had a story to tell. And he seemed to want to make peace with it. He spelled “powder” again, so we asked him if we had permission to google and look further into it. Given permission, we started searching. We asked if it was mustard gas, he said no. He was right. Mustard gas wasn’t introduced until World War I. It was then that Swan came across an article about Joseph Jones. When we got to his section of the article, we froze in fear. Joseph Jones was a confederate army surgeon who wrote twice to use chemical weapons against Union Ships during the Civil War. This was to be done by putting Hydrogen Cyanide in glass bottles and throwing them onto ships. It showed in the article that this was dismissed, but who is to say this wasn’t still done?

We put our fingers back on the planchette and asked Frank if it was Hydrogen Cyanide. This is when the planchette moved to yes. We immediately felt sadness and began to cry. We apologized over and over again to Frank, but then they spelled out “very happy”. The two of them have finally found peace with their passing, and better yet, they now have each other.

We concluded the session by thanking them for sharing their story and told them we would make sure to visit more often. Once we ended the board session, Swan and I looked at each other speechless. There is no way we would drive thirty minutes to Stevens Point, an hour and a half to Appleton, out of our way to Menasha, an hour and a half back to Boy Scout Lane, and another twenty minutes back to Iverson Park to put on a show for my coworkers. In fact, we were just as confused as they were the entire night, even making comments about the cosmic energy potentially having something to do with it. But, by the end of the night, it all seemed to make a little more sense. And it all came back to Bernice.