Swan's House Investigation
This blog post was written by Whitney Dankemeyer. Last names of the owners were removed for privacy purposes.
When you buy and move into your first home, a lot of other firsts will come with it. You’ll discover how expensive household items are, how frequently the dryer ducts need to be cleaned, and how much of your free time will be dedicated to yard work. When buying their first home in May of 2020, Swan and her boyfriend Gary thought this was all they needed to prepare for. It wasn’t until they finally settled in that they realized they forgot one possible thing: sharing their home with spirits.
Upon moving in, Swan, Nicole, and I had already been investigating for a year. Swan and I were still Two Halves of a Soul on social media at this time, posting witchcraft and astrology content during the week while investigating weekends. Despite the many ways we knew how to communicate with spirits, spirit boards were our strongest tool in 2020. A friend made Swan and I our own spirit boards a few months prior, so we spent a lot of that summer breaking them in. This was the summer we met Debbie, Edna, and L.
It didn’t take long to figure out there were spirits present in the home. Swan and Gary had a screw thrown at them while organizing the garage, and random lights would flicker on and off inside the house. A few nights in, Swan was already waking up in the night to her legs being touched. A few days after that, the cats would be found meowing and running around the house with their new imaginary friends. Once Swan finally turned on the iOvilus and received the word “Debra,” we decided to conduct a spirit board session with the spirits in the house. From our first board session, we found out the home was being shared with a young spirit named Edna, an older woman named Debbie, and a man in the garage who refused to share his name.
Edna was young and in her early 20s when she passed away. She said she used to attend parties at the house, and we later confirmed with Swan’s dad Troy that he used to attend the same parties when he was younger. Though he did not remember Edna, we had a lead to go off of. Nights before our board session, Gary had told us Swan said “Cord Syndrome” in her sleep. We discovered through Edna she was in a water park accident which led to a serious brain injury. She was brain dead but still conscious in the hospital, hearing everything up until her last breath. She told us the reason she was trapped in the house was due to a conflict with a friend at one of the house parties (Eff you, Jackie). We walked Edna through the whole experience and made the decision to help her move on. Though we’ve missed Edna terribly the past three years, she told us she would come back to us in this lifetime.
The man in the garage is a grumpy fellow. To this day it is still unclear what his name is, but because Gary and Swan have a giant “L” on the wall in their dining room, he said we could call him L. During a Sabbat celebration in 2021, we had another psychic friend channel L, and it was gathered that he was a previous owner who really liked to drink. Through L, we found out he spent a lot of his time in the garage because it was where he was able to isolate himself. It was also noted during our session that he may have even stashed alcohol in the garage at some point in his life. Although he likes to be left alone, we keep the peace by leaving him Bourbon offerings on the highest shelf in the garage from time to time.
The final spirit in the home is our precious Debbie. When we first contacted Debbie on the spirit board, she loved it. She loved the way the planchette moved, so now every time we communicate with Debbie on it, we have to let her play with the planchette first. We call this “Dancing with Debbie.” She told us she was a previous owner of the house and chose to stay there because it was her happy place. She shared she was born in 1900 and died from cancer. She said she was married and had three kids, all of them still alive. While she told us one child lived out of the area, she said she was still close with them. We were also informed her middle name was Georgia, and she said she used to have family friends over for game nights.
Because Swan and Gary would be sharing their home with another entity, we spent the next three years trying to get more information on Debbie and her life. It wasn’t until August 11, 2022 when Swan and I booked a session with psychic witch Patti Negri to discuss the house. She told us there were definitely spirits present, one whose name we modernized. Even though we modernized her name, Patti said she loved it. Our assumption is that the iOvilus didn’t have her actual name to generate, so she settled for the next best thing. Patti also mentioned that she saw Debbie taking care of someone like they were her grandchild, which meant that Debbie was caring for Swan in the night while she slept. Swan has had four major leg surgeries growing up, and Patti said Debbie tries to nurture her.
All of this incredible information has led us to the summer investigation I’m writing about today. As Two Halves and Nicole in 2023, we thought it was finally time to set up all of our equipment, do our own research, and get to the bottom of who Debbie and L really were. We started at the Wisconsin Rapids McMillan Memorial Library to look up records of previous owners on that side of town. The house was built in 1912, and the first owners we were able to find were Emma and Emil. Records show they were living in the home in the 1920’s. When they divorced, Emma continued to live in the home until she remarried and moved out. The next owner was a man named Walter, and he lived in the home from about 1937 until the late 40’s. The house remained vacant for at least a year before Herbert and Denise moved into the home in 1950. They lived in the home for the next 40 years before moving to Woodruff, Wisconsin.
With names to go off of, we were ready to do a full investigation of the home. On the night of Saturday, August 5, 2023, we set up our equipment in the living room on the first floor. We had the rem pod and cat balls out, but we did not receive a single response on either device the whole investigation. Debbie was still very talkative through the Estes though, despite it not being the usual spirit board she is used to.
We set our boundaries to only speak to Debbie and L in the home because as sensitives, it’s easy for passersby to interrupt us in the middle of a session. We wanted to nip this in the bud right away so we’d have consistent responses. We began by telling Debbie to come up and touch our equipment to show us she was present. Even though she’s seen us use the Estes before, we’ve never done a session with Debbie alone. While explaining how the Estes Method worked, Swan shouted, “Debra!”
This puzzled us for numerous reasons. Because we’ve modernized Debbie’s name, we were now unsure if she said “Debra” to show her presence or if she’s convinced that’s what her name is. I asked her if that was really her name, and she answered, “Man.” We assumed this was referring to the man in the garage, so we teased and said, “L, step aside for a moment. Debbie, is that your name?” That was when we received the name “Hank.” At the time, neither one of us stopped to think it could’ve been the man sharing his name with us. However, we did not find a Hank listed as a previous owner. We did find that Denise's husband's middle initial was H, but even through Ancestry, we were unable to figure out what his full name was.
I tried another approach when I asked Debbie questions. I asked her if her name was Emma, and she didn’t answer. I asked if her name was Denise, and Swan responded, “Um.” I asked if Denise sounded familiar and if that was her name. She answered, “Possible.” We asked her if she wanted us to call her Denise now, but she said to “Look further.” We asked if that meant she wanted us to research her further, but we didn’t get a response to that question. Instead, she told us that she missed us.
When Debbie said, “Missed you,” we told her we were aware it had been a while since we last talked. Our sessions with Debbie used to be very frequent, but with the latest investigations we’ve had, we cut back on those spirit board sessions. Swan said she heard Debbie say, “Well,” in a stern voice. I, of course, said, “I know, I know,” but then Nicole and I told her we were there now and wanted to figure out more about who she was. That was when Swan said, “Inside.” Yes, Debbie, we need the inside scoop!
I asked Debbie if she knew her husband’s name, but the answer we received was “Pal.” Nicole and I got a chuckle out of this, but we asked her again if her husband had a name. Debbie took this literally because Swan said she heard a faint “Uh huh” followed by a “You bet!” Around this same time the temperature gauge started going off.
I tried to ask Debbie another time what her husband’s name was. The only reason we were so persistent in asking is because it was all we really had to go off of. We already knew they were present because they show themselves to us, they interact with equipment, we’ve captured their voices on EVP, and as sensitives, we can feel them. We’ve even had other psychic mediums confirm that entities reside in this home. We just needed either the history to match all our instincts, or to figure out who these spirits really were and where they came from. To get you back up to speed on the investigation, Debbie ended up saying "Sorry," which gave us the impression she either couldn’t remember the name or was apologizing for her delayed response. We told her it was okay regardless.
Looking for yet another approach, I tried explaining to Debbie that there were two females we knew of as previous owners in the home. She said, “Yeah,” so I further explained that one of them had two husbands, and the other was only married once. I asked Debbie if she knew how many times she was married, and Swan said she heard “Long.” I asked, “One long marriage?” and Swan responded, “Unbelievable.” When I asked Debbie if the name Herbert sounded familiar (Denise’s husband), Swan said she couldn’t make out the response, but there was a female, and she sounded excited about something.
We already knew the man in the garage wasn’t Debbie’s husband, but we still asked to be certain. She did not respond to our question, but Swan said she heard a man say something she couldn’t understand. At the time of this investigation, I thought Swan was just saying, “A man,” so I asked, “What’s his name?” instead of acknowledging the man himself. Swan said, “The man,” so again we asked for a name. Instead of the man’s name, we got a man saying “Debbie.” We’ll take it.
We got another response that said, “You should tell them, " and Nicole and I discussed this being Debbie encouraging the man to share his name. We then got the response, “Just rude,” so we assumed this was Debbie coming back to the spirit box and the man had left the room. We laughed in agreement and said “Yeah, he likes to be left alone, but we’d like to know him better.” Swan heard Debbie say, “Want that,” so Nicole asked Debbie if she knew the man at all. She replied with, “Yep!”
The next thing that occurred is something we haven’t experienced on an investigation before, and that’s because we don’t always investigate with animals present. For this investigation though, we were interrupted mid-session by Oliver, one of Swan and Gary’s cats. Nicole and I tried to hold back our laughter, but it was nearly impossible with the laps he was making around the couch. I asked Debbie if she could see Oliver and Swan responded, “And now!” (But he was just getting started.)
We did the best we could to keep Oliver out of the way and asked Debbie once more if she could tell us the man in the garage’s name. She said “Hang on,” and then the responses stopped coming through. Nicole and I briefly chatted about this because it seemed as though she had left the room to bring the man back inside. After a few moments of silence, Swan finally said, “Perfect.”
Because we took this as a sign the man was present, I asked, “Is he here?” and Swan said, “I see people. It’s my life.” Nicole and I got a chuckle out of this because we knew L was already over this interview and wanted to go back to the garage. I told him we just wanted to get to know him better and Swan said, “Thank you,” back to us. Despite how cranky he is, he still appreciated our persistence. We took this as an opportunity to see if he’d tell us his name one more time, but his response was simply, “No.”
Oliver was still putzing around the living room at this time, and L actually interrupted the session to say, “Can you take him?” We thought this may have been Debbie at first because Oliver was already traipsing around, so Nicole asked if the man wanted us to leave him alone. The response we received was “Because there’s someone. Grab him.” Oh, they were talking about the CAT.
We wanted to debunk this response to ensure the spirit was really referring to removing Oliver from the couch, so I asked if they could clarify if they meant the cat or the man. Swan said, “Right in there. Cat.” I quickly told them we would move the cat and questioned if he was distracting them. Seconds later, Swan said, “Oliver,” and Nicole and I lost our freaaaaking minds.
I wrapped Oliver up in my arms for as long as I could to keep him still. I asked the man in the garage if he liked cats, but he responded, “Carry on.” We could tell he just wanted to get this evening over with. I did say, “Oh, so Oliver was just distracting.” and Swan said, “We all know it.” Nicole and I cackled and said, “Yeah, he’s a needy boy.” Swan then said she heard someone laughing on the spirit box.
We moved into a conversation with L and Debbie about manifesting for us on camera. While we were trying to clarify which camera L was showing himself on (the motion-activated one or the video camera), he said the words “Here’s me,” and “Myself.” Looking through footage post-investigation, we found an orb and heard a knock on the motion sensor camera in the garage. We didn’t receive much more from him than that.
Around the same time, Debbie had asked, “Can you see me?” and when we asked where she was, Oliver ran towards the stairs. Shortly after that, he meowed. Debbie then told us “Sunlight” and “I’m still with you,” indicating that she was losing energy to communicate with us but was still with us in spirit. Shortly after that, Swan started spewing a bunch of words. None of them were lining up with our questions, the words were entirely random, and we couldn’t feel Debbie in the room anymore. There were passersby crossing the boundaries we had established, so we made the call to end the session and conduct another brief session in the garage.
When we walked out to the garage, Swan mentioned that we should’ve brought a bottle of bourbon to share with L. We believe it also could’ve been the reason why we didn’t get any responses from him. We set up the grid pen to face the garage door, we placed the rem pod in the middle of the floor, and we started recording. We told L he could walk in front of the grid pen, touch the rem pod, or speak into any one of our devices, but we received no communication. When we look back at our footage, we captured one singular orb move to the back of the garage and hide behind supplies.
In the middle of filming, Nicole got the notification that her storage was full, and the video stopped recording entirely. This was something the Old Baraboo Inn spirits did to us on investigations when they wanted us to stop recording. Nicole showed the phone to us, and we decided that we annoyed L for long enough. We walked to the side door of the garage and flipped on the light. Immediately after turning the light on, L set the rem pod off. And by setting it off, he really set it off. This was just more confirmation that he didn’t want to be bothered. When I asked him if he was happy we were going to leave him alone, the rem pod immediately stopped. We thanked L for braving through his interviews with us, and then left him alone.
We never fully figured out who L really was when he was alive. All that we gathered is he is a previous owner that liked to drink, and the garage was his sanctuary. Even in the afterlife, L prefers to be by himself, but he appreciates being occasionally offered a beverage.
As for Debbie, we believe she is the spirit of the previous owner Denise. Her middle name is Virginia, so it is a state but not Georgia like she thought. The first name "Denise" and "Debra" are also incredibly similar, so we are still curious if the name "Denise" is absent from the iOvilus word bank. On July 10, 1946, Denise married Herbert, with whom she remained with the rest of her life. Census records show they lived at Swan’s house in the 1950’s and were still there in the 70’s. They had two children and a granddaughter they loved very much. On the board she had shared that one of her children was alive but out of state; our research confirmed that both children do not live in the area. We believe the third child she referred to is the granddaughter. We could not confirm she died from cancer, but records show she passed away in a Marshfield, Wisconsin hospital.
We will continue to call Denise “Debbie” because she really loves her new name. Although we still don’t know who the man is, we’re going to continue a relationship with him by offering drinks. Swan may live in the home now, but we will still honor the lives of the ones who came before her. We hope Debbie had her fun being a part of an investigation, but now it’s back to home, sweet, haunted house.
Thanks for reading!
Supporting Links:
Wisconsin Rapids McMillan Memorial Library
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