I realize the tour is not going to be what I expected when our guide says, “This is not a history tour. We’re here to do a paranormal investigation.” Sheboygan County Asylum is reputed to be haunted, and a local company offers ghost tours. Ghost tours usually involve spooky stories, some real, some not. This tour is taking a more direct approach. We will be attempting to communicate with the spirits who inhabit the building.

Sheboygan County Asylum’s real name is Sheboygan County Comprehensive Health Care Center. Located close to Waldo in a rural part of the county, the center was built in 1939 and was very modern for its day. The huge building has a central spine of administrative offices and facilities, flanked on each side by a V-shaped wing, three stories high, where the patients lived. From the air, the building looks like a dragonfly.

The tour starts in the dining room. The roof leaks. Kids’ plastic wading pools have been placed strategically to catch the water. The paint on the ceiling is flaking badly. A window bangs in the wind. I’m with two companions on the early tour, which runs from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. In total, there are about twenty people on the tour.

In the dining room, we split into two groups and follow our four tour guides to the first floor of one of the V-shaped wings. This ward, we are told, was for the criminally insane. The ward is a straight, wide hallway with about a dozen rooms on each side. A floorplan on the wall shows that they were mostly bedrooms, but there’s also a bathroom, a day room and a nurses’ station. The bedrooms are small and their walls are made of yellow glazed tiles. 

Our tour guides lay out their equipment. They place a long strip of lights on the floor. The lights change color when they detect motion. There’s also a REM pod that emits an electromagnetic field (EMF), which can be influenced by a paranormal entity. A dead bell – which looks like the kind of bell you used to find in hotel lobbies to summon the bellboy – is placed next to the REM pod on top of some sort of electronic gadget. There’s a small plush toy dog (a BooBuddy) that “barks” when you touch it. The tour guides have a bunch of other equipment. I don’t catch all the names. A digital recorder? A ghost box? One of the guests brought his own EMF meter. This equipment is all available online. 

The most surprising things are the cat balls – small plastic balls that light up when they detect motion. “Who brought the cat balls?” asks one of the tour guides and the other guides rummage through their equipment to find them. They place a cat ball in front of each open doorway on the ward. We are ready to begin communicating. 

It starts with a lot of questions. “Do you want to talk to us?” “Are the nurses good to you?” “Do you want to play with my puppy?” (The BooBuddy.) They offer the spirits cigarettes and alcohol as an incentive to communicate. There’s debate about whether they like beer or whisky better. Some of the lights on the strip change color and the BooBuddy makes a few noises. Not much activity though. It’s the first tour of the season, and the tour guides wonder if the spirits are unused to so many people. 

We take a look at the hydrotherapy room – once probably a pleasant open space. Banks of louvered windows line the walls, their curtains in tatters. Here patients would have taken hot baths, which were viewed as therapeutic. None of the tubs remain. The floor of the room is covered in tiny plastic beads that stick in the treads of my Skechers Slip-ins (comfortable shoes for the tour). “They hold Airsoft tournaments here,” explains a tour guide.

Now we’re in the tunnels, which are dark and claustrophobic. My Skechers sploosh through puddles on the concrete floor. Dusty pipes run along the walls of the tunnels. A guide mentions a Destination Fear episode in which four paranormal investigators spent the night in the asylum. We’re at the location where the team captured a picture of a fleeting human shadow. This entity is now known as Shadow Man. 

We stop at the convergence of three tunnels and set up. The equipment is the same, except that there is also a matrix light that throws tiny green dots over the tunnel walls, to detect movement. The guides identify some of the spirits inhabiting the building. Jacob. The Priest. One of the guides tries to coax Shadow Man to appear. She calls him by his real name – Frank – but warns us that Shadow Man doesn’t like the name. 

Suddenly, the green dots flicker on and off. “Did you see that?” someone asks.

(Continued next week.) 

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