"The Haunting of the Horicon Marsh"

I grew up in a haunted farmhouse overlooking the Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin. I can still remember autumn days, with bare branches brushing the horizon like webs of black lace, wild geese see sawing through moody skies, and the scent of burning leaves full and rich on the wind.

It was during this time we had the most paranormal activity.

When the October moon rose full and orange and pregnant, long dead Native Americans would rise out of their burial mounds on the edge of the marsh to ride amongst the world of the living on their painted Indian ponies.

More than once we were jolted awake from a dreamless slumber as we thought we heard the dairy cows stampeding through the farm yard. By the time we raced out of the house and into the eerie glow of the harvest moon we realized the sounds we heard were not cows but the snorts and whinnies of horses. We stood in awe as we watched a paranormal procession of long dead Indians gallop past us. Even now a chill on spidery legs walks down my spine as I remember those phantoms staring at me with long dead ,endless eyes. Often they would circle around the house for what seemed hours until the sun of morning turned them to mist, their yearly mission once again complete.

And so the years passed, with my brothers and me marching up the creaky old steps to our bedrooms upstairs. On cold winter nights the wind would gnaw at the windows like a living thing. Its icy breath invaded the rooms seeping into everything.

We huddled deep in our quilts of feathers and told each other stories about ghosts, hauntings and of course, Eddie Gein. Ed Gein was from Plainfield, Wisconsin and was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's demented character Norman Bates of Psycho fame. That very same Ed Gein was now incarcerated at the prison in Waupun, just west across the Horicon Marsh and a mere six miles away from our farm.

In the fall of the year, my grandfather would drive us by the old Gein homestead whenever we went to Plainfield to buy potatoes for the coming winter. It is hard to imagine that such a sleepy little town, average in every way could have something so evil festering just beneath the surface. The only strange thing about the place where Ed Gein once lived were all the crows that flocked where the house once stood. Crows, cousin to the larger and more glorious raven, are intelligent creatures, but these seemed even more so. They looked at us with their knowing beady black eyes, as if

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