Alexander Noble House

The oldest wood-framed house in Fish Creek has been haunted since 1875, when a ghostly fog shaped like a woman carrying a baby began appearing near the site where the original cabin burned. Visitors photograph strange figures in bedroom mirrors, a docent felt a cold hand console her while discussing the family's tragedy, and the Door County Trolley collects 50 to 100 ghost photos from the property every year.

During her first night as a docent at the Alexander Noble House in 2014, Katelaine Buske stood in the parlor wearing an authentic Victorian dress, telling visitors about Emily Noble's death. Mid-sentence, she felt a cold hand pat her back, slow and deliberate, as if someone were consoling her. Nobody was behind her.

That summer, working the Door County Trolley's nighttime ghost tours, Buske experienced it all: a child tugging her skirt in an empty room, crying from the upstairs bedrooms, doors slamming on their own, picture frames falling off walls. In one of the upstairs mirrors, she spotted a bearded man standing behind her. When she turned around, the room was empty. "They're just making sure everyone still knows that they're alive and chilling in the home," she told her school paper afterward.

The ghost story starts with a fire. Alexander Noble, a Scottish immigrant who became Fish Creek's blacksmith, postmaster, and town chairman, built his family's original log cabin around 1862. His wife Emily died in 1873. The following year, the cabin burned to the ground, taking every object Emily had ever owned. Their eldest daughter Ula, just 22 years old, drew up plans for a new Greek Revival farmhouse on the exact same site. Alexander and the community built it in 1875. During a later restoration, workers found a charred cedar board beneath the foundation, proof the original cabin had stood right there.

Almost immediately after the new house went up, a ghostly fog shaped like a woman in white carrying a baby began appearing in the backyard near where the cabin had burned. The figure would walk from the old cabin site across the property to the back kitchen door and stop. The family was frightened at first. But the sightings came so frequently through 1875 and 1876 that they decided it was Emily, coming back to check on her children.

The sightings never stopped. When Alexander's granddaughter Dr. Gertrude Howe, a pediatrician who flew her own plane across Wisconsin delivering the newly developed polio vaccine, moved out in 1990, the house sat boarded up for six years. Passersby reported faces staring out of the windows during that period. A woman in white lace, her dress matching 1800s descriptions of the backyard ghost, appeared behind the glass. Nobody was living inside.

The most active spot is Alexander's bedroom, where visitors take photos in front of an old mirror and find things in the images that weren't visible in person. One visitor captured what looked like a skeleton's face where her own reflection should have been. Alexander may be present too. During a Gibraltar Historical Association funeral reenactment, a photograph of his casket showed a floating orb of light hovering above it. In another image taken in his bedroom, what appeared to be hovering flames rimmed the top of his rocking chair, though the chair showed no damage.

The Door County Trolley reports receiving 50 to 100 ghost photos from visitors every year. The house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, now operates as a museum run by the Gibraltar Historical Association. Director Laurie Buske sums up the situation simply: "It's just a family that never wants to move out."