The Walker House

William Caffee was hanged at the Walker House in 1842 after requesting 'a slice of the judge's heart' for his last meal. His headless ghost has been seen on the back porch, and psychics have identified 22 separate spirits in this Mineral Point inn that started as a cave carved by Cornish miners in the 1820s.

When asked what he wanted for his last meal, William Caffee requested "a slice of the judge's heart." On November 1, 1842, roughly 5,000 spectators gathered in Mineral Point to watch his hanging. The sheriff had hired four guards after Caffee threatened to kill everyone in town. He walked willingly to the wagon and sat on top of a coffin, drumming a funeral march on the wooden sides with two empty beer bottles, all the way to the scaffold about a hundred yards from where the Walker House stands today.

Caffee had shot a man in the heart during a fight at a local dance. He was, by all accounts, a notorious drunk, a brawler, and a thief. The Iowa County Sheriff pulled the gallows lever personally.

The Walker House started as a cave. Cornish miners carved it out of limestone and sandstone in the 1820s, during the lead rush that brought thousands of immigrants to southwestern Wisconsin. By 1836, the cave had been expanded into a small stone house. By the late 1850s, it was a 15,000-square-foot, block-long, three-story inn at 1 Water Street. The building served miners, travelers, and the occasional murderer.

The ghost stories started after the building sat vacant and was renovated. Heavy breathing from empty rooms. Footsteps on the second floor. Doorknobs rattling but never turning. In 1981, the property manager at the time saw what appeared to be Caffee sitting on a bench on the back porch, wearing a rumpled gray suit of miner's clothing. The figure had no head. It sat there for several minutes before vanishing. A waitress later saw the same headless figure on the second floor.

Walker Calvert, a descendant of the original owner William Walker, was hired as property manager and chef in the late 1970s. He had at least three conversations with Caffee's ghost. What they discussed is anyone's guess, but Calvert kept working there.

Current owners Kathy and Dan Vaillancourt bought the Walker House in 2012. Kathy says psychics and paranormal investigators have identified 22 separate ghosts throughout the building's history. Interestingly, none of them have made an appearance in the twelve years she and Dan have owned the place. The Food Network named it the most haunted restaurant in Wisconsin.

The Cornish miners who built the original cave brought their folklore with them: Piskies and Tommy Knockers, mischievous spirits that lived in the mines and tapped on walls to either warn of collapse or lead miners to rich veins of ore. Whether any of those followed the miners above ground and into the Walker House is a question nobody in Mineral Point seems eager to answer definitively. Twenty-two ghosts is a lot for one building. Caffee, sitting headless on the porch, drumming on nothing, accounts for just one of them.