Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 57. Sunrise is 7:24 and sunset is 5:52 for 10 hours 28 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis ends and Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Whitewater has a long-standing reputation as a haunted place. The topic emerges now and again because stories and legends about Whitewater are more numerous here than in ordinary Wisconsin places that have been beset only by mosquitoes and coyotes. (There’s a Spirit Tour in this town because there are stories about spirits in this town.)
Milwaukee Magazine’s Tea Krulos writes of Second Salem: The Haunted History of Whitewater’s Spiritualist Past:
These spooky stories are thick on the ground in Whitewater, a college town of less than 15,000 about an hour’s drive southwest of Milwaukee. They say that Whitewater’s three cemeteries form the points of a “Witch’s Triangle,” with all the area within its borders under a curse. Under the light of the Halloween moon, the spirit of a bloodthirsty witch (who also happens to be an ax murderer in some versions) named Mary Worth rises from a crypt to stalk new victims.
Over at UW-Whitewater’s Andersen Library, there’s an ancient, leather-bound spellbook locked in a cage that will drive anyone who reads it (or even asks about it) insane. Elsewhere on campus, a magical altar is said to be buried under a building. A network of underground tunnels is used by a coven to traverse to Starin Park, where they assemble to perform Black Mass on unholy nights in front of the “Witches Tower.” Whitewater Lake has a kraken-like beast lurking beneath the surface, possibly conjured by witchcraft. And on and on.
All of these tales are weaved from a singular source at the center of the web: the Morris Pratt Institute, a unique college begun in Whitewater where communicating with the deceased was part of the curriculum. The legacy of this school, built at the peak of the Gilded Age religious movement of Spiritualism and bankrolled by a prophesied iron bonanza, is still alive today – not just in the urban legends it spawned but also in reality.
No story about our past would be complete without mention of Morris Pratt, capitalizing on loss and longing to bring his heterodox beliefs to Whitewater:
Pratt made good on his word [to advance Spiritualism] and began making Whitewater into a hub for his beliefs.
In 1889, a three-story brick building opened at the corner of what is now Whitewater’s Fremont and Center streets: the Sanitarium and Hall of Psychic Science, later renamed the Temple of Science. Pratt’s Spiritualist center had lecture halls, living quarters and a space for the practice of séances, mediumship and scrying (visioning the future in reflective surfaces such as crystal balls). The latter was known as the White Room for its entirely colorless paint and furnishings….
Pratt’s brusque approach didn’t endear him to the town, either. At the Temple of Science’s opening day, the lineup of lecturers reportedly attacked and ridiculed other religions. Later that year, Pratt placed an announcement in the Whitewater Register challenging leaders of the other churches in town to debate him. When no one accepted, he began showing up at their church services for “highly argumentative, belligerent confrontations that caused him to be shunned and ridiculed in Whitewater,” author Len Faytus wrote in The Spook Temple: The Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater, Spiritualism and the Occult.
See Tea Krulos, Second Salem: The Haunted History of Whitewater’s Spiritualist Past, Milwaukee Magazine, October 20, 2025.
However frightful or delightful, after an occasional Halloween interlude, one leaves behind stories of creatures or specters and returns to daily life in our small city of fifteen thousand.
Video shows view from inside the eye of Hurricane Melissa: