This haunted Wisconsin high school will give you chills

We had made our way to the boiler room in the basement of the old high school here and waited for a response.

The lights were off. And as we sat in the dark, Craig Nehring began recording using the video app on his smartphone. He was hoping to hear from Mike, a former janitor at the 108-year-old building that saw its last classes nearly 30 years ago. It’s also believed a fourth-grade girl wanders the halls.

“I know you like to talk to me when I’m down here, and I’ve also heard the little girl giggle in the hallway. Is she around?” Nehring asked. “Can you say hi? I have a friend with me today.”

But on this day, Mike, who is believed to have died decades ago, was as quiet as the massive, idled boiler that filled a part of the darkened room. There wasn’t a peep from the girl, either.

And that’s probably a good thing. I believe in heaven and hell, but I’m not sure Glenbeulah High School is some sort of rural Sheboygan County purgatory. Despite my skepticism, I have to admit being a bit freaked out and thinking to myself at the time about what to do if janitor Mike or giggling little girl had answered a few of Nehring’s questions.

For three days this month, however, the former school building in this village of 460 people will host a few hundred believers who may have some answers.

Nehring has written several books on haunted places, ghosts and the unexplained along with business partner Melissa Clevinger. The duo also own Haunted Midwest Ghost Tours, the driving force behind the second annual Great Lakes Paranormal Conference from Sept. 13-15. The event is scheduled to include celebrities and speakers from paranormal television shows that investigate ghosts, haunted sites and UFOs, and search for clues that Bigfoot may actually exist.

They include Jason Dawes and Shari DeBenedeti of “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Nation”; Dave Schrader, a longtime radio show host who now has the “Paranormal 60” podcast series; and Adam Berry, known for his appearances on “Kindred Spirits,” “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Hunters Academy.” Others include Shane Pittman of “28 Days Haunted” and the “Holzer Files”; Russell Acord and Mireya Mayor of “Expedition Bigfoot”; and Chad Lindberg, whose film roles include “The Fast and the Furious” and “October Sky” and who co-hosted the television series “Ghost Stalkers.”

The school also will be filled with those selling books and holistic items, others who do psychic readings and astrology, and some who will come to promote podcasts like “Badger Bizarre,” a Wisconsin-based podcast about “the dark, macabre, strange and unique happenings” in the state. Recent episodes have included topics about the 1978 murder of a nurse practitioner in Adams County; Rosemary Kennedy’s life at St. Colletta’s in Jefferson; and the 1990 helicopter crash at Alpine Valley that killed legendary rock guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. The podcast, hosted by Scott Wittman and Mickey Sanders, also has delved into the state’s haunted roads and “centuries-old paranormal happenings” in Mineral Point.

“Although today this area is an artist’s haven, in the early decades of the 19th century, it was a rough and tumble region rife with miners, gamblers, and drifters, where crime was prevalent, and law enforcement was not,” Wittman and Sanders write on their website about the early days of the Iowa County lead mining community.

Closed in 1995

Glenbeulah, just north of Highway 23, northwest of Plymouth, is considered one of the gateways to the Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest but is largely void of commercial establishment, save a convenience store, a few bars and a laundromat.

The village, where the sounds of motorbikes and cars can be heard on the track at Road America, should not be confused with nearby Greenbush, home to Old Wade House, a 240-acre state historic site and home to a former stagecoach stop and a museum that holds the state’s largest collection of antique carriages and wagons.

The old high school in Glenbeulah was constructed in 1916 and over the years was also home for grade school and middle school students. The school hosted its last students in the spring of 1995. The community is now part of a joint school district with nearby Elkhart Lake.

There was a plan to convert the school building in Glenbeulah into apartments, but those plans never materialized and the school sat empty for over 25 years. That is until 2021, when Nehring and Clevinger made an offer on the place, but not before doing a little paranormal research work. After a few visits, they came away convinced the building was home to more than the original chalkboards, desks and piano.

Their $165,000 bid was accepted, so they removed the asbestos floor tiles in the basement, added a few coats of paint to some of the rooms and set the building up to resemble a school, not a haunted house. One of the exceptions is a room filled with more than 250 dolls. Some of them are in built-in cabinets with glass doors, which adds to the creep factor.

“I’ll sometimes say that ‘if any of the dolls want to go home, they can knock on the glass.’ It’ll be pitch black and you can hear little knocks on the glass. It’s happened multiple times,” Nehring said, as he stood among the collection of dolls, some of which were sitting upright on the floor.

“Everybody loves this room. There’s a lot of activity in this room.”

The paranormal

Nehring, 54, was born in Milwaukee but when he was in fifth grade, his family moved to Minocqua. That’s where Nehring became active in water skiing and performed in shows with ski teams in Manitowish Waters, Sayner and Rhinelander. After high school, he worked in maintenance jobs at area hotels and motels before moving to Sheboygan in 2005 to take a job driving truck delivering groceries from warehouses to supermarkets.

But it was in northern Wisconsin when he was in high school that Nehring became interested in the paranormal. His father knew the owners of Summer Wind, an abandoned mansion on West Bay Lake located near the Michigan border in northern Vilas County. The mansion was destroyed by fire in 1988, but the property, believed by some to be haunted, has left an indelible impression on Nehring, who also has written about the mansion in one of his books.

Nehring, who is single, founded Fox Valley Ghost Hunters in 2011 and began doing paranormal investigations. He and later began offering tours of the now-shuttered Sheboygan County asylum, in a rural setting between Waldo and Sheboygan Falls.

Haunted Midwest Ghost Tours was formed in 2021 and now offers not only tours of the asylum but also $59 tours of the school in Glenbeulah. Another private event for $395 allows a group to hang out in the dark between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. to listen for voices, knocks, steps and bumps.

“I don’t know. There must be a lot of us out there because there’s a lot of locations that are haunted and there’s a lot of people who do this stuff,” said Nehring when asked about people thinking what he does is a bit nuts. “I tell them to come on a tour and see for themselves. We turn so many skeptics into believers.”