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Interest in phony Milton House legend resurfaces every Halloween

MILTON — The limestone walls and dirt floor of the tunnel were damp. It was dark, clammy and musty. Candles flickered.

Through the twists and turns of the tunnel that runs between the Milton House and the ancient Goodrich cabin, Janet Hudson walked, her small group of friends led by a few crouching parents. In the middle of the dark passage, the tunnel opened into an alcove.

Then, the candlelight fell on them: four human skeletons.

That was 76 years ago. Hudson, 85, a retired Milton teacher, was just a girl then. But she remembers it vividly.

“Something like that sticks out in your mind,” she said.

Hudson was recalling a tour of the tunnel under the Milton House that she took in 1934 with a half-dozen members of the Lima 4-H Club.

Earlier this year, Hudson asked Milton House historians about the skeletons. Hudson had donated funding for a recent restoration at the Goodrich cabin. The work had reminded her of her childhood tour of the tunnel—and the skeletons.

Officials told her she wasn’t the first to report the story.

The Milton House, its companionate Goodrich cabin and the underground tunnel that connects the two have long been known as relics of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret, safe havens for escaped slaves prior to the Civil War.

The Milton House has been run as a historical society since the 1950s. But in the 1930s the settlement’s Goodrich cabin was home to Will Davis, husband to a granddaughter of Milton House founder Joseph Goodrich.

Milton House director Cori Olson said historical records along with stories from former visitors indicate Davis had put human skeletons in the Milton House tunnel as part of a hoax to drum up tourism.

“It was a total myth, a money-making scheme,” Olson said.

There are multiple stories about how Davis lured people into paying for tours of Milton’s link to the Underground Railroad, Olson said.

Some accounts indicate that Davis told visitors the skeletons were dead slaves.

In other versions, tourists were told the skeletons were guests at Milton House when it was an inn, and that they’d died of cholera or the plague, Milton House officials said.

A 1932 news story in the Milwaukee Journal titled “Subterranean Cemetery Found Under Log Cabin” says Davis reported finding six human skeletons in the Milton House tunnel along with six moss-covered gravestones bearing the names of Goodrich family members.

The newspaper reported Davis found the remains and other relics while he was excavating the original tunnel beneath the cabin.

Olson said records at the Milton House show that in the early 1930s at least 100 people, mostly area residents like Hudson, paid to tour Davis’ erstwhile tunnel of skeletons. She said there’s evidence Davis even put a jail cell in part of the passage to create an illusion that the place was a dungeon.

Hudson says she doesn’t recall any explanation about the skeletons, but she remembers being frightened during the tunnel tour.

“I remember thinking that I really wanted to get out of there,” she said.

Olson said although the Milton House tunnel no longer has any skeletons, questions about Davis’ macabre ruse come up every Halloween season.

“I warn the staff every October that we might get calls on it,” Olson said. “Last year, I know we did.”

Olson said even into the 1940s and 50s, as local historians were trying to piece together the true history of the Milton House, stories of Davis’ hoax lingered.

“It’s gotten to the point that we laugh about it, but in the ’40s and ’50s, it (the hoax) made it difficult. It was an uphill climb. It actually angered a lot of people,” Olson said.

Olson said history buffs and ghost hunters who read scraps of the legend usually are disappointed to learn Davis’ claims were phony.

“People seem to get kind of bummed when they find out that the skeletons weren’t legitimate,” Olson said.

Hudson said she’s just glad to have an explanation about an eerie experience that has flickered in her memory since she was 9 years old.

“Thinking back, now, it really was kind of weird,” Hudson said. “But back then, children didn’t ask many questions. We just always accepted certain things, and nobody wondered why.”