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I grew up in Wisconsin, and when I was young, there was this local legend we'd all tell each other around Halloween, purely to scare the crap out of each other. I knew none of it was real, even back then. It was big enough that the legend was listed on the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce's website as a way to drum up business; now, it's gone, and I don't know what the hell happened.
I'm talking about the legend of the Swift Home for Wayward Children.
Supposedly, the Swift Home was an orphanage in Douglas County, constructed in 1871 by one Howard Swift. Swift was a cruel man who prided himself on the strict discipline he inflicted on the children under his care. Beatings, brandings, forcing children to hang from their thumbs or hang upside-down or sit in a dark room for hours if not days on end… all of this was to supposedly bring the children up in the proper Christian manner, free of all the sins of childhood.
In 1890, shortly after Christmas, it burned down. One version of the legend says that Swift left one of his branding irons out next to some tinder. Another says that one of his children, tired of the abuse, threw a candle at a curtain, even if he himself burned. Some say that Swift tried shooting one of the children under his care, and the bullet ignited a gas lamp. Whatever the case, the entire orphanage went up in flames, with over one hundred children, as well as Swift and his staff, all dying.
To this day, the ruins of the orphanage sit in the woods. It's said that if you park your car on the road in front of the ruins of the orphanage, ghostly children will try to tip it over, leaving ashen handprints on the windows and burns on the paint.
The thing is? All of that is bullshit.
throwaway57 Month/Day/Year (Day) Hour:Minute:Second #8digitnumber
Howard Swift did actually exist. So did the orphanage— but they had nothing to do with each other. Swift was part of a group of settlers that attempted to establish a logging town near Superior; Swift had a disagreement with the leader of the settlers, a man named Sloth, and Swift built his estate outside of the limits of the settlement in about 1883.
In 1885, a series of logging accidents left six children without their parents. To care for them, Sloth established the 'Light of Wisdom Orphanage' on the same road as Swift's mansion, an act that Swift saw as a continuation of the feud.
The exact event that started the Sloth-Swift feud is unclear but may have been related to Sloth's son Jasper courting Swift's daughter Jessica; at the time, both were about fourteen years old. He thought this was an attempt by Sloth's settlement to encroach on his land and claim it as part of the town, while Sloth framed it as a philanthropic venture. Swift reportedly threatened the orphanage the whole time the two inhabited the same road, going so far as to throw rocks into the windows.
By all accounts, the Light of Wisdom Orphanage had a clean record; Sloth thought the forms of child discipline popular in the late 1800s were barbaric, and insisted that the children be kept well-clothed, well-fed, and was willing to pay for all of this out of pocket. His daughter, Caroline, continued these practices after his death in 1890.
Swift would die in 1892 from tuberculosis. As a precaution, his possessions were destroyed; however, the incinerator on his property let out an inexplicable gout of flame, and the entire mansion burnt down as a result.
Light of Wisdom was abandoned in 1918, following the death of Caroline Sloth. It fell into disrepair, before being condemned and demolished in the mid-1950s.
Cool story, right? But there's one problem: I can't find any evidence of any of this.
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I own a first edition copy of the book Weird Wisconsin from 2005. It lists the story of the Swift Home for Wayward Children in the table of contents, right next to Paradise Road and the Sauk County Vampire Valley. I saw another copy of the book in a Barnes and Noble about a week back; the section about the Swift Home was gone.
The same's true for other resources that track paranormal areas in the USA; it's not listed on Atlas Obscura. It had a Wikipedia page at one point, but that's also gone now. And like I said, the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce doesn't list it anymore. If not for the fact that I have photographs of it and a copy of Weird Wisconsin I have on my desk as I write this, conversations with my friends, and my mother preserving a horror story I wrote about the Swift Home for fifth grade, I'd never know it existed.
I found a reference to it on the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce's website using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The last date the Wayback Machine crawled the site that the legend shows up is in October 2018.
But I know it's still there. I'm going to find it. Wish me luck.
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