By Justin Isherwood

Halloween is the creepy holiday. Only to walk through Shopko, Wal-Mart, even Menards and Fleet Farm, and be assailed by that vivid host of leering, dripping gore, a veritable choir loft of the demonic. Such is this universal nerve of horridness to wonder what subliminal nerve is satisfied by our annual rite of the scary and spooky kind.

Landscape can have its own scary connotations. It is one thing to stroll after dark in a sylvan woods, a public park, an open meadow. It is quite another to attempt this same transit in adark uncowoods whose trail is not generous, where moonlight doesn’t touch the ground.

Of possessed landscapes in central Wisconsin, none is more naturally foreboding than the precincts of the Buena Vista Marsh. That even unto the modern age is uninhabited, the better to foster the supposition of the sinister kind. Marshes have a long reputation for giving average and brave persons a case of the creepie-crawlies. Sherlock Holmes has something to do with this, as does Macbeth and King Lear, to posit that Doctor Frankenstein’s invention was last seen stumbling into a dismal swamp.

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