If you’ve heard of the Platte Mound, you may have heard of it’s “haunted house”
Numerous folktales start with the words “it was a dark and stormy night.” However, not all of them have influenced a community as much as “The Nodolf Incident.” This unique piece of lore has fascinated Platteville residents for over a century. Locals still remember the legend of “the strange night,” where the “dark and stormy” weather resulted in the mysterious disappearance of Minnie and Louie Nodolf. This article will introduce the Nodolf family and their unforgettable run-in with the supernatural.
The Nodolf Family Legend
In the 1800s, an industrious German settler named Carl Nodolf (also known as Charles or Karl) set up his homestead near the Platte Mound. The Mound is a natural rock formation that is now marked with the world’s largest “M.” Carl bought a sturdy stone cottage surrounded by lush fields, taking the first step to creating a farm he could call his own. According to folklore, he then went back to get his fiancé in Hanover, Germany. Carl was eager to take his sweetheart to America and build a life with her in the frontier town of Platteville.
However, his dream was not to be. When he got to Hanover, he discovered that his fiancé and most of her family had died in a diphtheria outbreak a few weeks before his arrival. Only her sister, Louise Steinhoff, and her mother had survived. Heartbroken, Carl almost gave up on his Platteville home before deciding to give the States another try. He and his fiancé’s remaining family members moved to the Mound and did their best to live a normal life. Not too soon after the trip, Carl noticed the deepening affection he had towards his departed fiancé’s sister. The similarity between the two siblings must have been striking. As Louise Steinhoff was only sixteen at the time, Carl waited two years to ask her hand in marriage.
The Real Nodolf Family
Carl Nodolf did settle by the Platte Mound in 1866 (“Charles Nodolf”). About six months later, he went back to his hometown of Hanover, Germany. There Carl met with his in-laws, the Steinhoffs. The family was safe and sound; nobody had died from diphtheria. Carl helped Johanna Steinhoff move to the Platteville area with her children Louise and Heinrich (“Johanna Caroline Bertram”). Johanna’s other daughter, Caroline, had already moved to Wisconsin. Caroline had married Carl’s brother, Louis Rudolf Nodolf, in 1861 (“Caroline Steinhoff”). In 1875, twenty-eight-year-old Carl Nodolf married eighteen-year-old Louise Steinhoff, creating more branches in the Nodolf-Steinhoff family tree (Johanne Marie Louise Steinhoff”).
The Strange Night
Carl and Louise took extra caution when they prepared their home for the impending storm.
By 1880, Carl and Louise Nodolf were doing well in their Platteville home. They had two children: a four-year-old named Minnie and a two-year-old named Louie. All was peaceful until “the strange night” in June when a massive storm rolled over their property. Oddly enough, the dark clouds seemed to hover over their home while the rest of the sky was blue and serene (Gard and Sorden). The soft rain turned into never-ending sheets at dusk, and the wind picked up into fierce gales.
They fastened each shutter tightly and slid bolts across every door. After making sure that the house was completely secure, they tucked Minnie and Louie into bed. The chaotic lightning and howling of wolves kept Carl and Louise awake long after their children had dozed off. Louise had never heard the wolves so close to her home before. At around midnight, Carl and Louise decided that they would at least try to get some sleep. Louise led the way up the stairs with her lantern as she and her husband checked on the children. After seeing that Minnie and Louie were sound asleep, they finally went to bed.
Several hours later, Louise woke to a crash of thunder. She thought she could hear her daughter crying out for help. She grabbed her lantern and ran to the children’s bedroom. Louise looked at their beds and saw they were empty. Carl was also awake by this point, and the two of them ran downstairs to see if their children had wandered in the night. Not finding them anywhere in the house, Louise and Carl called out, “Minnie!” “Louie!” in panic. All they heard was the rain beating down on the roof. Then, through the tumult of the storm, they noticed Minnie and Louie answering them from outside the house.
Carl unbolted the main door and found the children standing on the steps shivering. He ushered them into the house while Louise rushed to get them a warm change of clothes. Before she made it very far, Carl told her not to bother. Miraculously, Minnie and Louie had not gotten wet while they were in the middle of the storm. This detail was strange, considering the house did not have much of a porch, and there was no shelter for miles around that could have kept them dry. In the words of Haunted Heartland authors Beth Scott and Michael Norman, “it was as if they had been standing in some invisible shell on the doorstep of the house” (451). Carl and Louise were thrilled that their children were safe, but baffled by the bizarre event. They wondered not only how Minnie and Louie stayed dry in the rain, but also how they got out of the house in the first place.
Carl rechecked the house and saw that all the locks and bolts were untouched. Everything was still sealed from the inside. It would have been challenging for young Minnie and Louie to reach the bolts and slide the heavy bars to the side. Even if Minnie and Louie had managed to leave the house, who locked everything behind them? When Carl and Louise asked Minnie what had happened, she said that she did not know. The more she tried to talk, the worse she stuttered.
Minnie had never stuttered before that night, but both she and Louie would keep stuttering for the rest of their lives. According to Scott and Norman, they were the “only two of the eight Nodolf children to do so” (451). According to legend, Minnie and Louie never remembered what occurred on the “strange night.”
What happened that night?
What happened to Minnie and Louie defies all logic. But that fact has not stopped people from trying to explain the unexplained. The Nodolfs themselves tried in vain to come up with a reason for what happened on that “strange night.” Carl thought maybe some nomads (he used the term “gypsies”) had tried to carry off the children, before being scared off by the storm. This theory does not make any sense, and there were no camps or caravans anywhere near the Platte Mound at the time. Neighbors speculated that perhaps one of the parents had been sleepwalking and accidentally locked the children out of the house. This explanation is also strange because Carl and Louise kept waking up during the loud storm. Recently, independent researchers have rekindled interest in the case. Some of their wilder theories regarding Minnie and Louie’s disappearance include teleportation, alien abductions, and paranormal activity.
Michael Winkle and other proponents of the teleportation theory cite David Paulides’ Missing 411 series. These books focus on accounts where young people unexpectedly vanish and reappear in the Midwest area. The children in these cases, like Minnie and Louie, seldom remember how they got from one area to another. UFO enthusiast Joseph Trainor notes that Minnie and Louie may have experienced something that they could not comprehend, like an alien craft. Not too long after the incident, in 1894, local newspapers reported a strange ball of fire dashing through the sky in the Chicago area. The celestial anomaly was accompanied by “a terrific peal of thunder and vivid lightning” (“Fall of a Ball of Fire”). Some theorize that odd meteor-type objects like this one were actually spaceships. The trauma of seeing or being abducted by aliens could have led Minnie and Louie to their lifelong stuttering.
Finally, many Platteville residents think that the Nodolf house is haunted. Some people who believe Louise’s sister died from diphtheria point to her as the ghost (“Platteville, Wisconsin Ghost Sightings”). After all, she might have wanted to come to Platteville with the rest of her family. She could have unlocked and locked the door without anyone knowing. As stated before, Louise did not have any siblings who died of diphtheria, but it makes for a compelling story. A few of the people who have visited the old Nodolf home insist there is a ghost because of the eerie wailing sounds they have heard at the site (“Platteville, Wisconsin Ghost Sightings”).
Legacy
Only a few sources describe the Nodolf incident, with the primary account coming from Erva Loomis Merow (Gard and Sorden). She was a successful children’s book author from Kenosha, and there is a chance she “embellished” the tale when she relayed it in the 1960s (“Erva Merow”). Although the Nodolf Incident story is less well known today than it was in previous decades, the legend lives on. In 2015, Wisconsin composer Heidi Joosten wrote a collaborative choral piece about the incident. The work was performed by sixth through twelfth-grade choir students at Platteville High School (“Platteville schools The Strange Night”).
The Nodolf home still stands today and is a great site to visit by the “M.” Although the walls are intact, the house is crumbling and structurally unsound (Burns). An outside glance is fine, but it is not safe to venture inside. Those who are brave enough to visit the property cannot help but wonder what really happened to Minnie and Louie on that “strange night” so long ago.
Works Cited
Burns, Terry. “The Platte or Platteville ‘M’ Mound.” Adventures in Driftlessness, 11 November 2019. Accessed 10 August 2020.
“Charles Nodolf Obituary.” Shared by Scott Wichmann on Ancestry.com, 02 March 2011. Accessed 10 August 2020.
“Erva Merow Obituary.” Bruch-Hansen Funeral Home. Accessed 10 August 2020.
“Fall of a Ball of Fire.” The Weekly Wisconsin [Milwaukee, Wisconsin], 15 Sept. 1894, p. 1.
Gard, Robert and Leland Sorden. Wisconsin Lore, Antics, and Anecdotes of Wisconsin People and Places. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1962.
“Platteville schools The Strange Night premieres Monday.” SWNews4U.com, 21 October 2015. Accessed 10 August 2020.
Scott, Beth and Michael Norman. Haunted Heartland. Stanton & Lee, 1985.
Trainor, Joseph. “1881: A Possible Abduction in Southern Wisconsin.” UFO Roundup, vol. 5, no. 29, 2000, http://www.ufoinfo.com/roundup/v05/index.shtml. Accessed 10 August 2020.
Winkle, Michael. “Missing 411 Annotations.” The Fantasy World Project, Accessed 10 August 2020.
Wichmann, Scott. “Caroline Steinhoff.” Ancestry.com, . Accessed 10 August 2020.
—. “Johanna Caroline Bertram.” Ancestry.com. Accessed 10 August 2020.
—. “Johanne Marie Louise Steinhoff.” Ancestry.com. Accessed 10 August 2020.
