First Ward Schoolhouse

What the record supports: the building served Wisconsin Rapids as a public school for roughly eighty years, then passed into private hands. By the early 2010s the owners — the Libigs family, associated with the Wisconsin Investigators of Paranormal Studies — were hosting paid dusk-to-dawn investigations to fund repairs on a building that, by their own account, was in very rough shape when they bought it. The Booth Brothers filmed there in September 2012; regional groups including the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee ran documented sessions in 2013.

That Milwaukee group's report is the file's most careful document. Investigators took baseline EMF and temperature readings, scanned the attic thermally for animals, and logged the building's wiring producing elevated electromagnetic fields — 109 milliGauss near the ceiling wires in one basement area, against a 1.0 mG household norm — the sort of environmental detail that haunts instruments more reliably than it haunts people.

Reported phenomena run to type for a former school: children's laughter, small shadows in the kindergarten classroom, orbs and mists in investigation photographs, a purported story of a death in the attic that the file notes explicitly lacks documentation. During an August 30, 2014 session, one participant reported being touched by something she described as cat-like — and herself allowed that equipment malfunction was possible, which is, by some distance, the most honest sentence in the file. The 2013 Milwaukee team's log is similarly sober: pressure sensations in the basement, scratching on a wall of undetermined cause, and a full thermal sweep that turned up nothing more exotic than wiring.

A purported early log kept by nuns describing haunting activity has been cited in secondary accounts; the dossier notes it could not be located in the source report and treats it accordingly — cited, not filed.

What the testimony amounts to is a building that reads loud on instruments and quiet on documents: high EMF where the wiring runs, basement acoustics where the boilers ran, and a folklore set that assembled itself once the building went private and the investigations became the revenue.

The building stands, privately held, its schoolrooms intact enough to host investigators who pay for the privilege — fundraiser nights ran $50 a head toward repairs, per the W.I.P.S. team's own postings. The documented high EMF, the old radiators, and eighty years of accumulated school folklore do most of the explanatory work. What the archive keeps is the discrepancy it started with: two dates, one building, and a haunting claim that arrived only after the desks left.