The Haunted Tallman House of Horicon, Wisconsin
Yea it looks nice but this is Myths, Mysteries, & Monsters, assume one of those gifts has a head, Se7en style
It was a week before Christmas in 1987 and Allen Tallman had had enough. It was the final time he would let whatever was living in his home terrorize his children. He storms into his living room, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Get out of my house!”
No response. He yells again challenging the ghoul in the home to come after him first. He holds his breath waiting for something, anything, and then nothing happens.
A few weeks later he pulls up to his home, late from work at 2 am. The air is quiet but as he approaches his garage a howling of wind begins stopping him in his tracks. He follows the sounds to the edge of his garage where he hears an ominous voice through the howls.
It says, “Come here.”
The Tallman Family Move In
On April 13th, 1986, the Tallman family consisting of husband and wife, Allen and Debbie Tallman along with their three young children, a boy, and two girls moved into a new home in the small farming town of Horicon, Wisconsin. The family considered it their dream home and quickly made it their own.
Allen had taken a job as a shift supervisor at a manufacturing plant which would often leave him working till late at night while Debbie stayed home with the children. At first, everything seemed perfect, until February of 1987 when the family decided to purchase a bunk bed from a second-hand shop for their growing family.
While they set up the rooms, Allen built the bunk bed in the basement. Several days after bringing the bunk bed into the home the children began getting sick. Something the Tallmans would consider unusual as the children rarely would get sick in the months and years prior. Now Debbie was bringing the children to the doctor multiple times a week, sometimes all three of the children would need to see the doctor in the same week.
The Haunting Begins
In May the Tallmans finally brought the bunk bed upstairs, placing it in the room next to where their son slept. That night as their son slept, his radio turned on randomly switching between channels, witnessing the dial on the side of the old radio move on its own.
He ran out of the room to his parents in the living room but Debbie and Allen chalked it up to imagination and malfunctioning electronics. They removed the radio from his room and sent him back to sleep.
At this point you couldn’t blame them for thinking it was just imagination or a nightmare, none of the other members of the home had experienced anything strange and none wouldn’t for another few weeks when Allen was painting the basement.
Debbie called Allen to take a break and come upstairs for lunch and he complied leaving the brush on the edge of the pan. When he returned he found the brush dipped in the paint can handle first, something Allen knew he didn’t do yet he kept the incident to himself as he didn’t believe there was something in the home.
Soon Debbie would learn there was.
The Woman with Red Eyes
Their 2-year-old daughter who had been sleeping in the bunk bed told her of a woman with red eyes appearing in the room. She would often come around at night and create a fire in the room that would disappear shortly after.
Debbie believed her to be a witch but was still uncertain if the story was imaginary until a month later when her son screamed in the middle of the night. He claimed to have seen the same woman, glowing red as if she was on fire.
Debbie and Allen asked their pastor Wayne Dobratz to come to inspect the home. Immediately he could feel an evil presence believing it to be the work of the devil. He encouraged the family to attend church on a regular basis to combat the evil spirits but this only made them angry.
The family began hearing voices throughout the home, doors were banging open and closed at all hours of the night, and the children were being visited more often by the burning witch. It was now the week before Christmas, seven months after the first occurrence when their son’s radio was controlled by an unseen spirit and once again their son would scream in the night claiming to have seen another vision that terrified him.
“You’re Dead”
Allen lost his temper challenging the spirit to attack him instead of his children but when there wasn’t a response the family believed the worst may be over. But just three weeks later Allen would be called by the spirit outside of his garage as he returned from work. The voice beckoned him to come closer but Allen found nothing as the wind howled around him.
He turned back to his front door when he heard the voice again, upon back towards the garage this time he saw the fiery flames engulfing it. He ran inside, lunch pale in hand and realized the garage wasn’t actually on fire. He looked back outside and it was all perfectly normal. But as he entered his home once again the lunch pail in his hand was fiercely launched across the room.
Allen could do nothing to battle the unseen force and with no other choice, he made his way to his daughter’s room to sleep. He had been sleeping on the floor near their bed to help the girls sleep through the night as they were terrified to do so alone. But the spirit of the witch wasn’t done with Allen yet. Later in the night, he awoke to a fog filling the room, a voice sounded through the fog saying “You’re dead.”
Moments later he was in the kitchen with Debbie, unable to speak but shaking from fear with tears running down his face. Several days later, Allen knew he was going to be late from work and asked a relative to stay with his daughters in the room until he arrived.
The relative didn’t believe in the stories or the hauntings in the home but that night he would see the burning witch and scream at the top of his lungs. He walked out of the room as Debbie yelled asking what was going on but it was her breaking point. She had the family leave the home and vowed to never return.
The Bunk Beds
The Tallmans believed whatever haunted their home was linked to the bunk beds and wanted to ensure it couldn’t follow them. Two weeks after leaving the home, they brought the bunk beds to a private dump and had it demolished so it could never be used by anyone ever again. The home was placed on sale in February 1988.
Quickly rumors grew in the neighborhood of what caused the Tallmans to leave the home. People believed blood had oozed from the ceiling, or that the basement contained a hole to hell. Others threatened to burn the place down which caught the attention of the sheriff. He begged the Tallmans to speak to a select few of the press so they could tell their story and people would stop with the rumors.
The bunk beds example as shown on Unsolved Mysteries
Investigations
Soon a new family moved in and the show Unsolved Mysteries would film an episode in the home about the Tallman’s. The new family nor the crew ever experienced any paranormal occurrences. The Tallmans also never had another terrifying experience or visit from the burning witch in their new home in a new city.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal believed the Tallman’s were being affected by a gas leak that caused hallucinations this is bolstered by the fact the Wisconsin Power & Light Company had to replace faulty gas fittings in several homes in the area except the Tallman home wasn’t one of them.
Black Mold?
Also, a question would be why did the hauntings begin after the bunk beds were brought into the home and not prior? To that, I put forth my own, admittingly, flimsy theory. What if the Tallmans were suffering from hallucinations but from black mold in the wood of the bunk beds or in the walls of the home? The bunk beds were purchased from a second-hand store and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
The children experience the hauntings sooner than the parents since they were closer to the mold and smaller. Black mold can cause hallucinations in some cases. But the problem with this theory is there’s very little chance the Tallman family wouldn’t have realized the black mold in the first place. The other symptoms of black mold such as sneezing, allergic reactions, rashes, etcetera were also never said to have occurred.
In the end, we may never actually know what happened in the Tallman house but what we do know is sometimes a dream home can be a real nightmare.
But how about you? Do you think their home was truly haunted or was there a rational explanation for the hauntings?
