Just off Main Street in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there is a 12-foot-tall stainless steel statue that looks like a chrome mosquito, but with bat wings and human legs and an incredibly chiseled abdomen. The spot it stands in used to be called Gunn Park, but the name was changed to honor the statue and the figure it represents. Now they call it Mothman Park.

The was supposed to be even weirder. The original plan—developed by the town in 2001, after the release of the movie version of the John Keel book The Mothman Prophecies brought national attention to what was once strictly a local legend— called for the statue of the hometown monster-hero to be a towering 20 feet tall. The Mothman’s bulbous red eyes were supposed to light up at night, but funding ran short and the statue’s football-sized eyes were left dull and glassy.

Across the street is the , which sells copies of The Mothman Prophecies on DVD, as well as touristy schlock like Mothman t-shirts and keychains. I so love the idea that a person can keep a whole store in business based solely on the idea that nearly 50 years ago, a couple of residents in Point Pleasant thought they might have seen a flying man with giant wings and eyes that glowed red in the dark.

First Sightings of the Mothman

It helps the Mothman’s case that it was first seen by a group rather than the standard lone eccentric. The first sighting dates back to November 12, 1966, when five men, who were digging a grave in a cemetery at the time, said they saw a “brown human being” fly right over their heads from a grove of trees.

Four days later, a second, more memorable sighting was reported in the Point Pleasant Register. —Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette—were driving together in Roger Scarberry’s car from the “TNT area,” a decommissioned explosives factory from World War II, when they spotted a six- or seven-foot-tall, white creature with red eyes and large wings standing near the road. It followed them as they drove out, but it seemed afraid of the car’s headlights. They later told the Register that the thing, whatever it was, appeared to fly at speeds of about “100 miles per hour.”

One of the young men narrowed down potential suspects for the creature thusly: “It was a bird … or something. It definitely wasn’t a flying saucer.” So we know that much.

Unsurprisingly, a number of people living in Point Pleasant at the time of the sightings did not accept the Mothman theory on its silvery, red-eyed face. The county sheriff as a type of heron he called a “shitepoke,” and an article printed in the that winter quotes a Dr. Robert L. Smith, then-associate professor of wildlife biology at West Virginia University, as saying the creature was most likely a sandhill crane—a bird not typically found in the area, but one whose size (around six feet), wingspan (over seven feet), and circles of reddish flesh around the eyes approximate some of the physical descriptions of the would-be Mothman.

Silver Bridge Collapse of 1967

Whatever it was, it didn’t stick around for very long. A number of sightings echoing the first few were reported over the next several months, but they came to a sudden and dramatic stop when, on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge—connecting Point Pleasant with Kanauga, Ohio, across the Ohio River—collapsed during rush hour, killing 46 people. The chronological proximity of the Mothman’s appearance in town to the Silver Bridge tragedy led some to believe the two were connected. One exceptionally creative theory held that the collapse was caused by “,” but the predominant belief held that the creature’s arrival had been an omen, sent to warn the people of Point Pleasant—in what seems, at best, a very confusing and indirect manner—about poor infrastructure.

It’s nice to think that he was nice, that if something that looks like that town center statue ever came for us, it could be because he wanted to help. It makes you as fond of the guy as you are frightened of him. It’s like the that you can get in Point Pleasant—red and green pepper eyes, mushroom wings, pepperoni body. It’s probably cute and funny to take pictures of, but you’ll also eat it extra-quickly, just in case.

Mothman: Fact or Fiction?

Like any good legend, Mothman continues to make guest appearances out of town. In 2006, a handful of people in LaCrosse, Wisconsin a similar creature, which they dubbed the Man-Bat. The creature—long, with a large wingspan and yellow eyes—reportedly flew over the car of a man and his son, both of whom became sick to their stomachs afterward.

Granted, that strange side effect was never reported with the original, so maybe it isn’t the same guy. But once you’ve accepted one giant winged, man-like creature with glowing eyes, is it so implausible to think there might be more hidden around the country, emerging only to swoop over people’s cars at night?

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The first time I went horseback riding I was eight years old and a Girl Scout-in-training (a Brownie, to be specific) who would never quite make it to the Girl Scouts. It was a surprise, too, because as a child I liked uniforms and codes of conduct and members-only salutes. But the wilderness skills, the large group socializing games, the requirement that we become door-to-door saleswomen who didn’t get to keep even a little of the money we raked in—it wasn’t for me. I earned three or four badges over two months, and then I quit. One of these—ironed onto my tiny brown vest by my mother—was the Horse Rider Badge.Ìę

The trouble with the chupacabra is that it looks an awful lot like a handful of other, regular animals. When someone thinks he’s found one in the United States, the creature usually looks like a coyote, or a fox, or a dog, or a wolf, or a small kangaroo—just slightly off. But most things look a little off when they’re dead. And that’s what most so-called chupacabras have in common when they are found: being a shriveled dead thing.

But then there are those that describe the chupacabra more like a creeping lizard, a green-gray-black scaled monster, either with color-changing spikes or duller black (but still deadly, in the end) spines trailing down its back and tail, with a Hollywood bug-eyed alien face and claws on its fingers and toes. This is the fantastic version, and, it has to be said, the one without the carcasses to show for it. There are only drawings. Or, anyway, that’s what they want us to think.

The chupacabra—the name, Spanish for “goat sucker,” for the animal’s reported eating habits, the vampiric puncture wounds found on the necks or chests of its prey—is a relatively new legend, which I think makes it just slightly more suspicious for reasons I can’t quite explain but which have something to do with having too much familiarity with the historical setting into which it was born. (It’s the same way with religions, for some people. If you had relatives whose names you know and who were around and living when it all got started, doesn’t it just seem less authentic somehow?) 1995? I remember 1995. It did not seem an especially mystical year, or anything like one that could give birth to a new strain of folklore that could last for decades or more. But then, maybe I was too busy with the fourth grade to notice.

It is to that year, though, that the first eyewitness account of a chupacabra dates back, . A few months earlier, eight sheep drained of blood, apparently through puncture marks in their chests, were found dead in a town nearby. The attacks intensified, and soon , where Tolentino lived. She was the first to report seeing the creature responsible.

In the months between the first set of attacks and Tolentino’s report, she went to see the science-fiction movie Species, about a sexy (but lethal) alien woman named Sil who is hell-bent on seducing a human man and who, in her true, spiny-backed form .

That’s how —a paranormal enthusiast-but-skeptic whose written works (and podcast, MonsterTalk) exist to ruin the fun everyone else is having by applying scientific criticism to cryptozoologic and legendary phenomena—came to decide the lizard-man variety of the chupacabra mystery was nothing but a cinematic fever dream. It’s fair enough, if you’re looking for “explanations,” or whatever.

THE MORE MUNDANE VERSION—the dog that is just a little crazy—persists in the continental United States, no matter how many times . The theory explains the look: the hairlessness, the leathery skin, the wiry dying bodies. The smell.

Mange, however, wouldn’t account for the goat-sucking-ness of the thing; the insatiable and frightening craving for blood that makes any of this a more compelling story than one that starts and ends with “a few of my livestock have died.” Scientists say (and not without reason, though I’m loath to admit such a thing) that part is just a myth, an idea run wild upon seeing puncture wounds in an animal’s neck—something that is not, after all, so far outside the typical series of consequences when a carnivore kills something using its canine teeth. So there you go. It’s a young mystery all finished.

But it’s still the sort of thing that can pretty easily end up starring in , the reporter telling the viewer that this, like most chupacabras seen before it, is just a coyote with mange, probably. “Chupacabra” is still what we want to call it when we want to tell someone about something dead and weird we saw on the street—like .

Whatever the thing in that picture is, I think we can all agree that it’s a damn mess. Nothing that was once living is supposed to look like that. Its head is falling off, and it has an ugly, toupee-like clump of brown hair perched in the middle of its back. Its neck is much too big and its hind legs too small. I’d have said it could look like almost anything, but once I learned that the woman who found it, Lacey Ilse, said that the dead creature looked “half-human,” I knew I didn’t mean it. I tried turning my computer screen around and squinting my eyes out of focus and everything. It is 10-percent-human at best.

But anyway, there it was, on the street and in the national news. And a number of people must have wondered what it was for long enough to make it there, but then , which is probably one of the more boring chupacabra lookalikes there ever was.

We went to Alexandria just in case.

BEFORE WE LEFT, I asked Rylee if there was anything we should bring to bait it.

“What do they eat?” she asked.

“Well … goat blood,” I said. She took French in high school, not Spanish.

She paused. “Do we have any?”

Despite hiking up a steep trail meant for snowmobiles for two rather difficult hours, we did not see a chupacabra in (or around) Alexandria. If they are real, for as much as I’d like to claim them as a part of the local wildlife, they just don’t seem all that natural a fit in Minnesota. But then if it were white, like the predecessor seen by Lacey Ilse, it would have blended right in with the fresh foot of snow on the ground. It covered up everything; we didn’t see any badgers (dead or alive) either. The only other living things we saw, in fact, were the local snowmobilers, and, well, there are some questions even I am too embarrassed to ask a stranger.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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It’s weird to make actual plans for something that sounds more like a dream—to just pick a day and book it. But way up north in Minnesota, up at the , a person really can go dogsledding. It’s even a website: .

Dogsledding through Superior National Forest.

Oh hey, dog. Wanna bring me somewhere?

Ìę

Before it became something that most people do for sport—before it became associated with , the Alaskan, 1,049-mile, dog-driven trek (either northward or southward, depending on the year), and one of the three or four races everyone knows by name even if they’ve never watched it—dogsledding served a more pragmatic purpose. Sled dogs originally pulled loads (and people) across North America and Siberia. Today, they are still used among the Inuit peoples in the Arctic Circle, but snowmobiles have made them functionally unnecessary almost everywhere else. But as with every other animal humans have made our own in some way, it was probably never just about function.

Our day trip runs 9-5 and the Wintergreen Lodge is over four hours north of where we live in the Twin Cities, so my friend Rylee and I arrive in the night before. The tiny, Boundary Waters-adjacent town (3,460 residents as of the 2010 census) is not unfamiliar to us—we’ve stayed in a cabin up there two summers in a row—but coming here in the dead of winter is different. Nobody is outside, and several of the souvenir/outdoor-supply stores appear shuttered for the season. When we pull up to (which offers a discount for guests with dogsledding reservations) around sunset, the snowy parking lot is nearly empty. It doesn’t take many steps for me to arrive at melodramatic comparisons to The Shining, but being reminded of it in this case—the frozen hotel exterior not unlike the one Danny Torrance runs out into that night—seems more appropriate than ever.

After a night of very little sleep (due in no part to the lodge, which is cozy and ultimately not likely a place where someone might stick his head through your wall, but to dual senses of foreboding and excitement about the next day), we eat breakfast, put on as much of our cold-weather gear as we can stand, and pack the rest in the car. , and offers extras in its store, but what dogsledders like us wear also depends on the weather. I wore: two long-sleeve thermal tops, a hooded sweatshirt, and an impossibly warm fleece-lined Columbia jacket on top; long-johns, jeans, snow pants, and two thick pairs of socks on bottom; a knit hat (under my hood) and a neck warmer on my head, and thick mittens on my hands. I was lent two neck warmers by my REI-aficionado mother, one of which I wore, and the other of which looked exactly like a black neoprene Hannibal Lecter mask, holes over the mouth and all. (There may be no such thing as a non-terrifying face mask, but this one seemed egregiously so.) When I realize I won’t need it, I am grateful.

AT FIRST, THE DRIVE over to Wintergreen seems simple—the map puts it about 10 miles away, but it soon becomes clear we didn’t leave ourselves enough time for four of them to be winding, unpaved dirt roads covered in slick snow and ice. The route is treacherous, even if only in a familiar-to-Minnesotans sort of way, and when we finally see the signpost for a right-hand turn into the lodge, it’s a little too late: we slide past it for a while before being able to turn back in.

The relief at arriving very nearly on time and un-crushed by trees plus the lack of sleep from the night prior makes us giddy. “What if the lodge were, like, run by dogs?” I ask Rylee, half-deliriously, imagining a whole staff of sled dogs dressed in matching polos and slacks. “Haha, what if one greets us on his hind legs and is like, ‘Welcome,’” she says, and it’s all very funny until we both notice a large dog up the wooded hill from the road, who seems to notice our car and proceeds to head down the path (on all fours, but still), following us into the parking lot. I really thought he might say something. For the first (but not the last) time that day, I feel like I am in the North Pole.

It turns out to be a human woman who greets us when we finally shuffle our way into the lodge. Sue Schurke, co-owner of the Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge with her husband Paul, is tiny and immediately lively and charming. She welcomes us into the lodge’s homey living room—sectional leather couches, a standing fireplace, a long dining table—and invites us to sit anywhere and throw our bags wherever. While we wait for everyone to arrive—with us that day are two young couples and a grandfather with his two grandkids—we learn a little about the dogs: Canadian Inuits.

There are 65 of them at Wintergreen Lodge, each one pure-bred. The family’s first dogs were obtained from an Inuit hunter; others were given to them by the Australian government, which was looking to give a good home to the last team of working dogs in Antarctica. Others were gifts from families in Canada and Greenland. Canadian Inuits are ideal for life at Wintergreen: they aren’t as big as Malamute dogs (another of the four main breeds of working dogs, along with Huskies and Samoyeds), which makes them easier to manage for beginners, but they’re bigger and stronger than Huskies, allowing them to pull sleds in the uneven Superior Forest backwoods. In the lodge’s owners’ terms, .

Dogsledding is criticized by certain animal rights activists for being inhumane, pointing especially to vicious dog abuse in the Iditarod—in 2007, Ramy Brooks received a two-year suspension for having kicked and punched his dogs when they wouldn’t move forward from a race checkpoint. Critics say he’s just one of many, and I don’t know what reasonable person would doubt there’s some truth to that. For trophies and medals and money, there are people—and a never-ending fountain of supporting evidence—who would do anything.

After being at Wintergreen Lodge for 15 minutes, it seems clear this place and those concerns have nothing to do with each other. The dogs here “retire” after 10 or 12 years, and from there they have the run of the lodge. The family, wandering in and out of the main room, talk to the dogs, who are also wandering in and out of the room, like people. They talk to them like people they’ve known and loved—and worked with—for years.

I ALWAYS EXPECT LENGTHIER training processes than most outdoors organizations give, mostly because I’m never sure why anyone trusts me with myself, but after signing our waivers and receiving a 20-minute lesson on how to use the sled brakes, we’re ready to mush. Here, especially, I have little reason to think more background would help: it really is the dogs who run this operation, and they’ll do it, generally speaking, with very little of my input. We do, however, learn a few very important commands: “Ready hike” means go; “Whoa” means stop. Sue tells us, and she’s not kidding, that we don’t need to remember “whoa.” “Whoa” will come to us automatically.

While we were getting our lesson, Wintergreen staff members were preparing the dogs, and when we exit the lodge we hear them down on the lake right away. I know what dogs sound like. What these dogs sound like isn’t what dogs sound like. Their whining whistles, warbly and high-pitched, sometimes sound more mechanical than canine. They sound the way pinching feels. Our group descends toward them, trudging a steep decline along a guide rope, and as soon as we can see them, I start saying “oh my God” and don’t really stop for the rest of the day. The dogs are unbelievable.

They’re lined up in a row, in groups of five or six per two-person sled. Every last one is beautiful. Most are quite big but some are small, in relative terms, nearer to the size of the typical canine pet. They are black and white and beige and red and brown. Rylee and I approach a group that looks especially calm, avoiding the wilder-sounding, tough-looking group behind them until, as our luck would have it, the staff shifts us back there anyway. Every few minutes, as everyone gets situated in a sled and the dogs beg to get started, one of the staff will yell, scolding, “HEINSY!” and they’ll be referring to our sled’s front dog, who is a crotchety troublemaker but also very sweet. Somehow they are all like this: tough, teeth baring viciously if another dog gets too close, and simultaneously the gentlest, most emotionally needy creatures I’ve met. Their faces burrow into your palms like rabbits. They grin.

Rylee will be in charge of braking, and I’ll be “lead musher,” which means that it’s my job to, whenever we’re stopped, jump off the sled and run to the front of our pack to calm, pet, and praise the dogs. If I don’t, they will find something else to do. On our first practice stop, just 50 yards from our starting point on the lake, I forget to do my job. In moments, Heinsy veers left, leading the team to run in a circle back around the left side of our sled, so that we are trapped by our dogs. The guides, who travel alongside us on cross-country skis, get us re-organized, scolding the dogs just a bit and Rylee and I a little more so. It takes a while to get a hang of this: not just the calming, but the braking, too. The dogs desperately want to run.

We get to know our dogs when we really get started, sailing across the snowy lake. In front are Heinsy and Millie; behind them, Isis and Jupiter, and in back, the strongest, Bones and Ramona. (A female dog is set alongside each male, because two males alongside each other will fight. In truth, so will a female and a male, but it won’t be as vicious. In our group at least, the girls start the brawls each time we stop.) Isis and Millie are our black sheep—Isis is especially restless and takes it out on Jupiter. Millie does the same with Heinsy, and when I’m in front calming them down, she also enjoys chomping on my mittens and scarf. Ramona, the Real Housewife of the group, likes to fling herself dramatically to the ground and flop her paws in the air. Bones is our favorite; he is stately and gentlemanly, dark gray fur with a gorgeous white face and the highest, weirdest howl we hear among them all.

What I’m doing when I’m dogsledding looks an awful lot like standing, so I find myself struggling to explain to you how it is so very different. At times I forget it myself, and find myself thinking about other things I have to get done for a few minutes before remembering, with a shock, where I am. On the lake it’s easier to forget: it is flat, easy, vast open space, with little need to adjust our speed or direction. But soon we come to the edges, where we will head into the , with narrower, icier paths and dense tree grove barriers on either side. Here is where we will need the brake.

We’re never going so fast that it feels dangerous, but it does feel like flying. It does feel like Santa’s sleigh. It’s especially true given our sunny, stunning, frozen surroundings, which shift back and forth from forest so thick you can only see ahead or behind, to more open, swampier areas, from which petrified spruce rise up like twisted statues. There are a few points when the trees are so tall and thick that I look straight up and see them still, and it felt very movie-ish to stare heavenward like that, but it’s the best air I’ve ever smelled. Breathing in the cold often makes me feel at least theoretically immortal, and up here it feels certain.

I should say that it is important, as much as possible, to not look away from the path ahead. I feel strongly that the trees that jutted off the edges and into our space were heavily biased toward hitting me and not Rylee—I have to jump backwards off the sled at least four times to keep from slamming into trunks and branches. When this happens, I jog to catch up and jump back on the sled. It’s easy enough to handle, but one time I do swerve my body in an attempt to stay on the sled, and push my hipbone hard into the handle bar instead. The bruise I take home is my fault, no question, but it doesn’t mean I won’t hold it against my mushing partner for choosing the safer side of our sled.

IT’S ONLY TOWARD THE end of our day—split into morning and afternoon sessions, with an impressive hour-long lunch of wild-rice soup, egg-and-cheese soufflĂ©, pasta salad, fruit, apple pie—that I start to feel cold or anything less than invigorated. It’s past 4 p.m. now, and I start wondering if we’ll make it back by sunset. The thought of being in this perfect place once it is dark is unimaginably spooky. (We do make it back by dark, but just barely.) You wouldn’t see a thing.

We reach the lodge and the dogs get put away in their large, wooden, open-air stalls. I tell each of them goodbye, but with my darling Bones I attempt an entire parting conversation. He is stolid, reserved with his feelings, but I know he cares. We spent the whole day together. Anyway, I love him.

After taking off a few layers and settling our checks in the lodge, it’s time to head back to the city. For the first half of the drive, I can see every star. Later, too soon afterward, the trip will feel like something I didn’t really do. Which means, I think, that I’ll have to go back.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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I’ve been thinking about it, and, just hear me out here, I think the thing that has really kept me from achieving my athletic glory potential is not my gracelessness, nor my aversion toward elevated heart rates, nor the fact that throughout my eight years in competitive tennis I don’t think I ever even once actually looked at the ball as it made contact with my racquet, but rather my large and stupid imagination.

Or else I’ve signed up to do something, having done very little research beforehand, and, while I wait for the day I’m set to do it, developed a series of increasingly unrealistic and kind of embarrassing mental pictures of what me participating in that activity looks like.

I’ll just say it: today I thought I’d be flying around in the air over a frozen lake, attached only to a kite.

I don’t think anyone but me can be blamed for misunderstanding so thoroughly what it was I’d be doing here, but this, I think, is where it started: I read the description of the “Intro to Kiting” course on —“Our goal at the end of this class is to have you moving through the wind”—and I immediately saw myself floating peacefully across a lake by kite, eight or 10 feet off the ground so I wouldn’t be too scared—and then I apparently blacked out before I could comprehend the second half of the sentence: “…not dissimilar to riding on the snow or the water.” Or the sentence after that: “This is a land-based lesson focused on kite only.” I read those parts too, but I guess not really. I was already gone, floating away.

It snowballed from there. First I must have mixed in what I knew of parasailing, thinking we’d be attached by tethers to the ice so we wouldn’t end up in outerspace or Wisconsin. But later, subconsciously, my mind erased the tethers, and we were floating on our own—for a few minutes at a time, only, gently gliding back to the ground whenever the wind died down a little. I relayed this made-up version of a sport to my friends, Rylee and Colleen, and I sold them on going snowkiting with me by telling them I was sure (but how?) we wouldn’t be “going too high up.” To their credit they responded, “How will we get off the ground?” But not to their credit: when I said, “I think you just sort of run and take off,” they did not question me at all.

WHEN WE MEET MIKE, a gregarious instructor and guide at Lakawa, in a church parking lot next to not a lake, but a snow-covered, wide-open field, and one of the first things out of my mouth is the question (because by then I’d started worrying about it, and I honestly can’t believe it took me that long), “So, how high are we going to get off the ground?” and he says, “You won’t,” I am confused. “You mean we aren’t going to … fly, or anything?” I ask him, at the same time realizing how weird it would be to be able to, in a single day, pay someone to let you float off into the sky with all of his equipment, not really knowing how/if you’d get back down. It had made so much sense before. Sort of.

To clarify: you can, at a certain stage, snowkite yourself off the ground. If you get there with training (which you should probably, definitely, do), it will be a while: months or maybe more, depending on how often you practice. (And when you do, you will be jumping into the air while on skis. Never, I’m sorry to say, will you just be hovering around, hanging off a kite.) Mike tells us that he, having participated in the sport for years, only got off the ground in the last few. Our introductory course that day would teach us the basics of using the kite itself. The next session after ours (which, at Lakawa, costs $300) gets you on the skis, pulled along by the kite.

It depends on wind and skill level, but this way. (As Wikipedia rather dramatically puts it: “The limits of speed for snowkiting are not yet known.”)

But first—unless you want to just buy several hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and launch yourself into the sky like a lunatic—you have to learn how to manage a kite in a two-to-three-hour intro lesson like ours. It sounds like a lot for an activity most of us got the hang of as little kids, but these kites are four meters long, and that’s just to start: the kites used by the more advanced students in our group are 14 and 15 meters across. They yank you. To pull them across the sky takes enough effort that my muscles will be sore the next day, and Rylee will have a bruise from clenching the bar so tightly.

MIKE LEADS US ONTO the field and unpacks the equipment. He stands some 20 yards out from our little group, launching our kites into the sky and yelling, “Pull left! Pull right!” to help us keep them afloat. And that’s all you do—pull left when the kite is headed too far left, ditto on the right—but it is tough. What the kites want to do, especially, I notice, when Colleen is steering them, is to crash into the ground. I’m the last person to try it, and as I’ve found is the case with almost everything, it’s worth it to wait and watch everybody else mess up a whole bunch so that you don’t have to. When it’s my turn, I don’t crash the kite at all.

“She’s a natural!” yells Mike, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been called “a natural” at anything having to do with sports. I’m hardly even trying. Mostly I am just standing here.

Out of the corners of our eyes we watch the advanced students gliding across the field on skis—not at 70 miles per hour, but not so slowly either—and for the first time I can remember, I am jealous that someone’s getting to do the scarier version of an activity I’m doing. Toward the end of the lesson, I do a weird little hop into the air, just three or four inches off the ground, just to see if the kite could take me with it. It didn’t, of course, but for that half-second it was fun to think about.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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Construction on the was delayed twice, but it’s the second time that counts: it was then that the Red Wing, Minnesota hotel’s 11 builders—businessmen who pooled $60,000 to construct the building in 1875, largely to accommodate the frontier town’s rail- and river-trade traffic—were made aware of a Sioux burial ground beneath the plot. Presumably, in part, to avoid scaring away the guests before there even were any, building ceased until the remains could be moved. (It seems to me that forcing the dead to relocate is more likely to irritate them into haunting than simply letting them be, but it’s much too late to argue about how to handle what the men found.)

In that way, the St. James Hotel fulfills the two most basic requirements for a modern-day haunting: proximity to a Native American burial ground, and construction in a year that would someday sound very old.

The hotel was sold to a young man named Charles Lillyblad just after the turn of the century, a few years before he’d meet and marry a waitress named Clara who worked in the building’s restaurant. Charles died in 1931, and Clara ran the St. James until she passed in 1972. It was her husband who purchased it, but the hotel was Clara’s—for her renowned cooking and her affable, generous spirit, the St. James was frequently called “Clara’s Place” by people in town.

When guests and employees talk about seeing a ghost here, it’s usually hers. They see her sitting in the chairs in their rooms. One poor man left the hotel at 2:00 a.m. one night after reporting seeing her floating above his bed. (What was she wearing, I wonder? In , Clara is described as a “snazzy” dresser. I suppose it isn’t fair to expect the guest to have noticed.) Others have reported meeting ghostly resistance upon trying to move her favorite dining room table—anal-retentiveness even in the afterlife being something I can pretty easily imagine as a future problem of my own.

Clara has now been the star of the St. James for over 80 years. When Rylee and I book a night in the hotel, it’s her who we’ll be looking for.

WHEN SCOTT, THE HOTEL’S patient and good-humored rooms manager, describes Clara and the establishment’s history to us, I find myself inexplicably disappointed by how lovely she sounds, as if the only worthy ghost is a bitter one—as though seeing the ghost of a formerly adored person would be any less terrifying than seeing one who in life was despised, one whose death was much darker. So when Scott goes on to say that other guests and housekeepers report seeing (and hearing) the ghost of a little girl who, years and years ago, fell into the hotel’s basement well and drowned, I feel a small thrill. Which is obviously terrible. It’s just that little-girl ghosts (the laughing! The hair bows! The singing!) are the spookiest kind there is. They are the real deal.

Scott tells us these stories with the help of a three-ring binder of documents—witness accounts, results of previous investigations—he put together for guests interested in the St. James’ haunted history. Scott is my favorite kind of self-proclaimed skeptic, which is to say he really isn’t one. I’ve met so many people who label themselves this way, who also, as though they see no contradiction, fervently watch Ghost Hunters marathons and refuse to linger in dark, drafty spaces. When Scott says he doesn’t believe, I don’t believe him—especially when he produces a just like the ones they use on TV.

We had planned to supplement our senses with we downloaded onto our iPhones, but we take the proffered K-II for the night as well. While I wholeheartedly believe in spooks, I’m not sure I buy the idea that they can be evidenced by battery-operated tools (much less cell phones). Still, holding the K-II makes me feel official.

When we walk out of the hotel for a dinner that is 70 percent Wisconsin cheese curd, it’s snowing: the big, glittery, fake-looking kind. It can’t be more than three or four degrees out: a joke temperature—too cold to seem fair and too warm to seem deliberate. On the somewhat treacherous walk back, it is colder (and windier) still. It is perfect ghost weather—precipitation, and a chilled un-forgivingness that forces you into the nearest grand and haunted shelter.Ìę

To start, Rylee and I walk downstairs (along a line of portraits of the original owners, five of whom, given their high , are apparently ghosts, while the other six have either moved on, or are good liars) into the historic lobby, off of which sit a small, gorgeous library and Clara’s pristine dining room. The dining room is the darkest and creepiest, so it’s there we sit: in the middle, at Clara’s favorite table.

Before my butt even touches the seat, I’m flattering her out of self-defense. They do this on the shows: talk to the ghosts; let them know you’re there. “Hello Clara, thank you for having us. You have a terrific hotel. I hear you were a really good cook. Everyone loved you. And … I think it’s cool that you were a woman running your own business.” I ask her to greet us if she wants, but not in a scary way, and especially not in our room later on. Rylee takes a less conciliatory approach, scratching the tablecloth lightly with her fingernail. It makes the EMF light up and I hiss at her, “Stop it! Oh my God, stop.” I might have spoken to Clara, provoking her in my own way, but that doesn’t mean I want her to respond.

And she doesn’t, really. Our ghost hunting apps do chirp a number of times, a minute or two apart each time—this being the phone version of , supposedly using the phone’s magnometer to measure fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum and converting them into words in a process that seems arbitrary at best—uttering a string of meaningless (I think?) words: “car, Calvin, your, cough, finish, Florine, point, able, tend, face, sun, Elwood.” If Clara’s trying to tell us something, she is not especially well spoken, and possibly a little crazy.

Were we filmed in night vision, this would have been enough for a whole show. In person, without the dramatic score, it feels anticlimactic.

That’s how it is on TV, too, for the most part: mostly they find nothing. But we still watch, just in case. We still sleep in these buildings, just to see. I use “sleep” loosely—not for lack of comfort, which the hotel is brimming with, but because, despite myself, I’m scared. The red TV off-light frightens me for a second, and so does the chandelier, which, at 2:00 a.m., with my terrible vision, looks a lot like something black floating over my bed. I wonder how, if at all, ghost sightings correspond to corrective eye prescriptions as strong as mine. But that’s another question I don’t really want the answer to.

In the morning, when we do a last sweep of the room, the K-II flashes wildly when held over the spot on the bed in front of Rylee’s laptop. In my head, this is because Clara is checking her email. And with ghosts I think that’s how it goes: the in-the-head version might as well be the version that counts.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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The last time I came to this ski hill I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader on a field trip with my class. I spent the majority of the day in the chalet, buying candy, eating candy, and then feeling bad about candy on the bus back to school, which is the point when I remembered I’d allegedly given up sweets for Lent. To deal with whatever remained of my Catholic guilt, I pretended as though I’d only intended to give up chocolate-based sweets from the start. (I think it’s probably true for most people that the Lent in which you try to pull one over on God is your last-ever Lent.)

The first-most disappointing thing about the Minnesota Iceman is that he probably wasn’t even a native Minnesotan. He simply stayed here, in the southeastern town of Rollingstone, between trips around the Midwest, encased in a block of ice and wedged into the trailer of a retired Air Force pilot named Frank D. Hansen. Hansen was the Iceman’s promoter and hype man, so to speak, and him around to carnivals and state fairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, charging fairgoers 25 cents to take a look at the figure described as a “missing link” in human evolution. Call it regional chauvinism, but you want an important guy like the Iceman to really belong to your home state.

The second-most disappointing thing about the Minnesota Iceman is that he probably wasn’t even real.

The story changed a few times, as they tend to do in cases like these. the figure was found in the Bering Strait, sent to Hong Kong, and purchased by an eccentric California millionaire, who later hired Hansen to care for the Iceman and take him on trips around the Midwest. Later, , theorizing—and, rather meanly I think, nicknaming him “Bozo”—that he was mistaken for a human and was shot and killed in the Vietnam War. A year later, in 1970, , which claimed that he, 10 years earlier, then stationed in Duluth, Minnesota, came upon the Iceman during a deer-hunting trip 60 miles out of town. Actually, he wrote, he came upon three Icemen. But only the one charged Hansen. Only the one was shot.

He fled, but returned for the corpse several months later and found it buried in snow. Hansen retrieved the body, took it home to an understandably irritated wife, and kept the Iceman in his family freezer until spring. According to his story, Hansen then met a veteran showman who convinced him to showcase the creature—but to do so (at least at first) with a model version of the Iceman in order to gauge public curiosity and to protect Hansen from potential murder charges. On the carnival circuit, in order to stave off negative scrutiny, Hansen would admit to fellow showmen that his creature was a fake. But after a year, he felt safe substituting in the real thing. And that’s when the story blew up—the Smithsonian, and even the FBI, wanted to investigate. Hansen, as he writes, got nervous, and put the fake model back up for display. The reason that particular figure was later deemed a hoax by the Smithsonian, then, is because it was.

The Iceman’s original investigators maintained that what they had seen in Hansen’s trailer was definitively something real.

It’s a story that doesn’t tie together very nicely. Frank Hansen appears to have died some years ago (, a relic from Hansen’s first foray into showmanship, “was acquired from the estate of the late Frank Hansen of Rollingstone, Minnesota.”) but I can’t find his obituary. , and there are people on the Internet who, for reasons that are certainly creative, think that mysterious California millionaire was Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart, legendary actor and famed secret Yeti-in-a-block-of-ice collector. We’ll never know, because he’s dead, too.

Whatever happened to the Iceman, or the Model Iceman, and whether there was any difference between the two (and whether there were two at all), I cannot say. I suppose I could make an educated guess, knowing what you know and what I know about the nature of frozen hairy figures in boxes and blurry photos. But what fun would that be?

I think I will look for him instead. Or not him, necessarily, but his two mates: the ones that got away.

HERE’S THE RATIONALE THAT propelled my friend Rylee and I to look for something called the Minnesota Iceman in Wisconsin: clearly he is (or they are) on the lam, but he’d also probably be homesick, so he wouldn’t be too far from home. He’d want to be somewhere he could hide among the trees, and near a water source. He could be anywhere, so he might as well be in , just across the state line and the St. Croix River.

It’s hard to prepare for something like an open-ended nature search for something that was possibly a lifeless rubber suit 40 years ago, but you’ll want to start with a first-aid kit—for the potential loss of limbs. A ruler and a magnifying glass are also crucial—for tracking. We also packed notebooks, granola bars, and a hollow chocolate turkey, leftover from Thanksgiving, which we figured was a decent meat substitute and an attractive piece of bait. I brought a blush brush, too, ostensibly to dust for fingerprints, but in retrospect that just seems silly.

We get to the park two hours before sundown, and the trail of cars leaving the reserve as we drive in lends an appreciated sense of foreboding to our mission. There are four or five inches of packed snow crunching beneath our wheels. I see a moving figure behind the trees ahead and say, “Oh, there he is.” It turns out to be a normal human skier, probably. Rylee pulls the car into the next lot, and we get out and into the single-digit chill.

There are a handful of paths to take, but we follow a narrow, lesser-trodden one into the forest. Rylee occasionally asks our target to reveal himself (“…Iceman?”), and each time she does I almost expect a head to pop up from a fallen log and say, “Hey!” Instead, we keep plodding through the snow, noting a couple of “unusual” markings: a snow print that looks claw-like and a dead tree with a chunk of bark torn out of it. “That’s a sign of an Iceman if I ever saw one,” says Rylee. It’s true: as far as all that I’ve ever seen goes, this is as much an indicator of the presence of a Midwestern Yeti as anything else.

Deeper into the forest, we start seeing handfuls of trees sprayed with red paint, mostly in neat lines but in some cases splattered wildly like blood. Even though I know it’s fake—too bright and garish to look close to real—I still lean in close to make sure. It’s not that I’d attribute that kind of carnage to the Iceman anyway; I’ve seen the pictures. He looks like he was a nice, calm guy. Look at , the other resting on his belly. Even he doesn’t look like he cares whether or not he’s real, and even less what we think. You have to respect someone with that kind of confidence.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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There are distant childhood memories I have that I’m forced to conclude are false, only because their existence differs so sharply from the narrative of the rest of my life. One: that my presence once made a boy pretend to faint. (We were in the first grade.) Another is that—I think—I used to be pretty good at ice skating.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”: a saying that must have started somewhere. When the unknown speaker first said it—though the saying is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, the wise old Internet maintains that isn’t correct—surely it seemed especially true of that particular locality at that particular time, and everyone around him or her must have laughed. “So true,” they would have said. They would have gone home and told every one of their neighbors, and those neighbors would have told all of their neighbors, and eventually some of those neighbors would have been across state borders—which are, after all, arbitrary. And soon, people in every state came to believe the saying was theirs. In Minnesota/Maine/Ohio/Florida/New York/Illinois, we have a special saying: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.Ìę

Kiah is my family’s fourth dog overall and our third female Australian Shepherd. (The third dog, Oreo, a black-and-white lab and springer mix of some kind, was the beloved fluke we took home from the Humane Society, having gone “just to visit.”) I won’t go into her intelligence, because people talking about how smart their dogs are—so often incorrectly, too—is very nearly as bad as people talking about their brilliant, brand-new infants. Listen, almost all of us could talk by two. Almost all of us memorized the alphabet fairly early on. We were little babies; what else was there to do? But Kiah is very smart.

She is also the weirdest dog I’ve ever met, and not just because she wiggles her back half (not her tail area, but her whole back half) so strongly while walking that she can only ever get anywhere diagonally. Kiah has, from the beginning, loved to fight. Not seriously (she doesn’t appear to be out for blood), but neither is it totally not-serious. Unlike any other dog we’ve had, she fully leaps off the ground at other dogs (or people, doesn’t matter) when she wants to wrestle. She commits. Overall, she seems to prefer being airborne.

It is therefore unsurprising that before I open the back door of my car, Kiah has started jumping out of it. She lands on the ice-coated parking-lot asphalt and slides a few feet before regaining composure, looking back, presumably, to see if I noticed. I did, but for her sake I pretend like I didn’t. Once we’re inside the gate, I take off her leash, and she’s off again, jumping.

There aren’t many other creatures here today, canine or human, but those we do see, Kiah leaps at. There is a German Shepherd, whom she outruns, and a beagle, who seems to bore her. The other dogs don’t seem very “into” the idea of wrestling today—they seem lethargic, as if its taking them some time to adjust to the sudden cold and the slippery ground. Still, they don’t seem too bothered when Kiah keeps trying. I always wonder, in the midst of these attempted battles, how each dog decides that the other dog is mostly only joking about all the biting. How did they come to decide it was fun and not inappropriate or weird to jump all over the stranger dogs they encounter in public? When my ferocious small dog finally lied down in the snow in deference to an enormous black Lab with a three-foot-long stick in his mouth, was it because she was scared? Or was I right in thinking she looked a little bit … suggestive?

Perhaps I am anthropomorphizing her too greatly, but how do you not?

THERE IS THIS SORT of sad, free zoo in Saint Paul that Rylee and I went to last summer, and we stood for half-an-hour in front of the chimpanzee exhibit, watching through Plexiglas as a mom chimp teased and hugged her chimp son. There was a loose, flappy canvas bag he clearly loved, and his mom kept putting it over his face, running away to hide, and waiting for him to find her again. When he did, he’d climb in her lap, and she’d tickle him. “Exactly like us,” you’d have thought, “just furrier or scalier humans after all, every last animal there is. Geniuses, every one. Just like us.”

But there, the next display over, sat the old male gorilla, reclining on a boulder, leaning on his elbow, scooping a large puddle of vomit off the rock and into his mouth. Then swallowing it, vomiting, and then eating it again. So it’s hard to say. I suppose they are individuals, just like the rest of us, but I don’t pretend to understand the world around me. I only pretend, once in a while, to control it.

Ìęis a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

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