Driving on the other side of 7 Mile Road can be a spooky, dangerous experience

Sunday, July 1, 2007 2:32 AM CDT

I am going out on a limb on this one - supernatural and spooky even.

I always have been an extremely skeptical believer, or believing skeptic. I want to believe that there are things out there that we don't know about, much less can explain, but I need to see these things. I need videotape taken by an innocent 4-year-old child and delivered by a St. Bernard.

I had the opportunity to see something about 10 years ago. It was summer, in between semesters, and I was living at home. Dad and I had been traveling between Milwaukee and Racine quite a bit, and it became tradition to joke about seeing a UFO or some strange thing running along the side of the road. I would point to a star and say that it was blinking "hello" in Morse code.

Well, one cool and dry night, we were on our way back to Racine along Highway 32. We had just passed the power plant. All of a sudden, it felt like we drove into a bubble of warm, humid air. The car windows immediately fogged up. We rolled them down, and, just as quickly, drove out of the bubble as the windows cleared. We left the windows down, and hit another six or seven "bubbles." One time, the headlights flickered and the car revved as if it were going through a big rain puddle.

Dad and I looked at each other and laughed. A couple of minutes later, I tried to joke with Pops by pointing out a particularly bright star and said, "I think they're watching us." No joke. The star immediately turned green, streaked across the sky, and disappeared. Dad and I looked at each other and didn't laugh.

This actually reminds me of another story that's tangential, but I have to tell it. We were driving back to Racine from Wyoming, where we lived at the time, and were just about at the Minnesota border. We saw a sign for an A&W restaurant and took the exit. As we entered the restaurant, we saw that there were no customers, only a manager and two waitresses sitting at the table farthest from the door. They all slowly turned to look at us, without a word, without even blinking. Right then, "Mr. Sandman," started playing over the sound system. We all backed quietly out without even looking at each other.

We then went farther up the hill to a house that had been renovated as a diner. There were no cars outside, but it was packed inside with nice people and great food. As we joked with the waitress about how much dessert we could take home with us, we mentioned the weird A&W restaurant we had stopped at down the hill. All of the people near us grew silent. The waitress stopped laughing and said, "Don't ever go there again."

She refilled Mom and Dad's coffees and went on to serve other tables. I've traveled that corridor a few times now, and have never seen that exit, or even a hill that remotely looks like it, again.

OK, back to the first story. It was soon after the "bubble" incident that Dad told me about the "7 Mile Monster." He explained that there had been a sighting of a monster in the '60s and '70s along 7 Mile Road, and that even some mutilated pets and bodies had been found. He said that teenagers often went out to look for it. He also explained that, just as Las Vegas has a desert to dump things people don't want found, Chicago had the outskirts of Kenosha and Racine.

When I started writing this column, Pops told me to write about the monster, and I started doing some research. I came across Linda Godfrey's book, "The Beast of Bray Road." It's a great, well-balanced relation of eyewitness accounts of the werewolf sightings around Elkhorn in the early '90s. In the book, Godfrey also mentioned "The Eddy" of East Troy and "The Bushman" of La Grange around the '60s and '70s. Now, I know that stories can travel faster than monsters, but taking a straight line from these sightings to the Lake brings us right out to the 5, 6 and 7 Mile road area. I cannot explain why a monster would be interested in Lake Michigan, nor why it wouldn't just stop at Wind Lake or some other closer water source. Monsters are strange that way. But there's sure to be a way to connect the dots.

In Godfrey's map of sightings though, I noticed that Racine and Kenosha were quite bare. This could be explained by the fact that her book and research focused on Elkhorn. However, I began to wonder whether there are some good stories out there from Racine that just haven't been shared yet. I would love to hear them through e-mail or blog on The Journal Times Web site. I am sure we'll get our share of critics and skeptics (as I said, I'm a half-skeptic, a wereskeptic). But it wouldn't be a good storytelling session unless there was that little voice coming from the back saying, with the slightest quiver, "No way, that ain't true." It will be interesting to rediscover the "other" side of Racine.

One side point: I am writing this column at Barnes and Noble and took a break to peruse the magazines. Because I was in the mood, I picked one up on UFOs and the paranormal and opened it. It was about famous werewolf cases, and right at the bottom was "SE Wisconsin's werewolf." As Father Guido Sarducci might say, "Coincidence?"

By the way, if you are driving to Minnesota and see a house/diner on top of a hill with an A&W restaurant at the bottom, go up the hill to the diner. It has the best pecan pie in the world.

Mathew Somlai was born in Racine, and recently moved back for the fourth time. He has his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and is presently a write-at-home father.

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