Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainA Racine school built in 1852 on the city's first cemetery — incomplete exhumation left bones surfacing in the schoolyard for generations
1012 Villa St, Racine, WI 53403
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Exterior/drive-by only. No admission charged for the public street.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Residential/urban street, sidewalk access
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1852 · Racine Cemetery History · 19th Century Burial Relocation · Public Health and Urban Development · Incomplete Exhumation
Racine's first formally designated municipal cemetery was established at the Villa Street site in 1842, serving the early settler community during the city's initial decades of growth. By 1852, expanding urban development prompted the city to order the cemetery relocated to allow construction of a public school on the grounds.
The removal of remains in 1852–53 was not fully completed. Historical accounts document that at least two full human skeletons and scattered bone fragments remained in the soil after the exhumation was declared finished. Over the following decades, the presence of those remains became a sustained reality for the school's occupants: children playing in the schoolyard discovered bones, maintenance work periodically turned up fragments, and the knowledge of what lay beneath the grounds shaped the building's atmosphere for generations of students and staff.
Documented accounts compiled by local historians describe a custodian who refused to reenter the boiler room following an encounter he would not specify, disembodied voices reported in empty hallways, and the apparition of a figure moving through the building. A first-person account published in 2015 by a researcher who documented the site's history describes the accumulation of these reports as unusually consistent across different occupants over different eras.
The school operated as Winslow Elementary for much of the twentieth century. The building's use status as of the mid-2020s is that of a former school; public access to the interior is not available.
Sources
The paranormal accounts at the Winslow School site are anchored in documented physical fact: the cemetery was relocated incompletely, and remains were found in the schoolyard across multiple generations. The ghost lore does not need to assert a foundational mystery, because the foundation itself is established.
The most cited single account involves a building custodian who encountered something in the boiler room — the specific nature of what he experienced is not described in available sources — and subsequently refused to reenter that space. His colleagues accepted the refusal without apparent dispute, suggesting the account had credibility within the staff community.
Children at the school reportedly experienced apparitions and heard voices in areas away from occupied classrooms. The apparitions are described as human-shaped figures moving through corridors and stairwells rather than distinctly individual entities. Given the mixed-origin cemetery — multiple deaths, multiple burials, incomplete and disorganized exhumation — assigning the phenomena to any specific individual would be speculative.
A 2015 first-person research account notes the unusual consistency of these reports across different occupants spanning decades, treating the accumulation as meaningful in itself rather than as evidence for any particular interpretation.
The former Winslow School site at 1012 Villa St can be viewed from the public street. The building is not a public attraction; visitors are limited to exterior observation of the site where Racine's first cemetery once stood.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPClinton, IA
Built in 1942 on 150 acres in northern Clinton, Schick General Hospital was named for Lt. William Rhinehart Schick, the first U.S. Army Medical Corps officer killed at Pearl Harbor. At peak operation the facility processed roughly 1,600 battle casualties per week from Midwestern soldiers, closing in 1946 after the war's end.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPHampton, VA
In November 1718, Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard engaged and killed the pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, at Ocracoke Inlet off the North Carolina coast. After the battle, Maynard sailed to Hampton with Blackbeard's severed head mounted on his bowsprit. The head was subsequently displayed on a pole at the mouth of the Hampton River — the site now marked at Mill Point Park — as a government-sanctioned warning against piracy.
Winthrop, MA
In October and November 1675, during King Philip's War, the Massachusetts Bay Colony forcibly removed between 500 and 1,100 Praying Indians — Native Americans who had converted to Christianity and lived in 'praying towns' — from mainland communities and interned them on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. The colony provided no food, no shelter, and no means of return. An estimated 500 people died of starvation, exposure, and disease during the winter of 1675–76. The island is now part of the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, and annual commemorations by tribal descendants mark the history of what happened there.