I'm Writing A Book

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years but one night, a candle burned in the window.

To anyone who lived out near Fond du Lac had heard of the stories, but have always chalked it up to local legends. Something akin to the werewolf in Delevan, the ghosts in the graveyard in Elkhorn, all of the things you can find online with a couple of keystrokes.

There you’d find people who have experienced these things first hand from people with obvious fake names who really did see a woman in white walking on the side of the highway, or has a broken piece of the Hodag’s tusk in a glass bottle over their fireplace. It being a companion to the Yeti fur, and the bottle of Chupacabra blood.

But if you were to ask anyone of these like minded individuals about the old Burnham cabin, you wouldn’t get answers. Only more questions.

As the story goes(depending on who you ask and who actually remembers what happened in that cabin, much less is willing to tell you the tale without making the evil eye hand sign) a man by the name of Richard Burnham moved into a cabin just outside of St. Joe. An unincorporated community of Marshfield, just outside of Fond du Lac county.

Much isn’t known about Richard. If he was born in Wisconsin, how old he was, or even if his name was even Richard Burnham. The only time most people would see him was when he made the rare trip into town to get supplies. Everyone, even the ones who still make the evil eye sign, said that Richard was a handsome man. Short crop of curly brown hair, a farmer's build, and blue eyes that matched the sky on a clear day. It was when someone who worked at the Piggly Wiggly asked him one day while he was getting his supplies that they asked what he was doing, that he said “I’m writing a book.”

Richard had always wanted to write his own stories, and would tell folks that he was inspired by Stephen King, and Milwaukee’s own Peter Straub, but he didn’t know what kind of a story he wanted to tell.

That’s the story he would tell whenever he went into town, but each trip was starting to become less and less frequent.

It was when Richard Burnham stopped coming into town altogether that people started to talk.

When winter would roll around, locals who would pass by, either on their way to hunt or go ice fishing, would see that the chimney of Richard Burnham’s cabin would be smoking. But there weren’t any signs of light. All of the windows of the cabin were covered by thick black curtains.

It was the same in the summer, but no one wanted to be the one knocking on Burnham’s door.

It wasn’t until Richard Burnham’s car was gone from the cabin’s driveway one day that the town’s people thought he must have finished his book. Finished his book, and left town to see if he could get it published in Milwaukee or Chicago they would say. When a book comes out by a man named Richard Burnham, we’ll know that all of that work he put into it would be worth it.

But smoke still emitted from the cabin’s chimney.

Now, this is where some of the story, depending on who you are telling it to you, would say that they have been to Burnham’s cabin, and say that all of the furniture was still there. Even though when Burnhnam bought the cabin, it was from someone who sold it as is, but they would see magazines, mail, and even some food still sitting out. All with a fine layer of dust. Others would say that they would see Burnham himself, now a man with a long tangle of a beard to match his large mess of curly brown hair. His once muscular body now white skin and bone. His eyes black instead of sky blue. Others would say there was nothing but his typewriter sitting on a large table. Typed on paper littering the floor and more covering the walls.

None of these stories turned out to be true.

It wasn’t until the concerns of the towns folk that the Fond du Lac police went to Burnham’s cabin.

What they found is still up to debate to this very day, and is still used to frighten any would-be explorer.

The police found Burnham, hunched over his typewriter. Dead.

But it wasn't Richard Burnham. Burnham with curly brown hair, or those sky blue eyes, but the real Richard Burnham. Age forty-six, and reported missing to the Milwaukee police a year and a half prior. He was bald, skinny (mostly from starvation the police reported), and dark brown eyes. Or at least that’s what his driver's license said when they fished it out of his back pocket. He had been dead for quite a while. A blow to the head did it.

There was a search for the man who called himself Richard Burnham, but nothing turned up. The family of the real Richard Burnham still have a reward for any information that could help bring Richard's killer to justice.

But the town folk of Fond du Lac are left talking again. A candle burns inside the abandoned cabin, and smoke is coming from the chimney once again.