I paid four dollars for a dead sexton’s diary, and it turned into the strangest small town mystery story I’ve ever pieced together from paper. In 1974 the church bell in Elmfors rang by itself at 3 a.m. on three nights, and the next day the pastor’s grown daughter was gone.
I paid four dollars for the diary. It was in a cardboard box of hymnals at an estate auction, and I almost left it there.
This was August of 2023. I live in Ashland, Wisconsin, up on Lake Superior, and I work as a title examiner.
If you’ve never heard of the job, it’s pretty simple. When somebody buys land, I go through a century of deeds and liens and probate records to make sure nobody else has a claim on it. It’s slow, dusty work, and it turns out I’m good at it because I don’t trust anything until I’ve seen it on paper twice.
The auction was in Elmfors, about forty minutes south of me. Population around six hundred.
It has a co-op, a bar called the Pike Inn, a closed creamery, and a white Lutheran church on a hill that hasn’t held a service since 2008.
The estate belonged to a man named Arvid Lund, who died in 1993. His house had sat empty with his things in it for thirty years while his nephews argued in court.
Arvid was the sexton of Bethany Lutheran from 1951 until he retired in 1986. A sexton, if you didn’t grow up Lutheran, is the caretaker. He mowed, he shoveled the steps, he fed the furnace, he dug graves before they had a machine for it, and he rang the bell.
The diary was a little brown pocket calendar for 1974. Every day had an entry, usually one or two lines, in pencil. And every entry started the same way, with the outside temperature.
Jan 4. 12 below. Furnace fussy. Shoveled steps twice.
Jan 5. 8 below. Funeral for Mrs. Eklund. Bell rung 61 times.
He rang the bell once for every year of the person’s life. I didn’t know people still did that in the seventies.
I read it on my porch that night the way you’d read anybody’s old calendar. Weather, chores, who died. It was almost relaxing. Then I got to October.
Here are the entries exactly as he wrote them.
Oct 3. Thurs. 44 above. Bell rang 3 times at 3 a.m. Went over. Rope tied off on cleat as I left it. Tower door locked. No wind.
Oct 10. Thurs. 41 above. Bell again 3 a.m. 3 times. Rope tied off. Sat in vestibule till 5. Nothing.
Oct 17. Thurs. 39 above. Bell 3 a.m. 3 times. I was on the steps when it rang. Nobody near the rope.
Pastor came out in his robe. Said leave it be Arvid. Bells ring. Margit on parsonage porch in her coat. Asked me did it ring three times. Told her yes. She went in.
Oct 18. Fri. 46 above. Margit not at organ for choir.
Oct 19. Sat. 40 above. Pastor says Margit has gone to Minneapolis. Unhappy here. Asked me to take down the rope and coil it in the shed. Bell to stay quiet till he says.
I sat there with the diary on my knee for a long time.
Chasing a Small Town Mystery Through Paper
Then I did what I do for a living. I went looking for the paper.
Margit was Margit Strand, the daughter of the pastor, the Reverend Harold Strand. She was twenty in October of 1974. She played organ on Sundays and worked in the office at the creamery during the week. She had graduated from the high school in Mellen two years before and, according to her yearbook, wanted to “see the ocean and never shovel again.”
The official story was easy to find, because Elmfors had a weekly paper back then, the Elmfors Ledger, and the county library has every issue on microfilm.
October 24, 1974, page 3, in the church news column: Miss Margit Strand has taken a position in Minneapolis and will be missed at the organ. Mrs. Ruth Nyquist will play until a replacement is found.
November 14, 1974, same column: Pastor and Mrs. Strand report a card from their daughter Margit, who writes that she is well and has found a nice apartment.
That was it. No police report. No missing person notice. A grown woman left a small town for the city.
In 1974 that happened every week. It still does.
And honestly, that would have been the end of it for me, except for a few things that didn’t line up. In my job, when things don’t line up, you keep pulling.
The first thing was the postcard.
The Elmfors Historical Society is two rooms in the back of the old village hall, open Saturdays from ten to two. The woman who runs it, Lorraine Thorsgaard, is eighty-one and knows where everything is without looking. When the church closed, the congregation’s records went to her. Council minutes, baptism books, a shoebox of pastoral correspondence.
The postcard was in the shoebox. A picture of the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis on the front. On the back, in blue ballpoint:
Dear Mother and Dad, I am well. Found a nice apartment. Please don’t worry and don’t look for me. M.
Postmarked Minneapolis, October 22, 1974.
I went back to the diary.
Oct 22. Tues. 42 above. Pastor away to Minneapolis for district business. Back late.
So the pastor was in Minneapolis on the same day the card was mailed from Minneapolis.
That could be a coincidence. Maybe he went to find her. Maybe she handed it to him. I wrote it down and kept going.
The second thing was the district business.
The church body Bethany belonged to had a regional office. It’s merged twice since then, but their archive still exists, and an archivist there named Dale was kind enough to check the 1974 calendar for me. He emailed back the following week.
There was no district meeting on October 22, 1974. There was nothing that week at all. He’d checked the pastors’ travel reimbursement ledger too. Strand hadn’t filed for that trip.
A Load of Cement in October
The third thing was the cement.
Back to Arvid.
Oct 21. Mon. 38 above. Nordgaard’s truck brought cement. Pastor wants new floor in furnace room. Says it cracked when the new furnace went in. I did not know the floor was cracked.
That entry bothered me more than anything else in the book, and it took me a while to figure out why. Then I looked at the church council minutes in Lorraine’s boxes.
The minutes for November 1974 had a short line: Motion to reimburse Pastor Strand $46.20 for cement, furnace room. Carried.
And in the minutes for September 1979: Motion to purchase new oil furnace from Lindquist Heating, $2,140. Old unit installed 1949. Carried.
There was no new furnace in 1974. The one in that basement had been there since 1949. Arvid fed it every day for twenty-five years. If the floor had cracked, he would have been the first to know, and he said, in his own pencil, that he didn’t.
So now I had a pastor who told the town his daughter left for Minneapolis, who drove to Minneapolis the day a card from her was mailed there, who lied about why he was going, and who poured a new floor in the church basement three days after she was last seen, for a reason his own sexton didn’t believe.
I’m not a detective. I’m a woman who reads deeds. But I’ve read enough of them to know what it looks like when somebody is papering over something.
The fourth thing was Joyce.
Lorraine gave me her name. Joyce Halvorsen, now Joyce Meinke, Margit’s best friend in 1974. She lives in a senior apartment in Hayward.
I visited her on a Sunday in September. She made coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.
Joyce said Margit had been planning to leave. That part was real.
She’d been saving creamery money in a coffee can for two years. But she wasn’t going to Minneapolis.
“Duluth,” Joyce said. “She had a cousin in Duluth with a spare room. She had it all set.”
“She was leaving after Thanksgiving so she wouldn’t ruin her mother’s holiday. That was Margit. She’d apologize to a chair she bumped into.”
I asked if she ever heard from Margit again.
Joyce shook her head.
“Not one word. Fifty years. And she knew my address. I’d lived in the same place since I was born.”
I asked her about the bell.
Joyce put her cup down. She said the week before Margit left, they were sitting in Joyce’s car outside the creamery on their lunch break, and Margit told her the church bell had been ringing in the middle of the night. Thursdays. Three times, always three.
“She wasn’t scared of it,” Joyce said. “That’s what I remember. She said it was like someone knocking. She said, ‘I think it’s telling me to go sooner.'”
I drove home from Hayward in the dark and didn’t turn the radio on once.
Inside the Old Bethany Church
In October, I went to see the church.
It’s a private house now. A retired couple from Madison bought it in 2011 and turned the sanctuary into a big open living room.
The steeple is still there. The bell is still in it.
They let me in because Lorraine called ahead, and because I said I was researching the building’s history, which was close enough.
The husband took me down to the furnace room. It was 2:20 in the afternoon. I know because I checked my phone right before we went down, the way you do when you’re nervous and don’t want to look nervous.
It was colder down there than upstairs. It smelled like old fuel oil and wet stone. A newer furnace hummed against the far wall.
The floor was old concrete, gray and pitted, with hairline cracks running all through it.
Except for one patch along the east wall.
It was smoother than the rest. A little lighter. About the length and width of a door laid down flat. The edges were straight, like somebody had used boards to frame it.
The husband saw me looking. “Somebody patched that a long time ago,” he said. “We figured there was a drain under there.”
There isn’t a drain on that wall. I checked the 1949 plans later. There’s nothing there at all.
I put my hand flat on it. It was the same cold as the rest of the floor. I don’t know what I expected.
Every Reasonable Explanation
Now, here is where I’m supposed to be fair, because I promised myself when I started this that I’d be fair.
The bell first. I called a man in Iowa who restores church bells for a living. He has done hundreds of them. I described the bell, the tower and the yoke from the photos I took, and asked if a bell could ring on its own.
He said yes, more often than you’d think.
Old bells hang on wooden yokes and iron bearings. When the yoke wears, the bell can sit just a hair off center.
On a cold fall night, the metal and wood contract at different rates, and around three or four in the morning, which is usually the coldest part of the night, the whole thing can settle and swing just enough for the clapper to touch the lip. “Two or three strokes,” he said. “Then it settles. People have been calling it ghosts for three hundred years.”
So that’s the bell.
And Margit? She was twenty. She was saving money to leave.
Maybe she changed her plans, the way twenty year olds do. Maybe she went to Minneapolis instead of Duluth, and maybe her father drove her there himself on the twenty-second and mailed the card for her, and made up a meeting so the town wouldn’t talk about the pastor driving his runaway daughter to the city.
Maybe she simply wanted a new life badly enough that she never wrote to anyone. People do that.
And the floor? Old floors crack. Pastors get particular. Arvid was in his sixties and maybe didn’t notice everything.
Harold Strand died in 1991. His wife died in 1998. There were no other children.
Nobody ever filed a report. As far as any piece of paper in the state of Wisconsin is concerned, Margit Strand moved to Minneapolis in 1974 and that’s the end of her.
If I had to put it in a title report, that’s what I’d write. No claim found.
But there’s one more entry in Arvid’s diary. I almost didn’t read it, because it’s in the back, in the blank pages for notes, after the calendar for 1974 runs out. It’s the only entry in the whole book that’s dated in a different year.
He still wrote the temperature first. He always did.
Feb 6, 1975. 31 below. Coldest night in my memory. Bell has not rung once since the furnace room floor was done. Pastor says that proves it was only the cold all along.
Have a small town mystery story of your own?
Have you ever found an old diary, letter or logbook that turned your hometown into a small town mystery? Share your small town mystery story, or any creepy church stories from where you grew up, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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