public

Heavily Investigated

Something old has settled into Bonanzaville's 40-plus historic buildings, and it doesn't always stay put. Workers report children laughing inside the Houston House in the dead of winter — no children anywhere near. In the upstairs bedroom, a pillow always bears a fresh indentation, no matter how many times staff smooth it flat. Down the lane, the Brass Rail Saloon's second floor — once a brothel — rattles with sounds that have no source. And then there are the phones: the closed Telephone Museum has, more than once, rung calls through to other buildings after dark, when no one was there to dial.

Bonanzaville, USA is a 12-acre open-air pioneer village operated by the Cass County Historical Society — founded 1954, opened to the public in 1967 — and now home to over 41 historic structures and 400,000 artifacts. Among them: the Houston House, built by a Scottish immigrant farmer who staked his claim in Cass County in the 1880s, and the Brass Rail Saloon, a repurposed hotel-and-brothel whose upstairs history the county records note with admirable restraint. That the buildings were moved here to be preserved is either deeply comforting or, depending on what came with them, not.