It’s been said that Wisconsin has more ghosts per square mile than any state in America, a claim I can’t substantiate but buy nevertheless. It seems like every town has its own ghost story: haunted hotels, haunted theaters, haunted steakhouses and saloons. Some have seen the apparition of a Christmas-tree delivery ship that sank into Lake Michigan off the shore near Manitowoc in November of 1912, or heard the disembodied sounds of the Kickapoo Polka Band, whose eerie music floats through the Vernon County woods. Others have seen the ghosts of gangsters who laid low in the Northwoods at spots like Manitowish Waters’ Little Bohemia Lodge, where to this day you can enjoy fried lake perch, potatoes, coleslaw, and rye bread in a place whose windows still have bullet holes from the FBI’s botched 1934 raid on the Dillinger Gang.

This was more or less what brought me heading north on Highway 51 towards the vast woods and glacial lakes of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest — not gangster lore or stray ghosts, but Friday fish fry, my favorite Wisconsin tradition. The European Catholic immigrants who settled the state in the late 1800s abstain from meat on Fridays; luckily, lake fish like bluegill, perch, walleye were plentiful and cheap. During the Prohibition years, law-abiding local taverns stayed afloat by selling fish plates at weekly Friday socials, and by the ’60s, when the Catholic church relaxed their dietary rules, the Friday fish fry had become embedded in Wisconsin life. You could find one at just about any neighborhood bar or restaurant, but for the true experience, you went to the supper club.

Those who claim that the Midwest is absent of style have clearly never dined at a Wisconsin supper club, whose dark wood-paneled walls are hung with taxidermy and prize fish, cozily aglow with lighting on the spectrum between “yuletide” and “brothel.” At least that’s the Northwoods hunting lodge ideal; other supper clubs are modest, with church-basement ceiling tiles and vinyl tablecloths, done up in the dusty kitsch of grandma’s living room. A few supper clubs exist in cities like Madison or Milwaukee, but they’re hardly the real deal. You’ll find those on the side of two-lane highways, overlooking lakes or encircled by tall pines. They’re family-owned and -operated and often keep odd hours — closed for lunch and on most weekdays but never Friday or Saturday night.

I pride myself on social graces, having mostly overcome the painful shyness of my youth to become the kind of woman who waltzes into strange bars and leaves with strange new friends. But in the taverns of Wisconsin, it’s as if they see right through me — some yuppie city slicker dressed self-seriously in black, batting fake eyelashes, scribbling in… is that a notebook? It’s a tough blow to the ego to be so thoroughly clocked, and I become the type of girl I thought I’d outgrown years ago, someone desperate for approval, on the outside looking in. It isn’t customary to visit supper clubs alone, but there I was, having driven the past five and a half hours to line up outside the doorstep of McGregor’s Blink Bonnie Supper Club minutes before it opened, sandwiched between two shaky couples of the Silent Generation with whom I shared a preference for dinner in the afternoon.

The low-slung log cabin restaurant sat just off WIS-70 in the town of St. Germain, across from my quiet hotel, where I’d arrived an hour before to find a terrier manning the front desk. The place was painted farmhouse red, its neon sign (“COCKTAILS / FINE FOOD”) dim in the daylight. I’d been tipped off to Blink Bonnie, a Northwoods classic since 1971, by a Sconnie friend who performed with the Min-Aqua Bats, the world’s oldest amateur water-ski show, at nearby Lake Minocqua every 4th of July. The trick was to arrive just ahead of 4 PM, or else wait hours for one of 12 tables in the tiny dining room.

The door opened, and I entered Northwoods heaven: a knotty pine bar lit up in lantern-red and framed by windows onto the surrounding woods, wet and green in early spring. The walls were maximally adorned with stuffed bobcats and pine martens, felling axes, bear traps, wooden skis, waxy three-foot muskies, and a giant elk-head trophy mount at least as tall as me. Opposite the dining room, hung with thick curtains of red flannel, a tiny game room rigged with Big Buck Hunter awaited hyperactive children of parents at the bar. “And where is your date this evening?” asked my waitress, Carol, a woman in her 50s, bright eyes rimmed with thick mascara. “I’m not insinuating that you need one. But you might not leave alone.” She winked and took my order: broiled walleye with almonds, a side of hash browns, salad, and one brandy old-fashioned, sweet.

The ambience of a supper club may vary, but the constant is the food — fine dining classics of yesteryear, served simply and in maximalist portions. Among the menu staples are surf and turf, roast duck and pork schnitzel, all-you-can-eat fish fry on Friday, prime rib served on Saturday, and broasted chicken on Sunday. The sides are complimentary: warm bread; iceberg salad; your choice of potato; and a platter of pickles, olives, crudités, pâté, and cheese spreads known as a “relish tray” — a little nosh of veggies before your meal of meat and starch. For dessert are ice-cream drinks like Grasshoppers or Pink Squirrels, blended with liqueur and poured into heaping glasses (a tradition since the 1884 invention of the hand-cranked milkshake mixer in Racine). As for cocktails, it’s a given that you order the old-fashioned: served here with brandy, offered sweet (with 7 Up) or “sour” (with Squirt) and garnished with a cherry — or if you’re feeling freaky, with a pickled mushroom or brussels sprout, both popular for reasons beyond me.

“You better eat that bread. Gotta soak up these old-fashioneds,” said Carol, dropping off my second one and clearing my empty plate. I obliged and asked how long she’s worked here. “Oh, forever,” she laughed, launching into Blink Bonnie’s lore — the place was on its third generation of McGregors, owned at present by the founder’s son and operated by his grandsons. “And the fourth generation’s starting,” she added, nodding to a busboy no older than 13. “He’s a little young for you. But don’t worry, I’ve got my eye out for eligible bachelors.” She pulled me to the bar, where the bartender regaled me with tales of drunken snowmobiling on the vintage sleds he restored in his spare time: “Winter’s seven months a year, but you gotta get outta the house.”

I dashed across the parking lot with the umbrella Carol had lent me against the sudden rain. The evening was still young, and she’d given me an agenda: Norwood Pines for dessert, then Clearview for a nightcap. (“It’s crawling distance from your hotel, should you need to crawl.”) I headed west on Highway 70 past the bait shops and snowmobile dealerships, turning down a narrow lane through groves of towering evergreens to the overflowing parking lot of Norwood Pines, whose history as a supper club dates back to the 1930s, when it was popular with the gangsters who hid out in the woods. A ghost named Edgar, a former guest of what was once the brothel upstairs, has been spotted by dishwashers, skulking around the property in a trench coat and derby hat.

Norwood Pines is among the state’s more glamorous supper clubs: no Packers memorabilia, mounted skis, or stuffed raccoons, just an elegant stone fireplace and views of Patricia Lake from the fancy screened-in porch. I found a seat at the packed bar after the dining room’s 6 PM seating and ordered an old-fashioned from a cheery blonde bartender who mixed brandy concoctions at an assembly-line pace, greeting nearly everyone who walked in the door by name. Two men whose small talk revolved around the joys of ice fishing ordered their old-fashioneds garnished with crisp asparagus stalks: “That makes it healthy, right?” To my right, a man I’d estimate at 200 years old, trembling over a plate of roast duck and wild rice, offered me his hush puppies, which I happily accepted. Tempted by the notion of a flight of ice cream drinks, a menu special which by my count totaled 64 ounces of dairy, I settled for a half portion of Norwood’s minty Grasshopper, which spilled over the edges of the glass nevertheless.

The rain had passed and the sky burned silvery-red as I parked among the pines outside of Clearview Supper Club, having followed Dollar Road to the edge of Big Saint Germain Lake. This far north in early summertime, the sun wouldn’t set till after nine. Outside, the dark wood lodge was done up in Christmas lights and Miller High Life neon. The front door jingled as I stepped into the bar, a paradise with walls of knotty pine like Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel, with dim Tiffany lanterns hung from arches of gnarled branches. Beyond them, in the dining room, a display case six feet tall was crammed with mounted butterflies: monarchs and viceroys, swallowtails the size of dinner plates, the blood-black wings of mourning cloaks. The childish melodies of video slot machines babbled from the corner, and the television showed a simulation of a crackling bonfire in a lakeside scene much like the one framed by the lace-curtained windows. It all felt so familiar. Had I been here before?

A chatty lady at the bar with a greyhound-like physique, pleasantly drunk on chardonnay, had owned the supper club since 1996. She told me that the lodge had been established here 106 years ago. Unlike some other clubs, she explained, Clearview stayed open through the winter; St. Germain’s residents had to eat, not just the summer tourists. 

The bartender, eyeliner streaked to her temples in the mode of Amy Winehouse, slid me an overflowing glass of cabernet she’d poured by accident. Then she poured herself one, too. In her heavy Polish accent, she told me of her plans to drive tomorrow night to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where, with the right equipment, one could find magic rocks along the shores of Lake Superior that glowed neon yellow and orange under UV light. 

The men at the bar had gone, with to-go cups for their whiskey-and-peanut-butter-ice-cream cocktails, leaving just us girls: three bartenders, the owner, and me. The club was closed and we were dancing, flinging old clothes from a donation bin into the ceiling fan. Nobody seemed to notice when I slipped outside and drove into the darkness, tense with anticipating a sudden flash of wild red eyes, but no one was out there but me.

My family spent each summer in a cabin on Lake Delton, which I can picture as if the year were 1994: sticky pine needles carpeting the woods, hot dogs hissing on the grill, porch swing groaning under the weight of three sisters at once. The face of my childhood idol Smokey Bear gazed magisterially over the parking lot from a tin sign on the stairway — the real Smokey, kind but serious, before the lamestream media turned him into an emoji. The message he imparted hit me like a ton of bricks: Standing in the way of the place burning to ashes, and with it everything I loved, was me, and me alone. He approached me as an equal, though I was maybe 7, asking that I simply care.

When my parents were feeling fancy we’d have dinner at the Del-Bar, a moody supper club with Rat Pack vibes and Prairie School design, and a fixture of Wisconsin Dells since 1943. Even then I was aware that the Dells was pretty tacky, with its filmy lazy rivers down which obese families floated, its “trading posts” hawking rude shot glasses and garish tie-dye t-shirts. (Returning to school one fall, especially tan and sporting Minnetonka moccasins I’d picked up at one such tourist trap, I spread the lie that I was an “Indian” throughout my third-grade class.) But not the Del-Bar, where shrimp was served in mirrored silver bowls, French onion soups bubbled with cheese, and char-broiled steaks came topped with crab. My fit and bookish mother, the queen of self-control, allowed herself a glass of wine and granted me a kiddie cocktail swimming with neon cherries. My heart burned for adulthood, having reached an understanding that the youth my schoolmates cherished was just something to pass through.

Years later, after a week of heavy rain, floods would bust the levee which held Lake Delton intact, draining 700 million gallons of water into the Wisconsin River in two hours’ time and leaving in its place a mud pit three stories deep. You could stand over the edge, as my sisters and I did later, watching the fearsome currents rush through the hole where our childhood used to be. The flood was June 9, 2008. My mother had died the morning before (breast cancer, stage 4). By then, years had passed since I’d been in those woods; she’d been too sick, and I too cool to partake in nostalgia at the age of 21. As allegories go, it was all quite heavy-handed. Treasure hunters descended in subsequent weeks to sweep the muck with metal detectors, emerging from the pit with motors, guns, and bones. A decade or so later, in a dusty corner of a Baraboo antique store, I came upon an art object: a dozen tarnished wristwatches that a local man had found inside the void, which he’d affixed to plywood and captioned shakily in Sharpie: “ON JUNE 9TH 2008 TIME STOPPED ON THE BOTTOM OF LAKE DELTON.”

Somewhere in the lobby of the Whitetail Lodge a woman was loudly sobbing, but it wasn’t me. I’m a grown-up now. So I poured a cup of coffee at the empty breakfast bar, taking in the artwork that covered the halls in which deer wore clothes and lived wildly: racing golf carts, crowding hot tubs, wolf-whistling a sexy young doe. A fawn in a coquettish nightgown knelt beside her bed, whispering to the heavens: “Thank you, Deer God!” It was time to hit the road. I returned Carol’s umbrella to the steps outside Blink Bonnie’s, then pulled onto Highway 70 in the direction of Rhinelander.

This is hodag country, the domain of the Northwood’s own mythical beast. In a local newspaper in the fall of 1893, a timberman named Eugene Shepard published a story he’d told for years in the logging camps of northern Wisconsin — the tale of a fanged beast born from the ashes of cremated oxen who smelled of buzzard meat and ate white bulldogs for lunch. Lumberjacks loved tall tales like this, told while drinking heavily in the remote camps of the deep woods; Shepard was among the first to spread the word of Paul Bunyan, Wisconsin’s famous folk hero. 

A charismatic storyteller and great American liar, Shepard claimed to have killed one hodag and captured another, which he’d unveil inside a dark tent at the Oneida County Fair, where his sons groaned and shook the cage in which they kept the giant hodag puppet he’d commissioned. The town of Rhinelander then adopted the thing as a mascot. I passed the Chamber of Commerce, where a giant red-eyed hodag sculpture leers out at the highway, and drove by the local high school (“Home of the Hodags”) and a firearm shop called Hodag Gun & Loan. All through town hung fliers for the 46th annual Hodag Country Festival, its lineup full of bearded men with two first names.

My closest brush with murder — I mean, with being murdered — was in the Northwoods, too. The year was 2020 and I was more or less insane, resulting in a five-month romance with a tall, dark sociopath I had met at a bonfire on shrooms. To be fair, I had my reasons: He drove a big truck, lived by the river, worked the same job (operating a printing press) as my dad. 

Date enough artists and you get to thinking that regular Joes are the ticket to love. Well, bad news — they’re even worse! Sometimes while drinking, his eyes would go black and he’d proclaim my living room to be swarming with demons. He once claimed to have performed an exorcism on an ex-girlfriend one cold winter night in his barn. (I reckon methamphetamines were involved, as they so often are in cases of demonic possession.) Anyway, I had nothing better to do that New Year’s Eve than accompany him to a cabin in Hayward where, by the glow of the wood-burning stove, he proposed drowning me in the frozen pond out back, which I was pretty nice about, all things considered. After all, the guy was my ride home.

The sun was sinking over the waters of Lake Koshkonong, on whose shores the Buckhorn Supper Club opened 95 years ago. The Potawatomi tribe had made its home there centuries before; for them, it was common knowledge that within the 10,595-acre lake lived a water demon with a bad nicotine addiction. Nobody crossed the lake without first making an offering of tobacco to the monster lest it overturn their canoe, as was the case with a pair of brothers who tried to disprove the myth only to disappear, washing ashore the next day with their mouths full of white clay. Lake Koshkonong’s water demon slipped into obscurity as the centuries passed — until 1887, when two duck hunters spotted from their boat a giant swimming serpent whose powerful wake they figured to be nearly 40 feet long. By the account of a nearby newspaper from November of that year, it was the sixth or seventh sighting of the monstrous swimming creature, who’d been jonesing for a cigarette some 200 years.

The Buckhorn’s pig-tailed hostess sat me at a high-top with a prime lake view, presumably out of pity for the restaurant’s only party of one. The barroom was aglow in lurid bordello red — from the dangling glass lanterns to the cherry leather seats. Elvis ephemera was jumbled alongside signed Packers and Badgers jerseys, vintage oars, Sinatra records, and the whimsical handicrafts of sassy alcoholics (“Screw the cracker, Polly want a cocktail!”). 

At the bar, a glamorous woman in silver shoes, pushing 75 with the voice of a teenager, ordered for herself and her Hawaiian-shirted lover: “Brandy Manhattan with olives; double Tito’s and tonic, double lime, with mushrooms.” A spray of fuchsia orchids was pinned to her white dress. “Rodney, are you aware of the traditions of flower etiquette?” she asked her date, who shook his head. “Well, my father always bought us girls corsages on Mother’s Day,” she said. “And if the mother is deceased, then you buy white.” 

I ordered the deep-fried lake perch and a baked potato, served with a salad of mostly croutons and a basket of bread and crackers with two types of cheese spread. As lake perch goes, I’d had better, but that was beside the point. You don’t go to a supper club for the best meal of your life. You go there to get lost in time, grounded by the specificity of place. “David, how ya doin?! You got a little taller!” a burly man in camo greeted a sunburned 20-something. “I see your grandma once in a while. So whaddaya doin?” “Well, I’m an industrial designer…” “Wow! Well, nice seeing youse guys.” The woman in white regaled her date about a recent batch of salmon-salad sandwiches made from fish she’d caught that day. 

“Playin’ volleyball this summer, Mike?” a man in a XXXL golf shirt asked the bartender, who solemnly shook his head. “It’s my knee. I only play volleyball one way — hard.” I stayed there eavesdropping long after the sun had disappeared into the lake.

Schwarz’s Supper Club is on a two-lane road with no speed limit, running straight through the farmlands of St. Anna (pronounced “St. Ann”). It’s a 20-minute drive from Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin’s largest inland lake, home to some of the best walleye and perch fishing this earth has to offer. Take the exit off Highway 151 and suddenly all around you are endless rolling hills interrupted here and there by bursts of lilac bushes and herds of skinny cows. Signs warn drivers to mind the horses and buggies of the local Amish settlement, while others advertise eggs, tomatoes, strawberries, and asparagus. I’d driven three hours to get here and I was starving.

In 1881, the unincorporated community of St. Anna — part of the German Catholic farm communities constituting “The Holyland” of Wisconsin — consisted of St. Ann’s church, a wooden-shoe factory, a general store, and two hotels. Today, there’s St. Ann’s church, the fire station, the cemetery, and Schwarz’s, which was opened by Ziggy and Evelyn Schwarz in 1957 and is now run by their grandchildren. The Schwarzes do things the old-fashioned way, butchering their own meats and hand-breading their onion rings for up to 700 patrons on Saturday nights. In a week, they go through ten pounds of Grandma Schwarz’s pickled mushrooms and 900 pounds of prime rib, which some say is the best in the state. In a patch of shade beside the parking lot, nearly full at 4:45 PM, an ancient woman dozed behind a booth of raffle tickets for an upcoming brat fry fundraiser for the Sheboygan Falls Conservation Club.

Schwarz’s doesn’t take reservations. They operate their seating in the old-school supper club style: You order at the bar and linger there drinking old-fashioneds until your name is called, then you’re assigned a table, where your salad, bread, and relish tray await you. You may smoke inside the “VIP room,” where SiriusXM’s “Mellow Classic Rock” station blares over the tinkle of gambling machines. 

The nightly specials flashed on a TV screen: bacon-wrapped baby tenderloin, salted caramel White Russians, and of course the Friday fish fry. A separate TV showed the big news of the day: the mug shot of the world’s #1 golfer, who’d been arrested that morning outside Valhalla Golf Club for criminal mischief, reckless driving, assaulting a police officer, and disregarding traffic signs.

“And he still made his tee time!” crowed the biker to my right as his wife fed him a cherry from her plastic cocktail spear.

“Scottie’s Mug Shot, your table is ready,” announced the hostess on a mic. I plucked a pickled mushroom from my old-fashioned (it works better than you think) and listened as the woman to my left rhapsodized about the morels growing by her juniper bushes. “How’s your hip?” the bartender asked a bearded fellow in tie-dye, who put down his table name as “Mr. Natural.” Down the bar, a group of women rolled their Shake of the Day. 

“Kevin’s Ladies, your table is ready,” the hostess went on. “Keith and Betty, your table is ready.”

“Ready to order?” the biker’s wife asked. “Unless they changed the menu,” he replied. Oh, how they laughed. I hope the menu never changes.