Mocha Mayhem

Chapter Three

We certainly had our share of supposedly haunted resorts, houses, restaurants and other tourist attractions up in Northern Wisconsin, so the tale of the Haunted Resort at Crystal Clear Lake was just another drop in the bucket. I'd even forgotten about it until Sam's reminders, and the mention of the Melenuewski family. Ghost stories around teen bonfires usually included a hat tip toward the girl who mysteriously vanished at a Wisconsin resort one warm July weekend, never to be heard from again.

As Sam walked me through the cold case in her office that afternoon, it did seem a bit familiar: the town was in turmoil when Regina wasn't found within the first couple days. Reinforcements had been brought in from nearby towns and municipalities, and a thorough search had been conducted. According to the aunt and uncle (who had been out with friends at a nearby bar and grill the night of Regina's disappearance), the three had been spending their annual week-long vacation up at the resort and Regina said she would be playing volleyball with friends near the resort's beach the evening of the 12th. She wasn't in their cabin when her guardians returned for the night, but the aunt and uncle had gone to bed, assuming she had spent the night with friends. When they'd awoken the next morning, the girl was still missing. Regina's resort friends had been questioned, but none of them had seen Regina the evening of July 12th. Finally, after some pressure, one sixteen-year-old friend did admit that he had seen her earlier that afternoon, and that they had planned to go for a swim together, but that she seemed unusually jumpy and turned him away. This same teenage friend claimed to have seen Regina heading toward Mr. Melenuewski's office shortly afterward, and that was the last time he ever saw her. Mr. Melenuewski had been brought in for questioning at that point, but they never had enough evidence to hold him. The friend who had pointed the cops toward Mr. Melenuewski was also held for a short time, too, but that didn't stick, either. One of the profilers with the department in Regina's aunt and uncle's hometown said that Regina had run off once before; she had also experienced trauma as a child, due to her parents' sudden death, which made her a higher risk for a runaway. Regina herself was a bit of a goth; friends described her as someone who mostly dressed in black, listened to metal, and wrote dark poetry. From the report, it sounded as though she and her aunt had some trouble getting along but that the three of them were more or less a happy family. The local authorities gradually dismissed the case, and Regina was reported as a runaway after detectives combed the entire surrounding area without finding a sign of the girl, nor any dead body. The aunt and uncle hired a private investigator to continue the search once the local detectives stopped searching, but she was never found. It appeared she was essentially given up for dead or for a runaway, depending on which materials you consulted in the cold case files. Though it was never considered a murder, local teens took that theory and ran with it, quickly perpetrating the legend of the haunted resort.

As far as Jon and Melody Melenuewski went, business had plummeted afterward. They had never been beloved members of the community anyway (Mrs. Melenuewski was racist, crass, and all-around bonkers; and Mr. Melenuewski drank too much and gave off creepy predator vibes), so nobody was willing to help them salvage the resort's reputation. They didn't have any kids of their own or nearby family members either. Eventually, their property was foreclosed on, and they took off down to Florida to mooch off distant relatives. According to the information Sam was able to find, they had both passed away within the last ten years; they would have been in their eighties by now, so it wasn't surprising that they were gone.

From what I remembered of the place growing up, teenagers used to try to break into the cabins after the bank took the place. There were no few tales of lost virginity in the old-fashioned one-room log cabins peppering the resorts' grounds. Several tales of graffiti and other miscellaneous vandalism also accompanied the resort, as did a few rumors about a ghostly figure stalking the area. The stories I'd heard back in high school were starting to come back to me. The rumors of the resort's haunting were basically local legend. It was apparently time to see whether or not they had been greatly exaggerated.