A trip to the western suburbs yesterday took me, predictably, to my new favorite spot to visit: Westwood Hills Nature Center in St. Louis Park. It’s a great place for a hike through the woods along Westwood Lake; it’s also an excellent spot to take kids to learn about nature. Doesn’t hurt that there’s no admission charge. (The turn-of-the-seasons photo was taken from the road that leads into the nature center. Click on it for a larger view. Another photo, below, shows a red-tailed hawk that the Westwood staff tends to; it is blind in one eye and likely wouldn’t survive if it were released.)
Predictably, I suppose, I had an ulterior motive in making the visit. Two of them, really: A, I wanted to drop off a flyer advertising the impending publication of “Fore! Gone.” at the nature center, which was built on the site of what I’m calling “the king” of lost golf courses, Westwood Hills Country Club / Golf Course; and, B, every time I set foot on the grounds, I learn something.
What I learned yesterday: The old golf course grounds might be haunted.
Emphasis here should be on the might have been. For one thing, there is the highly debatable notion that dead guys got caught in the giant afterlife linen closet in the sky and donned white sheets cuz it’s all they could find to wear and then came back to worldly places with which they were familiar. For another, as it turns out, The Haunting in northwest St. Louis Park, if it really does exist, doesn’t appear to exist on the old Westwood Hills golf grounds.
Still, it was amusing to ponder, if only for the hour or so it took to look at old aerial maps in an attempt to fortify or refute the “haunting” notion.
Someone I met at the nature center referred me to a page from the 2002 book “Ghost Stories of Minnesota” by Gina Teel. Under the heading “Fox Farmer Phantom,” Teel wrote:
“The ghost of a fox farmer is said to haunt Lamplighter Park in St. Louis Park. The eerie figure is set aglow by a spectral lantern that lights the path he is doomed to walk for all eternity.”
Cue the creepy organ music, and continue:
“Residents in surrounding neighborhoods have for years claimed to see the ghostly shape at night walking on the other side of the pond.”
I also was told yesterday that there was indeed once a fox farm in that area of St. Louis Park, and it was speculated that the fox farm might have been on part of the former golf course grounds. So when I got home, I turned on all of the lights as brightly as possible, armed myself with the latest anti-ghost technology (I know; there’s no such thing) and checked to see if the old fox farm or the current Lamplighter Park occupied the Westwood Hills golf grounds.
Darn it; that was disappointing. Looks to me like the northern edge of the golf course grounds in that specific area was Franklin Avenue/Westmoreland Lane, which actually is a path that now appears to divide Lamplighter Park from the grounds of St. Louis Park Junior High School. The junior high rests on what used to be the golf course; Lamplighter Park, I am pretty sure, does not.
So the ghost story, at least as it relates to Westwood Hills Golf Course, appears to have been debunked. Although I suppose it’s plausible to wonder if more than one twilight golfer at Westwood Hills was scared half to death not by the notion of standing over a 5-foot putt for bogey but rather over a 5-foot putt with the Bogey Man — the real thing — 100 yards in the distance, rounding up his spectral foxes.
