Dating back nearly 60 years ago, Necedah, a village of about 900 people set in the rock formations of central Wisconsin, has been the site of several unusual religious goings on.
It started on Nov. 12, 1949, when Mary Ann Van Hoof, a farm wife and mother of eight, said the Virgin Mary appeared to her outside the village.
Over more than 20 years, Van Hoof said she was visited by the Virgin Mary, a hundred saints and a Russian czar. Their messages to her began simply: "Pray, pray, pray hard."
But as time went on, the messages coming through Van Hoof became diatribes on subjects ranging from doomsday and communism to the dangers of food additives and music by the Beatles.
Over the years, crowds as large as 100,000 people traveled to the site, and some followers have devoted their lives to the Necedah apparition.
The site is not approved by the Catholic Church, as are more famous Marian locations such as Lourdes, France, and Fatima, Portugal.
Indeed, the Catholic Church condemned it almost immediately, saying the apparitions were false, and in 1975 issued an order forbidding shrine followers from receiving sacraments in Catholic churches.
But that did not deter Van Hoof, who died in 1984, and her followers.
The community was thrust back into the spotlight in 1998 with the arrest of Jeffrey L. Maas on charges of stealing religious statues.
Believing an asteroid was going to destroy most life on Earth, Maas constructed a modern day Noah's Ark in the woods, packing it with stolen religious statues and other items for Armageddon survivors.
Twenty-nine statues were recovered from Maas' Town of Necedah shed. He was placed on probation for 10 years after pleading guilty.
The arrest of Maas put a spotlight on another strange case, the unsolved slaying of Father Alfred Kunz of Dane, who knew Maas and other shrine pilgrims. Kunz, 67, was found with his throat slit on March 4, 1998, at St. Michael Catholic School in the village of Dane.
Kunz, a conservative Catholic priest, was periodically drawn into the circle of shrine followers - not as a public devotee, but through friendships and consultations about canon law. Kunz and the group shared, at least to some degree, a distaste for what they considered the liberalization of the Catholic Church in the last several decades, and they appreciated old practices such as the celebration of the Latin Tridentine Mass.
The case remains unsolved.
