This story is excerpted from an interview conducted in Rushville in August 2026 with Jerry Wellnitz and PW.

PW: I just know we always said they were the haunted trees.

Jerry Wellnitz: Yeah, she always calls that the haunted trees up there. When I was a first grader, we walked up there and got sticks, and then afterwards they told us that there was a murder up there. And gosh, I can’t remember now, but it seemed like the person that got convicted of it didn’t do it. It was kind of a rigged deal or something that they.

PW: In the museum, it says, really they think her husband did it—

Jerry Wellnitz  —and he blamed it on a transient or something that he tried to blame it onto or something. So.

PW: We just always thought there was blood on the rocks up there, and you know.

Shyanne Bellamy: And that must have been scary as a kid to go.

PW: That’s why we went up there, yeah.