Chief Highknocker’s Boulder: The Legends of Dartford Cemetery

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Dartford Cemetery sits in the city of Green Lake, Wisconsin, and its best known grave is not a marble monument but a boulder. Under it lies the man the settlers around the lake called Chief Highknocker, the last reigning chief of the Green Lake area, who drowned within sight of the shoreline he had returned to every summer of his adult life. The documented story is grim enough on its own. The ghost stories that grew around the burial ground came later, and they are worth telling apart from the record.

Orientation: Where Dartford Cemetery Sits

• Where: the city of Green Lake, Green Lake County, Wisconsin, on the northeast shore of the lake at Dartford Bay
• The town: small, with a population of 828 as of 2018
• The lake next door: Green Lake, 237 feet at its deepest point, the deepest natural inland lake in the state
• The grave people come for: Chief Highknocker’s, marked by a large boulder carrying an inscription from the community
• Status: an open burial ground, free to walk, no admission or tour

Why the Cemetery Is Called Dartford

The name is older than the town’s current one. Anson Dart, working with Smith Fowler and his own son, built a dam in an effort to raise the level of the lake, and the settlement that grew up around it took the name Dartford. Dart put up a sawmill the following year that ran off the mill race the dam created, and the raised water level made room for other mills around the lake. Dartford eventually became Green Lake, but the bay at the outflow of the Puchyan River still carries the old name, and so does the cemetery.

The resort era followed the mills. Large wooden hotels lined the north shore in the late 19th century, along with one short-lived casino. The Pleasant Point was among them, opening in the early 1880s. That mix of working town and summer resort is the setting for everything that follows: a place where visitors came for a season and locals stayed for generations, and where the older history of the lake was already being pushed to the margins.

Henaga, the Last Chief of the Green Lake Area

The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, also referred to by the exonym Winnebago, were among the earliest known residents of the Green Lake area. The lake itself, known as Daycholah, is a spiritual place for the Winnebago. One legend holds that a person must bring gifts for the Water Spirit that lives beneath the lake in order to enter it. That belief is not a ghost story invented for tourists. It predates the dam, the hotels and the cemetery.

To clear land for the increasing number of European settlers, the United States government forced the Ho-Chunk people to relocate repeatedly, first out of the Green Lake area to Iowa, then to Blue Earth County, Minnesota, where a reservation had been established for them.

Chief Highknocker was born in 1820 with the given name Henaga. He spent most of his life around the lake, but the growing settler population pushed him north as well. He kept coming back, returning to Green Lake every summer with other members of the tribe. On August 12, 1911, at the age of 91, he was swimming in the lake when he got a cramp and drowned. His grave at Dartford Cemetery is marked by a large boulder with an inscription placed there by the community.

Nothing about that account requires the supernatural, and it is the part of the cemetery’s story that can actually be checked. It also explains why the folklore attached itself to this grave rather than any other.

What Visitors Say Happens Among the Stones

Everything in this section is reported experience and local legend. None of it is documented, and no verified account places any of it beyond the reach of ordinary explanation.

• A figure in ceremonial dress. The most repeated claim is a sighting of Highknocker himself, described in traditional ceremonial attire and most often reported on quiet, fog-heavy evenings. Fog and low light are exactly the conditions under which a headstone, a shrub or a fellow visitor becomes a figure.
• Children’s laughter. Visitors describe giggling and whispering that seems to come from no particular direction and fades out. In a residential town this small, sound from nearby streets carries.
• Inscriptions that change. Some accounts claim certain gravestones show sudden, unexplained changes in their lettering. This is the least verifiable claim of the set and the one most likely to reflect weathering, lichen and shifting light on old stone.
• Orbs in photographs. Photographers and ghost hunters report capturing bright spheres of light. Flash bouncing off airborne dust, insects and moisture produces the same effect in any dark outdoor space.
• The mausoleum dare. A local legend holds that anyone who sits on top of a particular mausoleum on Halloween night will be shoved off by invisible hands. This is a classic legend trip: a specific place, a specific date and a specific dare, which is the shape folklore takes when teenagers carry it rather than historians.

Green Lake’s reputation for this kind of thing reached television. A season four episode of the Discovery Channel series A Haunting, titled “Legend Trippers,” is set in Green Lake and the nearby town of Montello.

Visiting Dartford Cemetery Respectfully

This is an active burial ground in a small community, not an attraction. There is no gate fee, no tour and no interpretive signage aimed at ghost hunters. Daylight is the sensible time to come, both because the grounds are easier to read and because after-dark visits to cemeteries invite trouble with local ordinances and with the families whose relatives are buried here. Leave the stones alone, do not climb on the mausoleum regardless of the date, and do not disturb anything left at Highknocker’s boulder.

If you are making the trip, the surrounding area rewards the drive. The city of Green Lake sits at Dartford Bay on the northeast shore, with a marina that leads into Deacon Mills Park, and “Loop the Lake,” a 24-mile trail, circles the whole lake. Tuscumbia Country Club, the oldest golf course in the state, is also here. Read the boulder first. The story it marks is the reason anyone remembers this cemetery at all.

See Dartford Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• Google Earth
• The Removal From Minnesota of the Sioux and Winnebago Indians
• Portrait and Biographical Album of Green Lake, Marquette and Waushara Counties, Wisconsin…
• The City of Green Lake
• Green Lake Watershed Information System (Wisc (official site))
• Wikipedia: Green Lake (Wisconsin)

Address: 431 North Street

Ghost Tours Nearby

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