Hank Peck, a World War I veteran now hoboing and looking for work during the Great Depression, makes an unfortunate choice when he hops off the Milwaukee Railroad just outside Uppsala, Wisconsin. Unknowingly, he has landed himself in the midst of a ghost story: the Uppsalans have violently expelled earlier settlers from their town, and a deadly, vengeful spirit has terrified them ever since.

Rather than welcome a traveler in need, the townspeople threaten Hank and drive him away. But something he has yet to understand scratches at Hank's spirit and urges him to stay to see them through the haunting and bring it to an end.

He meets two new friends, sister and brother Polly Cooper and Daniel Cornelius Oneidas, who own a farm outside of Uppsala, and they decide to help Hank find a way to expel the ghost. Teamwork, composure, and resolve may succeed where strength alone cannot.

Wiskalo Chookalo recreates a world of the American past in a Midwestern story of suffering, friendship, courage, compassion, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice: values that got Americas through an age of privation, loss, and spiritual doubt. Not all ghosts haunt mysterious passageways in ancient castles, and not all heroes achieve their quests on battlefields: spiritual power may win out where physical skills alone cannot.