Charles Brumbach: William Branham's Fictional Life Story

Charles Brumbach was William Branham's first father-in-law and is very closely tied to William Branham’s life story. In the gut-wrenching tale of his first marriage to Hope Brumbach, Branham described building the courage to visit Mr. and Mrs. Brumbach to ask for Hope’s hand in marriage. Like many other parts of Branham’s life stories, however, the scene described was fiction.

Charles Brumbach married Hazel Scott in 1912. Shortly after, Charles and Hazel moved to Logansport, IN. Hazel became critically ill, and the family was called in. After Charles' mother went to see the newlyweds, Hazel began to improve. Her illness, sadly, appears to have been due to foul play.

Later that year, when Hope was one year old, Hazel sued Charles for divorce. It then became known that Charles was abusive and had abandoned his wife and child. After a fight, Charles told her to file for divorce. He no longer cared for Hazel and was not providing for Hope. By 1919, Charles had returned to Jeffersonville and began building a new life. That life appeared to include white supremacy.

The same year Charles Branham was arrested for his involvement in the production of illegal liquor for the R. E. Wathen Distilleries and Otto H. Wathen. The Fiery Cross, the Ku Klux Klan’s Indiana newsletter, published a story about the Klan headquarters in Jeffersonville being burned. Jeffersonville newspapers were exposing the names of the Ku Klux Klan. The headquarters was on the second floor of the Spieth Building. There was a female Klan in Jeffersonville, and part of the building was used for the women, while the other part was used for the men. Mr. Brumbach had the key to the Klan headquarters.

Though Hope did move in with her father temporarily, and Hazel did make another brief attempt to reconcile with Charles, their last attempt failed. Long before William Branham’s marriage to Hope, Charles married his second wife, Grace Creigh. Just 4 months after his divorce in 1931, three years before William Branham married Hope, Charles was no longer living with Hope's mother.

You can learn this and more on william-branham.org

Charles Brumbach:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/charles_brumbach

Hope (Brumbach) Branham:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/hope_branham