Historic Places Archives - Page 14 of 15

Ten Haunted or Creepy places in Michigan

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Forgotten Places, Historic Places, Lighthouses, Michigan Historical Markers .

I love a good ghost story especially when there is some Michigan history attached to it. Here are some of my favorite spooky places I have found traveling the back roads in Michigan. If you find these places intriguing I hope you will take a look at the Lost In Michigan book for more in-depth information and stories HERE

The Bruce Mansion in Burnside township is said to be one of the most haunted places in Michigan and there is a story of the owner hitting a pedestrian and burying his body on the property

Bruce Mansion in Burnside Michigan

Northville Psychiatric Hospital in Northville, This state run hospital closed in 2003 and supposedly there are ghosts in the tunnels that run between building, I have not been there in a while and I hear it is being demolished for a new project on that site.

Northville Psychiatric Hospital in Northville

The Calumet Theatre in the Keweenaw Peninsula. According to Wikipedia it is inhabited by the ghost of a famous Polish actress Madame Helena Modjeska

Calumet Theatre

Pere Cheney near Grayling was an old logging town that was stricken with illness, all that is left of the town is some depressions in the ground and a cemetery with strange things happening in it. Pere Cheney was a lumbering town established in 1874 and one of the largest towns in the region at the time. The population grew to about 1500 people but in 1893 diphtheria spread throughout the village killing most of its population.

Pere Cheney Cemetery and ghost town

Eagle Harbor Lighthouse, there are stories of a Coast Guard lighthouse keeper in the 1970s reporting many strange happenings at Eagle Harbor, including the sight of a faceless man in a plaid flannel shirt, the sounds of moving furniture and heavy footsteps on the second floor and lights turning on and off.

Eagle Harbor Lighthouse

The Fenton Monastery The monastery was built in 1868 and was originally a Baptist seminary. By 1886 it became a retired home for Baptist priests and their wives and then Converted into apartments between 1935 and 1945. by the 1950s the building became a nursing home. I found some references of it being haunted but no stories of why it is creepy with part of the front fallen down. Sadly the old Monastery was torn down in 2016.

Fenton Monistary

The Pere Marquette Depot on Potter Street in Saginaw one of the largest Victorian era train stations in the United States There are several sources that claim the station to be haunted, bodies of soldiers who died in the war were shipped back to Saginaw by train to this depot. Richard Froeber was a casket maker in Saginaw and his shop was in the depot and he would build caskets for the fallen soldiers. There have been reports of people seeing a ghostly figure of a woman in white roaming the station.

Potter Street Train Station in Saginaw Michigan

The Marquette Orphanage,Built in 1915 and closed in 1980 there is a story of a girl who died in a blizzard and they held the funeral in the basement for her.

Marquette Orphanage

The David Whitney House in Detroit. This house was originally constructed in the 1890s by David Whitney, Jr. It was restored in 1986 and is now used as a formal dining restaurant. Both Whitney and his wife died in this mansion and are believed to remain behind to haunt it. An elderly man can be seen looking out the windows and the elevator will move between floors without anyone in it. Now it’s a resturant with the third floor converted into the “Ghost Bar”

The David Whitney house in Detroit

Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse in the thumb rumors of an apparition of a woman wearing an apron appearing in a second floor window, footsteps on the tower stairs, ice cold spots appearing then dissipating, Peter Shook, was the first lighthouse keeper at Point aux Barques. In 1849, he drowned along with two others on their way to Port Huron to pick up supplies, leaving his wife Catherine the honor of being the first woman lighthouse keeper in the Great Lakes.

Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse in the thumb

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The Calumet Theatre Haunted by the ghost of Madame Helena Modjeska

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places, Michigan Historical Markers, Uncategorized, upper peninsula .

The Michigan historical marker next to the Calumet Theatre reads:
“One of the first municipal theaters in America, the Calumet opened on March 20, 1900, “the greatest social event ever known in copperdom’s metropolis.” The theater contained a magnificent stage and elegant interior decorations, including an electrified copper chandelier. For over a decade, Copper Country audiences witnessed a broad panorama of American legitimate theater, and many prominent stage personalities, both American and European, trod the boards of the Calumet. By 1920s, motion pictures replaced live theater, and subsequently, live drama returned to the Calumet. The reopened community theater resumed its position as a focal point of civic pride for the people of Calumet and the Copper Country.”

According to Wikipedia the Theater is inhabited by the ghost of, Madame Helena Modjeska. The story of the ghost first emerged in 1958, when actress Adysse Lane claimed that the ghost of Madame Modjeska appeared to her during a performance when Lane had forgotten her lines. Since then, unexplainable happenings have occurred. Many people have heard music and felt cold air from nowhere\

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The Old Marquette Orphanage

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Forgotten Places, Historic Places, upper peninsula .

The Holy Family Orphanage was opened in 1915 by the catholic church and was designed to accommodate 200 children. The reason for the large orphanage was Native American Children were removed from their families and tribe in an effort by the government and society to separate them from their culture. Sadly I don’t remember hearing about this in history class. I found the Indian_Child_Welfare_Act on wikipedia for more info.

It was furnished with classrooms, a dormitory, bathrooms on every floor and an annex that housed heating and plumbing facilities. There were laundry and kitchen facilities, a large dining hall and playrooms. the orphanage was open until the 1960s and some of the Cuban refuges children were some of it’s last to live there before being moved to foster homes. Northern Michigan University used it until the 1980s and it has been abandoned since then.

There are urban legends of abuse by the nuns, and a rumor of one girl who was out playing in the snow who caught pneumonia and died a few days later from her Illness. Supposedly the nuns had a funeral for her in the basement. they say on a quite night you can still hear the children playing.

For the record, I do not trespass, and I took this photo from a public sidewalk.

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The Old Guitar Factory in Kalamazoo

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places .

Sitting on 225 Parsons Street in Kalamazoon is the old guitar factory that looks like a church with the doorway in a sort of steeple. it’s like a temple to the gods of music. The smokestack still has the word “Gibson” laid in tile across the side of it. unfortunately Like many companies, Gibson made the decision to leave Michigan. After they left, some talented Luthiers formed the Heritage guitar company in 1985 and continue to this day building some of the worlds greatest guitars at the old factory in Kalamazoo

The Medical Miracle at Mackinac Island

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places, Michigan Historical Markers .

On June 6, 1822, an employee of the American Fur Company on Mackinac Island, named Alexis St. Martin, was accidentally shot in the stomach by a discharge of a shotgun loaded with a buck shot from close range that injured his ribs and his stomach. Dr. Beaumont treated his wound, but expected St. Martin to die from his injuries. Despite this dire prediction, St. Martin survived – but with a hole in his stomach that never fully healed. Unable to continue work for the American Fur Company, he was hired as a handyman by Dr. Beaumont.

By August 1825, Beaumont had been relocated to Fort Niagara in New York, and Alexis St. Martin had come with him. Beaumont recognized that he had in St. Martin the unique opportunity to observe digestive processes. Dr. Beaumont began to perform experiments on digestion using the stomach of St. Martin. Most of the experiments were conducted by tying a piece of food to a string and inserting it through the hole into St. Martin’s stomach. Every few hours, Beaumont would remove the food and observe how well it had been digested. Beaumont also extracted a sample of gastric acid from St. Martin’s stomach for analysis. In September, Alexis St. Martin left Dr. Beaumont and moved to Canada, leaving Beaumont to concentrate on his duties as an army surgeon. Beaumont also used samples of stomach acid taken out of St. Martin to “digest” bits of food in cups. This led to the important discovery that the stomach acid, and not solely the mashing, pounding and squeezing of the stomach, digests the food into nutrients the stomach can use; in other words, digestion was primarily a chemical process and not a mechanical one.

During 1826 and 1827, Dr. Beaumont was stationed at Fort Howard in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In 1828 he was transferred to St. Louis, Missouri. While en route to St. Louis, Alexis St. Martin was ordered to stop at Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to serve as Dr. Beaumont’s handyman again. In early 1831, Dr. Beaumont conducted another set of experiments on St. Martin’s stomach, ranging from the simple observation of normal digestion to the effects that temperature, exercise and even emotions have on the digestive process.

Beaumont published the account of his experiments in 1833, as Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion. He and St. Martin parted ways, with Beaumont eventually going to St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Martin to his home in Quebec province, Canada. Off and on for the next twenty years, Beaumont tried to get St. Martin to move to St. Louis, but the move never occurred.

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The Michigan Historical Marker next to the American Fur store reads:

On June 6, 1822, Alexis St. Martin (1804 ~ 1889), a French Canadian voyageur, was accidentally shot in the American Fur Company store located on this site.. Dr. William Beaumont (1786 ~ 1853), The Fort Mackinac post surgeon nursed St. Martin back to health. St. Martin’s wound healed, leaving a permanent opening into his stomach. Through this opening Beaumont compared the digestibility of foods, recorded the temperature of the stomach under different conditions, and extracted and analyzed gastric juices. Beaumont conducted the first of 250 experiments with St. Martin in 1825 in the Officers’ Stone Quarters at Fort Mackinac. Eight years later he published a groundbreaking book on his discovery of the digestive process.

The Magnificent Hurlbut Memorial Gate in Detroit

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Detroit, Historic Places .

When Detroit Grocer Chauncey Hurlbut died in 1885, he willed the bulk of his fortune, some $250,000, to beautify Waterworks Park on Jefferson Ave. The architectural philosophies of the era called for construction of monumental gates at the entrances to public places and part of Hurlbut’s fortune was used to construct just such a gate.

Herman A. Brede and Gustave Mueller were chosen to design this gate at a cost of $30,000. The structure is a three tiered triumphal arch, 132 feet (40 m) in length, 40 feet (12 m) in depth, and over 50 feet (15 m) high, built from limestone.It is decorated with carved garlands, water fonts and roundels, and an American eagle with outstretched wings tops the entire structure. Two stairways lead to a terrace twelve feet above the ground.

The gate originally featured a statue of Chauncey Hurlbut inside the center dome, and an ornamental iron gate for vehicle entry, but both are now gone. The gate was substantially restored in 2007, with damaged limestone repaired or replaced, a stairway reconfiguration, repair of the eagle sculpture, and repair and replacement of light fixtures.

Edmore’s General Bag Corp Building

Posted on July 7, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places, small towns, Uncategorized .

Sometimes fate has a way of showing me what to photograph. On a recent trip heading down 46 I had to use the facilities somewhere since my 44 year old bladder does not work as well as it used to. knowing the Fred Meijer Heartland Trail was nearby I stopped at a parking lot that had a restroom I could use. After using the well appointed deluxe outhouse and my mind could think of other things beside reliving my bladder, it was then I noticed a huge building that had the words ” GENERAL BAG CORP.” painted on the sides. I guess one thing that catches my attention is a building with giant lettering painted on the sides. It means it is usually old and historic, but it also is helpful since it tells me something about the buildings. And the bag building was no exception, after googling Edmore General Bag Building I found and Article about it HERE and how the DDA in Edmore wants to re-purpose it into shops for the community. I hope they are successful, I like seeing old buildings being reused not only because it is a wonderful way to connect with the history of town but it just seems wasteful to knock down a building and build new ones.

PS. when I am traveling the back roads it’s nice to find a bathroom when I need one. to bad the world famous two story outhouse was not functional and accessible it would have been nice to use some historic facilities.

The old Library in Petoskey built by Carnegie and visited by Hemingway

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places, Library .

On East Mitchell Street in Downtown Petoskey there is this old Library building of which Andrew Carnegie donated money to build. I liked the architecture, but then I noticed there was a small sign near the steps about Ernest Hemingway.

It Reads

When living in Petoskey in 1919 the library was a favorite haunt of Hemingway’s and, in December, wearing his Italian cape and Red Cross uniform, he spoke here to the Ladies Aid Society about his world war I experiences. At that event he met the Connable family who led to his connection with the Toronto Star newspaper and his employment as its European Correspondent

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Memorial Day Images

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Historic Places .

My Favorite Images from Memorial Day 2014

detroit firemans memorial elmwood cemetery

Detroit Fireman’e Memorial at Elmwood Cemetery

great lakes national cemetery holly michigan

Great Lakes National Cememtery in Holly Michigan

Owosso Michigan Oak Hill Cemetery

Saginaw Michigan Oakwood Cemetery

Downtow Stockbridge Michigan

Midland county Courthouse

Michigan’s Haunted Mansion

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Mike Sonnenberg Posted in Forgotten Places, Historic Places, Houses, Uncategorized .

Several sources have said this is one of the most haunted places in Michigan. I am not much of a believer in ghosts, but I do like a good story. Built in 1876, on M53 near Brown City is this old Second Empire mansion. It was the home of and built by John G. Bruce who owned the Bruce and Webster General Merchants with his brother-in-law in Burnside township which he was the postmaster for 16 years. The old house sold a few different times and rumor has it one of the mansion’s owners were said to have been taking the back roads in his automobile when he hit a pedestrian. Terrified at what he had done, he took the body back to the mansion and buried it somewhere on the estate. Some say the ghost of the victim, others simply guilt, caused the man to lose his fortune and drive him to commit suicide by hanging himself in the old bell tower.

Please note this house is not abandoned please be respectful and do not trespass.

I have more about the historic mansion and several other haunted places around the state in the Lost In Michigan books available on Amazon HERE

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