In the middle of June, I will be traveling up to the UP of Michigan to vacation with some friends who are also authors who write paranormal stories. (I was going to type paranormal authors, but I thought that might be divulging too much about the kind of people who let me be their friend. ) One of the things we wanted to do was take a haunted tour somewhere near Marquette, Michigan, but unfortunately, they are only offered nearer to Halloween. So, I decided to start researching some haunted places, and maybe we’ll just create our own tour.
If you happen to know of any UP haunted places, PLEASE feel free to tell me about them in the comments section. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
This is a Facebook posting from a paranormal site: “The only haunting I have been to is an old house located on Lincoln Road outside of Harbor Beach. It was a funeral home at one time. (That figures.) Just a dark shadow appears to be walking on the first-floor level (about 5 feet above ground), where there is no porch. I watched it from the old kitchen window. It was the home of a friend’s grandparents back in the 60s. She told me that when she spent nights there visiting her grandma, she would hear people talking in the living room (this bedroom was just a door away). She opened the door, and the room was filled with people dressed in black. I remember staying there when I was first married, and that second-floor hallway was spooky cold.
Grandma told stories about when she saw a lady in black leaning over the crib, crying. She asked the lady why she was crying, but got no answer. So, she asked, “Was it Richard?” No answer. Was it So and so…no answer. And the vision disappeared.
That house has had many owners since then, but none have stayed for long. It’s for sale again, but everyone in town knows its reputation. No buyers yet, but when new owners show up, it won’t take long. Someone from the city will buy it…and we wait to see how long they’ll stay!”
This is a little south of where we’ll be, but I thought it was a great haunted house story. It’s from Your Ghost Stories.com.“ These happenings took place at The Whimsy House in Pentwater, Michigan.
In July 2006, my family and I were renting an old 2-story Victorian house for a week in the village of Pentwater on the western coast of Michigan. The village was an old lumber-producing town. In its heyday, Pentwater had 3 or 4 lumber mills and was one of the number 1 providers of lumber for the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire. The house sits atop a hill on the south side of town overlooking Pentwater Lake.
Upon arrival, we all found our rooms and disposed of our luggage, then headed down and out to the front porch. While sitting on the porch, talking and carrying on, we heard a static noise coming from my parents’ room. We all looked at each other with that look. You all know the look I’m talking about. Well, it was decided that I would be the one to go and find out what it was. In the house and up the stairs I went. As I rounded the corner and entered their room I was amazed to find out it was the tv was on, so I walked up to it and pushed the KNOB in and turned it off.
Once back outside. I told everyone that it was the TV. Not 2 seconds after I told them, we heard the noise again. This time, my wife and I decided to go up and turn it off. Done! We headed back to the porch. Yet again, the TV went back on. My older brother, being a believer but not wanting to believe, went with me to turn off the TV… This time, we unplugged it. No power, no noise. We made it halfway down the stairs, and the TV came back on. This really scared me. I have never seen two 6-foot-6-inch men move so FAST.
That night, before going to bed, my father moved the TV to the closet.
My room was located in the back of the house, facing the woods. The bed was positioned in the room so you could look out the door, see down the hallway, and the top of the stairs. I woke up sometime during the night, sweating. Mind you, it was the summer, but it wasn’t hot or humid. Nice, cool Lake Michigan breeze is blowing. As I lay there, I kept hearing the sounds of people talking and the sound of saws in the woods. It kept me up for the better part of 3 hours. It happened every night we were there.
Nothing crazy happened for the rest of the time we were there. Until the last night, we were all out back sitting around the fire pit, relaxing and talking about how much fun we had had on our trip. It was around 7:30 pm. When the light in my room came on, we all saw this and couldn’t believe what we were seeing. My brother and I said, 1,2,3 NOT IT. My father decided he would go and turn out the light. He came back down and said, “I didn’t know the light switch in that room was the old pull cord type switch.”
That was the first and last time I ever had to stay in the house. Since then, my father has had a home built up there. Every time I drive by that house, I still get the heebie jeebies.
Well, that’s all I have for now. If you ever find yourself in Pentwater, Michigan, stay in The Whimsy House.”
I told you it was a cool story!
These are from Reddit:
“My hometown is the Sault (I live in New Mexico now, but my family still lives there), and we have a family cabin out near Bay Mills. It’s fairly secluded with a long driveway through some deep woods. One night, my sister and I were trying to fall asleep in the little bunkhouse that’s separate from the main cabin, and we heard strange music that sounded like a pan flute or something similar coming from the woods outside our window. We sat in silence for a minute listening, and then both yelled DID YOU HEAR THAT?!? And booked it to the main cabin where our parents were. Unless someone wandered the mile down our driveway and then went into the woods to play the pan flute at 1 am for fun, I think it must have been something paranormal.”
“For years, I’ve been telling this story, without having a name for the creature I saw. “Skinwalker”, “Wendigo”, and “alien” have been thrown around a couple of times, but none of those really stuck.
Now I finally have a name for what I saw…Crawler.
It was June of 2008. A cluster of really bad storms hit our state, and a large portion of it lost power for a couple of days. I was 16 at the time and stayed a couple of nights at my friend’s house, who also lost power. She lived in the boonies, middle of nowhere, on a horse farm—surrounded by crop fields (soybeans maybe?), which was then surrounded by woods.
The night in question, we were upstairs in her bedroom, lying on her bed, looking out her window, just talking and laughing the evening away. We were faced into her backyard. Around 930pm, we heard this sound out in the woods that was unlike anything we’ve ever heard before. Now, I’ve lived in Michigan my whole life; I know what “Michigan summer” sounds like. The sound we heard was so incredibly unnatural, it almost sounded metallic. It was this horrible shrieking noise that was so loud it sounded like it was right in front of us, but was at least a quarter mile away and didn’t echo. Originally, we weren’t psyched out about the sound. We actually started making jokes about it, completely unfazed. The night progressed on as normal.
11 pm rolls around, we are still gossiping and facing her backyard, looking out her window. It was dark now, with barely any visibility due to the clouds obscuring the moon. Suddenly, her horses started going wild out in the pasture. Braying and running towards her barn. We barely had time to process it because simultaneously, her husky started acting really uneasy, pacing back and forth while giving us a mixture of a whine and a growl.
And like clockwork, everything went silent. The horses stopped. Her husky paused. There was a deafening silence to the moment.
And then we heard it.
First, it started off as a rustling sound, as if something was shifting through the crop field. Then we heard a bone-cracking sound, as if every joint in someone’s body cracked as they moved. I looked down into her yard, into the darkness, and I saw this tall shadow next to a telephone pole in the middle of her yard.
Me- “[Friend’s name], do you have a bush next to your telephone pole?”
Friend- “No, why?”
Me-“There. Do you see that?”
And like a movie, the clouds roll away from the moon, which illuminates her yard, and there stands an 8-foot-tall humanoid figure, incredibly skinny with long arms dangling at its side, staring up at us.
It takes my brain a second to process what I’m seeing, and when it finally clicks, I whisper.
“…what the freak?”
And IMMEDIATELY this THING gets down on all fours and runs full speed ahead towards her house while making that awful shrieking sound once again.
We scream in unison and instantly slam her window shut and run to her mom’s bedroom to bang on her door while SOBBING uncontrollably. It was such a visceral response to what we just saw. There was just something about it that was so absolutely disturbing. It shook us to our core.
Her mom woke up, and of course, didn’t believe us. Poked fun at us, even. I started to even question what we saw, but we were so frightened we didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Steered clear of all the windows and hid in a closed-off computer room in the center of her house.
The next day, it was all we could talk about. The craziest part about it all? My friend suggested we camp outside that night to investigate!! I tried to hide my fear, and I played along. We set up a tent. Decorated it with “alien hunting” signs. But deep in my soul, I was beyond terrified for the unlike any other time in my life.
With a stroke of luck, the power came back on. I used this as an excuse to stay inside that night. My friend, of course, protested and wanted to sleep in the tent. But I used wanting air conditioning as an incentive to stay inside.
That evening, around the same time we heard the shrieking sound the night before, we heard it again—but this time it almost sounded even angrier. More menacing. Like it was waiting for us. Watching us. Calling out to us.
For the past 15 or so years, I’ve wondered what I saw. It’s haunted me ever since, forever burned into my core memories. Now I finally have a name for it…Crawler.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m freaked out. I guess I’ll be searching online for “Crawler Repellant” before we go up north. In the meantime, please share your stories of the UP, if you have them. Really, I can’t get any more freaked out than I already am!
Happy Friday!!!
Good stories!
Thank you!!! 🙂