John Carlisle, Detroit Free Press Columnist

ALLOUEZ – Alex Fagotti sat under a tree, holding a shotgun, waiting in the darkness for the thieves to return.

He was all alone. Except for the ghosts watching from the woods.

Fagotti owns Prospector's Paradise, a rocks and minerals store along U.S.-41 in the northern tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, an area so remote and isolated, a sign along the highway calls it "The Last Place on Earth." It's a sparsely populated wilderness of abandoned mines, empty towns and forested mountains.

His rock shop is housed in an old sawmill whose thick wood shelves are lined with thousands of ocean jaspers, rainbow fluorites, jagged quartzes, slabs of amethyst and shards of minerals that shimmer or shine or just look beautiful when the light strikes them the right way.

It's been a haven for collectors, a favorite stop for kids and a target for thieves who know that there's money to be made in minerals.

But after buying the property 15 years ago, Fagotti discovered he also was the unwitting owner of an Indian burial ground with an underground river that draws thousands of pagans, witches and mystics who believe it has healing powers and are convinced that the spirits of the dead live among the trees.

It all makes for one of the strangest tourist stops in the Upper Peninsula.

"I don't know what the hell's down there," Fagotti said about the haunted forest. "But there's something to it."

That something didn't deter the thieves who broke in and stole some minerals one night. And if they weren't frightened of the spirits, Fagotti figured he'd have to scare them himself.

The next night, he hid in the woods and waited. Just him and the ghosts and a gun. It wasn't the first time that thieves had stolen rocks from the 74-year-old. And despite him being on guard, it wouldn't be the last, either.

Shop for rocks

Up here in Copper Country, where years of mining have left minerals unearthed and scattered, rock collecting isn't a hobby. Rocks are a livelihood.

"There's probably 200 individuals who live here who depend on it year-round," Fagotti said. "I have the local prospectors come here almost every day. They want beer money, gas money, cigarette money, so they'll sell me some stuff."

They dig inside defunct mines, comb through excavated tailings piles, even scour the gravel on the side of the road, looking for anything that glistens. Every morning, an army of self-taught geologists shows up at the rock shops in the area with a bucket or two full of little gems, trying to get some pocket money.

"It's not easy, but they don't have any choice," Fagotti said. "We don't have a lot of jobs, so people go back to that mining. At this time now, the main industry is tourism, and people bring their kids in the summer, and kids love rocks. They'll stop just for rocks."

Fagotti was another kid who loved rocks. He grew up in Crystal Falls, near the Wisconsin border of the western U.P. and his grandfathers would bring him little gems they found while working in the iron mines.

He spent years in New Mexico as a prospector and a miner before returning to the U.P. 15 years ago and opening his massive warehouse of rocks and minerals, "A Rock Wall Mart" as its sign calls it.

"I could always make a buck selling rocks," he said. "I've always been monkeying with them."

There are a million rocks for sale under his roof, he said. The main warehouse has long tables of rocks and minerals at tourist-friendly prices.

Outside, he's got buckets of cheaper, smaller minerals at kid prices. But in the upper level of the warehouse, the real gems are laid out in splendor. Those sell at collector's prices. And many collectors come here and spend hundreds of dollars to get them.

"But they're hard to part with," Fagotti said, holding a chunk of rich blue sodalite. "They really are. Especially the bigger pieces. They get to be like old friends."

Forest wizard

Rick Hiltunen picked up a forked branch, held it before him and started walking in the woods behind the rock shop. Suddenly, the branch bent downward, even as Hiltunen seemingly struggled to keep it level. His face turned red from the strain.

"There's the water," said the 61-year-old, pointing to the ground. He was demonstrating dowsing, also called water witching, the old folk art of using a sixth sense and a stick to detect underground water sources. "I put my hand over here and I can feel it running underneath here. Ain't that cool?"

Hiltunen is a backwoods healer, a Finnish shaman, a forest wizard.

He said he can heal people's ailments. He said he sees the dead. He said the woods up here are alive with ghosts.

"When I was just a little boy, my grandmother said, 'Richard, don't tell nobody. They'll put you in a cuckoo's nest. But you have that power to sense things.' "

He works sometimes inside the rock shop, but his main role is being guardian of the Keweenaw Vortex, which local legend says is an underground whirlpool where two rivers meet and strange things happen. It lies just behind the shop.

Trees in the soil above the vortex grow in curling spirals, while one has knotty growths on its bark, said to be discolored by the copper and silver it draws from the rich soil. To top all that off, tradition has it that the clumps of mossy rocks arranged in the forest around the shop are the graves from an Indian burial ground.

People have become convinced that all these influences make this a magic, healing spot.

"You feel a tingling emanating from the ground," Hiltunen said, standing over the vortex. "I've seen people come in here with a cane and walk off without it."

The vortex has attracted people seeking cures for their ailments. It's drawn powwows. It's even become the site of an annual metaphysical festival that brings the spiritually hopeful and the mystically inclined to this hidden spot in the Michigan woods.

"I don't really understand it, but a lot of people go up there and they can feel it," Fagotti said. "The people that are crippled, they can feel their blood start to circulate. They sit there in the sun for a half hour or so and they say it really, really helps them." He doesn't charge people to visit the vortex.

But sometimes people come to just see Hiltunen, whose image is painted on a mural on the rock shop wall, portraying him as a robed warlock standing over the whirlpool.

He reads people's auras on request, or prays with them, or tells them hair-raising stories about the murdered people whose ghosts he said he sees along the U.P. highways. No charge for any of that, either.

"Rick is really a character," Fagotti said. "But it's all a lot of fun."

Burglars are back

The hours ticked away as Fagotti sat under that tree that night, holding his shotgun, waiting for the thieves to return.

"I wasn't going to shoot anything," Fagotti admitted. "I just wanted to scare these guys. I was just going to shoot up in the air."

Toward midnight, rain began to fall. He gave up, got in his truck and headed home.

Of course, that's when the burglars came back.

"Those son of a guns must've been watching me, because they came right after I left," Fagotti said. "Crazy, huh?"

This time, they didn't settle for a few copper nuggets. They hooked a chain from their truck to the door, tore it out along with part of the wall, and stole $32,000 worth of not only obvious valuables like copper and silver, but also a rare specimen of petrified wood, a smoky quartz crystal, some banded agates from the lake, other obscure minerals.

In other words, they knew their rocks and minerals, and how much money they could get for them.

"They knew what they were doing," he said. "They picked out all the good stuff."

The thieves didn't seem too concerned that police would drive past this remote outpost. They apparently weren't spooked about the ghosts watching from the woods.

But they probably should've noticed the surveillance cameras mounted high on the walls.

Buckets of minerals

A few weeks after the burglary, police called the shop. They'd arrested someone, they said, based on the footage caught on camera the night of the break-in.

Most of the stolen rocks were long gone. And it's hard to run a business without something to sell.

But a telltale thing happened. The local prospectors heard about the burglary and began showing up with buckets of minerals, sometimes including certain gems they'd been keeping for themselves. His shop is a part of the cycle of buying and selling rocks and minerals up here. It was important to keep every link in the chain healthy.

"They all brought me stuff enough to keep going," he said. "I wrote checks, I borrowed, I owed, whatever the hell, but it got it going again, so it was good."

As he stood in the doorway telling the story, a little boy walked into the shop with his mom. "Are you one of the owners?" said 10-year-old Luke Jarvi of Copper City. Fagotti nodded and smiled.

"Well, we have some rocks," the boy said shyly, and held out some minerals he'd found for Fagotti to examine. "Oh, here's a salesman!" Fagotti said, his face lighting up.

He was delighted — he said it reminded him of how he once was, when he made a little rock collection out of gems his grandfathers found deep in the mines. Reminded him of why he opened the shop in the first place. Of why he made it a place simply for people who love rocks and minerals as much as he does — the prospectors, the wide-eyed kids who make up half the store's customers, even the thieves who would steal from a rock shop with a magical tree behind it.

"Everybody likes rocks," Fagotti said. "I think it's the color and the brightness of them. But I really think it's the thought that you're going to get rich quick, that you're going to find something free that turns out to be something that's really valuable. There's no end to it. And there's always the chance of finding something really good."

Columnist John Carlisle writes about interesting people and places in Michigan. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com.