Michigan ghost hunters chase Upper Peninsula's unexplained

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

SAULT STE. MARIE – The ghost hunters crept through the cargo hold of an old freighter. It was dark apart from the twilight through the portholes, and it was quiet except for their footsteps.

Suddenly there was sound ahead of them. They stopped walking and listened intently. The noise came again. It was a swoosh sound, ghostly and mysterious, and it was coming from the next room. Could this be a manifestation of some sort?

When they slowly rounded the corner, they came face to face with the source of the noise.

It was a little audio speaker. It was part of an exhibit, and it was playing the taped sound of swishing water.

Apparently, someone who works here forgot to shut it off before the ghost hunt. So much for ghosts.

“Um, the sound effects are still on,” said Brad Blair, one of the ghost hunters, into his walkie-talkie with mild exasperation. “Can you ask them to turn them off?”

He was radioing the rest of the crew stationed by the entrance to this ship, the Valley Camp, a century-old freighter that has been docked on the banks of St. Mary’s River and turned into a museum. Among other artifacts, it houses the two mangled lifeboats from the Edmund Fitzgerald and is said to feature paranormal activity.

They kept moving forward.

Blair’s one of the founders of the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society, which investigates just about any unexplained phenomenon Up North. For some reason — it could be the region’s isolation, or its landscape of mysterious old lighthouses and empty mines, or just rural loneliness –— the group says the U.P. generates a lot of reports of paranormal activity.

And these guys get the call when someone sees something otherworldly and wants an answer.

They never charge for an investigation, and will travel throughout the Upper Peninsula and northern lower Michigan on reports of the paranormal. But while most reports of aliens or hauntings turn out to be nothing of the sort, there have been a few times that the group couldn’t explain away something it encountered.

And those are the times that fuel fascination.

Like the night the guys from the group saw a figure in the window of a lighthouse that was locked and had no people in it. As a crowd outside stood frozen in astonishment, the guys headed in to find him.

“I’ve never been so scared that I’ve wanted to quit, but I remember reaching for that door handle and thinking, ‘Why do we do this?’ ” said Tim Ellis, a founder.

“But this is what gets our adrenaline going. We don’t bungee jump or anything like that. This is our extreme sport.”

A love of the unknown

The group was founded 15 years ago by three longtime buddies who returned to the Soo after college and found they still shared their childhood interest in the paranormal.

“We’ve been best friends since third grade, and ghost stories, haunted houses, scary movies, that kind of stuff was our thing, and we never really grew out of it,” said Ellis, 43. By day one’s a store owner, another’s a radio personality, another is a physical therapist.

At night, they chase the unknown. Or rather, it comes to them. If their group isn’t the only one of its kind up here, then it’s the oldest and best-known. And it’s the one people turn to when something happens they can’t explain.

“They don’t want to talk to their family or their friends because they’re afraid people will think they’re nuts,” said Blair, 42. “So when they find someone to talk to, they completely unload. It’s not uncommon when these people call that you end up being on the phone for two hours.”

Now and then, those callers include police officers who’ve encountered strange things while driving long hours along the rural highways up here. Their observation skills lend more detail and credence to their stories, Blair said. “Anytime we hear something from law enforcement, we’ll listen a little more intently.”

Once, there were a couple of cops who tailed a UFO hovering over the Soo Locks, for example. And there was the cop who was hunting in the Porcupine Mountains and woke up one night to see a small orb hovering over his car. When he left his hunting shack and approached it, the thing shot off into the night. The cop called the guys in the group, he said, because he didn’t dare tell anyone at work.

“He said it kind of ruined the rest of the weekend for him,” Blair remembered. “He headed home early. It scared the (stuff) out of him.”

The U.P.P.R.S. gets reports of ghosts, of alien spacecraft, of encounters with Bigfoot or the Michigan Dogman, a beastly legend said to live in the Up North woods.

Towns around Lake Superior generate quite a bit of everything. “I don’t know if they coincide with alcohol sales per county or what,” Blair said, laughing.

Indeed, members say, they always try to find a rational explanation for people’s experiences.

“We really go in with the notion that there’s a natural cause for everything,” Blair said. “We’re not there to tell people, ‘Your house is haunted. Get out.’ ”

There was, for example, a girl in Kincheloe who was having nightmares and felt a scary energy in her room, and her family contacted the group. The guys found that a badly wired fuse box was in the basement, just under her bed, which they say can alter people’s brain waves and cause strange effects. Get it fixed, they recommended, and the problem should disappear.

And there was the woman in DeTour Village who was convinced her deceased husband was haunting her and tormenting her at night. How else were her blankets always taken off her? A video camera left in her room overnight revealed that she had restless leg syndrome and was wildly kicking her sheets off herself in her sleep. The video wasn’t enough for her.

“She didn’t want to believe us,” Blair said. “She called us everything but a fraud.”

Some people like her, they’ve found, will cling to a supernatural explanation, no matter what. They need to believe in another reality. It helps them explain this one.

“I always say, ‘You can’t take away someone’s ghost if they don’t want you to,’ ” Blair said. “If someone is convinced their house is haunted, no matter how much evidence you give them, they’re not going to believe you.”

A gathering of believers

Josh Piipoo grew up in the Soo and said he lived in a house that was haunted. Like many believers in the paranormal up here, he has found it hard to find someone to talk to about it.

“There are some people up here, but we don’t really know who is into it and who is not,” said the 34-year-old. “And the people who aren’t sometimes get offended when you want to talk about it.”

He hit the jackpot in fellow believers at the paranormal convention held by the U.P.P.R.S. in Sault Ste. Marie on an early August weekend. The sixth annual miParacon, as it’s called, drew about 1,200 visitors to the Kewadin Casino. They paid $45 a day, or $75 for the weekend, to congregate with mediums, psychics, ghost hunters and Bigfoot stalkers.

For one weekend at least, they were among friends.

Ellen Marie Blend sat at a table, hoping some of them would buy her books. She became psychic a couple decades ago, she said, and she authored four self-published books about the things she sees in her mind’s eye.

“I can’t say they move that well because you’ve got to be out there promoting,” said the 71-year-old from New Baltimore. “But this is certainly the right venue. I’ve sat all day at craft shows and maybe sold one or two, if I happen to catch the right person going by.”

Across the room, Don Hermanson sat in a fort he made by surrounding himself with DVDs arrayed on tables. He’s a one-man production studio who conceives, films, produces, edits and distributes videos about local lore, both historical and supernatural.

Half the DVDs he was selling were about local history, the other half were about ghosts and aliens. “That’s the fun stuff,” he said, smiling.

After years spent as a roadie for Bob Seger and Ted Nugent, he became interested in the paranormal after being invited to the Seul Choix Point Lighthouse in Gulliver to make a movie about the ghost reputed to be there. He wasn’t a believer before that. Then his group asked for a sign from the ghost as they stood in the lighthouse. A light suddenly switched on.

That did it for him. Since then, he has devoted himself to making paranormal videos Up North and selling them out of this car trunk or at events like this one, which was full of people like him whose lives were different after they experienced the unexplainable.

“It’s all about curiosity,” said the 74-year-old Houghton resident. “People want to know is there life after death? You got doctors in here, you’ve got farmers in here, you’ve got Native Americans in here. It’s a mix, and they’re all loud and all passionate about the paranormal.”

Listening for answers

The ghost on the freighter was not very talkative.

The night after the convention, the guys from the U.P.P.R.S. gathered in the Valley Camp ship. During a previous visit, they were in the old coal room and heard a sound. “It sounded like a cough,” one of them remarked to the others. “I am coughing,” came a faint, spooky reply from nowhere, they said.

Now they were back to investigate further.

They explored with flashlights, tape recorders and a Mel Meter, a commercial instrument that’s meant to measure temperatures and magnetic fields and ghost-induced changes therein. It was designed by a distraught father from Connecticut who wanted to communicate with his dead daughter and has become a favorite tool for ghost hunters. Out in the lobby, the rest of the group watched the hunt live on video monitors.

Two of them stood in the engine room and posed questions to the ghost that might be there.

“What happens after physical life?” Blair asked. No reply. “What can you tell us about where you are and what you see?” Same. “Is there a heaven and a hell?” Nothing.

Later, they would check the tapes for voices. Nothing there either.

But once in a while, though, they hear something they think just might be a voice, and it thrills them like it did when they were little kids reading ghost stories together.

They once investigated a reportedly haunted local brewery whose upper floors were a long-ago boardinghouse for sailors. One of them asked into the air, “Were you a bootlegger?” and heard on tape what sounds like someone saying “captain.”

“It turns out the son of the family who operated the boardinghouses actually was a captain of a fleet in the U.P.,” Blair said. “I’m not saying it’s him, but it’s interesting to find that correlation.”

And some places are legendary for how often strange things happen there, like the Seul Choix Lighthouse, where the old cigar-smoking lighthouse keeper is said to haunt the place, and where they had their best encounters. “We call that the Disney World of our locations because so many amazing, strange events have happened there that leave us scratching our heads,” Blair said.

They say they’ve watched latched cupboard doors open in front of them, and heard a song from an old-fashioned music box suddenly playing from nowhere, and one night watched from outside as someone in the supposed-to-be-empty lighthouse pulled back a curtain to look outside at the group of eight, who all witnessed it.

They eagerly rushed inside. There was nobody in there. But the smell of cigar smoke was.

“The first year or two we did this it was like, ‘I heard something’ and everyone would say ‘I’m not going in there!’ Now we kind of run towards it,” Blair said.

“I liken it to an extreme sport — you have something happen and all of a sudden, your adrenaline kicks in. It’s kind of to the point where I get more frightened by some of the living people that call us.”