Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  But early in what would turn out to be her own last year on earth, 1868, those who knew her noticed a change of behavior—she began to take better care of her personal appearance, often stayed home at night reading by the kerosene lamp, and spoke pleasantly to those whom she met on the roadway.

  The reason for Marie’s “redemption” constitutes one of the oldest ghost stories in Detroit.

  A number of years earlier, Marie had decided to make a little extra money by taking in a boarder. Clarissa Jordan was an elderly lady who regularly attended mass and prayed several times a day. Marie laughed at her piousness, as her own church brethren had ostracized her for her many eccentricities.

  Clarissa tried to reform Marie. She attempted to persuade her to attend church more regularly and, after that failed, sought to scare Marie with ghost stories showing the presence of supernatural forces in human lives.

  There was, for example, her story of old Grand-mère Duchêne, who sat at her spinning wheel for weeks after she died. The droning of the wheel nearly drove her son insane until he bought fifty masses for the repose of her soul.

  Clarissa spoke also of the feu follet, or the will-o’-the-wisp, sent to the door of a girl at Grosse Isle while her lover was trapped in a swamp. The mysterious light led her to him, and he was rescued.

  And remember French hunter Sebastian’s ghost boat, Clarissa solemnly added, which ascends the Straits of Mackinac once every seven years to keep the Frenchman’s promise to his betrothed that he would always return to her—dead or alive.

  “Bah!” Marie hooted at Clarissa’s tall tales. “I don’t believe in your silly stories, or your purgatory or your hell . . . which you can go to at once for all I care! But I will make a bargain with you—if you die first, come back to me right here. Should I die before you then I will return. We will then know if there is any other world but our own!”

  Sometime after this conversation, the women had an argument in which Marie swore never to speak to the lodger again. But, she added, their agreement to return from the dead was still to be upheld.

  For the rest of their time together in the house, the two women avoided each other. Instructions or messages were written on scraps of paper and left for the other to find. They ate in different rooms. If by chance one saw the other coming down the hallway, she would duck through the nearest door. To the outsider, it appeared as if each woman existed in a different dimension, unable to see, hear, or communicate with the other.

  Clarissa Jordan died early one winter. One evening not long after, Marie was out visiting, so as to spare the expense of heat and light in the early darkness. A young neighbor boy spotted her and asked why she had left the lights on in her house. He knew of her miserliness and was surprised. Marie returned home at once, but when she got there the lights were off.

  Marie’s kerosene lamps were reported shining over several subsequent evenings, but she never quite returned in time to catch the “culprit.” The stout cane she held in her hand was always poised, ready to strike down the intruder.

  Determined to put an end to the problem, Marie left the house at her usual time one day but then sneaked back in minutes later, quietly climbed the stairs, and hid under the covers of her own bed. Moments later, a light blinked on downstairs in the sitting room. But, instead of remaining where it was, the glowing orb ascended the staircase. It was phosphorescent and seemed to shimmer as it moved down the hall, through the door, and into Marie’s bedroom. The glow gradually took the form of her old, pious lodger, Clarissa Jordan.

  “I know you!” Marie cried out. “Come no nearer! I believe! I believe!”

  Until her death a year or so later Marie Louise Kennett grew softer, kinder, and more neighborly. She even stopped her miserly walks at night. However, she also aged very rapidly.

  The sight of the ghost of her old lodger, it is said, had a most profound effect on her.

  The Lynching

  Menominee

  One of the most gruesome legends in all of American history was spawned in the Upper Peninsula lumber town of Menominee, on the shores of Green Bay, a few miles north of the Wisconsin border.

  On September 26, 1881, a pair of thugs known as the McDonald boys stabbed to death Billy Kittson. The next day, a crazed mob broke into the jail holding the killers and subjected them to “timber justice” so grotesque that it almost strains credulity, were it not so well documented.

  The sadistic carnage also gave rise to the grimly accurate foretelling that each vigilante would die “with his boots on.”

  The McDonald boys were actually two cousins, although they were closer than most brothers. Their surnames were different, but everyone called them the McDonalds. The tall, slim one was Big Mac, born a McDougall. His shorter cousin was known, naturally enough, as Little Mac.

  They had reputations as mean, deadly knife fighters, especially when they had been drinking, which was most of the time. It was the wise citizen who gave this ornery pair a wide berth.

  By most accounts, the trouble began after the 1881 spring lumber drive. The McDonalds got into a fight in Pine River and ended up stabbing Sheriff Ruprecht as he tried to break it up. The sheriff recovered and deputized two-hundred-pound muscleman George Kittson, Billy’s half brother, to track down and arrest the pair. He did, and the McDonalds spent the next several months in jail.

  They were released on September 24 and drifted down to Menominee, swearing vengeance on George Kittson. They both found work at the Bay Shore Lumber Company.

  The Kittson family was fairly prominent, if not highly respectable, in the pioneer lumber town. There were three boys—George, Norman, and Billy—all sons of an Englishman who had fled the catastrophic Wisconsin Peshtigo fire in 1871. He moved to Menominee shortly thereafter to become its second permanent settler. Billy, the youngest boy, was a rough character known to like whiskey and women, and not always in that order. Norman was cut from the same cloth.

  On the afternoon of September 26, the McDonalds left work at the Bay Shore Company and headed for the Montreal House, a seedy saloon in the west side neighborhood known as Frenchtown, where Norman Kittson bartended.

  The more the McDonalds drank, the more belligerent they became. They warned Norman that his brother George was a dead man. To back up the threat, they drew knives. Eventually they staggered out of the bar and headed for the Frenchtown whorehouse ensconced behind the jack pine near Bellevue Street. Inside, Billy Kittson was drinking whiskey out of a jug with the girls of the house. When the McDonalds barged in, a fight ensued. Billy hit one of the McDonalds over the head with an empty bottle, then headed for the relative safety of the Montreal House. The McDonalds caught up with him in the street outside. Norman Kittson saw the pair closing in on Billy and shouted a warning.

  “I’m not afraid of those sonsabitches!” Billy yelled back. Big Mac smashed Billy across the head with a heavy club and then plunged a knife deep into his rib cage as he lay sprawled on the ground. Norman ran to Billy’s aid, but Little Mac knocked him away. Billy struggled to his feet, only to be stabbed by Big Mac in the side of the head.

  Norman managed to draw a revolver from his coat pocket. He fired twice. Little Mac clutched his leg as he and his cousin fled.

  By all rights, Billy Kittson should have fallen right away. But he had drunk so much whiskey that he was oblivious to his mortal wounds. He limped inside the Montreal House, ordered drinks for everyone, and then promptly fell over dead.

  Norman’s wounds were serious but not fatal. The McDonalds were captured a few hours later at the train depot trying to get out of town and were promptly locked up. Word spread like a fire through virgin pine that young Billy Kittson had been killed and the notorious McDonald boys were responsible. At every tavern and hotel, on each street corner in Menominee, lumbermen talked of little else. Their voices were loud and angry, especially the next day, when it became clear that a hearing on the murder would be postponed. The prosecutor had trouble, for even though the McDonalds were in custody, many witn
esses thought fulfilling their civic duty to testify against them might shorten their own lives considerably.

  As the liquor flowed, the talk turned to inflicting rough justice on the pair. They had knifed a sheriff, killed the son of a well-known family, and generally created a reign of terror in the city.

  Six men were ringleaders. Frank Saucier, a drayman, offered the use of a stout section of timber to batter down the jailhouse door. Bob Stephenson, the superintendent of the Ludington, Wells, and Van Schaick Lumber Company, supplied the rope. Max Forvilly, owner of the Forvilly House on Ludington Street, the gathering place for the mob, constantly replenished the whiskey.

  Stephenson headed the mob with Louis Porter and Tom Parent, both timber bosses, and Robert Barclay, an ex-sheriff who ran a livery stable.

  Late that afternoon, the half-dozen men, followed by a group of hangers-on, grabbed the ramming timber and marched on the courthouse. Only two deputy sheriffs guarded the McDonalds. One of them, Jack Fryer, challenged the mob, but Louis Porter immediately disarmed him and shoved him aside.

  The mob ransacked the jail and found the two McDonalds cowering in a cell. Big Mac pleaded to be allowed to argue against his imminent fate. They ignored his whimpers and threw a rope around his neck.

  Louis Porter grabbed Little Mac, but the outlaw pulled a small knife from his boot and stabbed him in the hand. Enraged, Porter grabbed an axe from a man named Laramie and whacked Little Mac, splitting open his skull. He was done for.

  Nevertheless, the mob drew ropes tightly around both men’s necks and dragged them from the jail. Big Mac was still conscious even as he was pulled by the rope over an iron fence. Witnesses say his neck stretched several inches when his head got caught in the fence.

  Down Main Street, the jubilant mob hauled the McDonalds, one already dead and the other on his way. The mob took turns jumping on the bodies, stomping out bloody chunks of flesh with their heavy boots. A few even “rode” them for a distance. The macabre procession took on the appearance of a parade as men, women, and even children joined in. Church bells peeled and whistles blew. Everyone cheered the spectacle of the McDonald boys getting “just what they deserved.”

  Near a railroad crossing, the mob strung up the McDonald boys from a tall pole. Big Mac twitched, moaned once or twice, and then died.

  Not everyone appreciated the sight of the boys swaying in the breeze at such a prominent location. Some thought the bodies might scare the horses and frighten the women and children. After some arguing, the mob came up with a solution. Why not take the boys back to where the trouble had begun—the Frenchtown whorehouse?

  And that is just what they did. They let fall the corpses and dragged them up Bellevue Street. At the church, Father Menard tried to stop them, but they brushed him aside.

  The priest glared after them and declared that for these sins each man present would “die with his boots on.”

  Undeterred, the men dragged their prizes through the front door of the whorehouse and into one of the bedrooms, dumping the bloodied, mangled remains on a bed. They rounded up the girls and, one by one, forced the dozen ladies to climb into bed with the corpses.

  When the mob tired of their entertainment, they ran the girls out of the house and burned it to the ground. They left the McDonald boys’ remains tied to two small pine trees outside the burning building.

  Had the leaders of that mob known what strange fates awaited them, they might have thought more seriously about their own actions and especially Father Menard’s curse, almost lost in the hubbub.

  First struck was Bob Stephenson, who supplied the rope. A few months after the lynching, Stephenson’s lumberyard caught fire. His men refused to run between two piles of lumber and tip them over to save them. Cursing them, Stephenson himself ran between the piles, trying to douse the flames with water buckets. The fire caught him but when he cried out, fumes from his whiskey-sodden breath ignited. His body exploded in flames, from the inside out. He lingered in excruciating pain for three days before he died.

  Frank Saucier, who had supplied the battering ram to break down the jail door, died without apparent cause on a train trip from Iron River to Menominee.

  Louis Porter, who recovered from the knife wound Little Mac had inflicted on him, came to his end when he went with his men on a log drive. Porter sent them on ahead, saying he was tired and wanted to rest. When the crew returned at the end of the day, they found his body propped against a tree, his arms folded across his chest. No one knows why he died. Some say a poisonous snake bit him.

  The list goes on: A man named Dunn was accidentally sliced in half by a head saw in a Green Bay sawmill. Albert Lemieux, a timber cruiser, slashed his own throat midway through a poker game he was losing in a lumber camp late one night. Alfred Beach drowned when his boat capsized.

  Some of the men learned of the peculiar deaths of their comrades and vowed they would not die in a similar manner. They would avoid the curse by leaving the region forever.

  But the curse was too strong. On his way to a family reunion, ex-sheriff Robert Barclay pulled up at the gathering, jumped out of the wagon, waved, and dropped dead.

  And Max Forvilly lost his hotel, his money, and his family. He died on a small farm at Peshtigo Sugar Bush, crazy and penniless.

  The Lake Odessa Mystery

  Lake Odessa

  The old house at the corner of Tupper Lake Street and Sixth Avenue in the small town of Lake Odessa was haunted, of that there was little doubt. But just what or who flitted through its darkened rooms and tromped across the front porch remained a mystery.

  Lake Odessa was a quiet village at the turn of the century, slumbering midway between Lansing and Grand Rapids. Dan and Cora Shopbell moved into town after being disillusioned with life on their farm a few miles away. They decided to build a new house on a vacant lot across the street from Cora’s parents, George and Delilah Kepner. Uncle Dan, as everyone called him, built the house himself, right down to the cabinetry in the kitchen. As the foundation he used the old cellar that remained from a previous house that had burned many years before.

  Uncle Dan took great pride in the dwelling, pouring several inches of concrete into the walls so rodents could not enter, and installed one of the first indoor bathrooms in Lake Odessa. He also crafted most of the furniture by hand.

  Soon after Daniel and Cora moved in, they realized something was very wrong. They rarely talked about it with her parents, or her sister and brother-in-law, the Gardiners, who lived with the Kepners across Sixth Avenue. The Shopbells were practical, hardworking people not given to flights of fancy. They found it uncomfortable to discuss any troubles they could not understand. Their niece, Leona Gardiner, learned as a teenager about their experiences in the house, and it is her recollections and investigations that preserved the story of the mystery house.

  It was shortly after the Shopbells settled into the house when they began hearing odd noises. If the couple was in the sitting room, a banging came from the back of the house. Daniel ruled out rodents since the concrete prevented their getting into the walls, and there were no tall trees near the house to scrape against it. At other times, the couple was brought out of their chairs by what sounded like a big ball or oversized pumpkin rolling across the porch and then slamming into the front door. But when they opened the door, they found nothing. No ball. No pumpkin.

  The odd happenings in their house went far beyond the occasional unexplained sound. An old-fashioned, woodburning stove stood in the sitting room. As Cora and Daniel watched, the stove door sometimes gently swung open and then slammed shut, just as if someone was checking the fire.

  They made their decision to move the evening when Daniel, who was sitting in his favorite chair, was picked up—chair and all—held aloft for a few seconds, and then set back down. There was absolutely nothing to explain it.

  Although they had only lived in it for a year, the Shopbells sold the house for a negligible sum to Gottlieb and Anna Kussmaul and moved back to their o
ld farm, which they found much less hectic.

  Gottlieb was a first-generation American who still spoke with a heavy accent. Stocky in build and strong, with a colorful vocabulary, he was a generous man as well, always ready to come to the assistance of his neighbors. He worked at a local grain elevator, hoisting hundred-pound bags of grain for hours at a time.

  Anna, in contrast, was small and refined, a woman who had been educated through the twelfth grade, which was unusual in that era, and later studied music. She taught piano lessons for many years in Lake Odessa. At one time, she and her brother, Byron, a violinist, formed a dance orchestra, which played at local events and practiced in the Kussmauls’ sitting room.

  The couple had one daughter, Hattie, a pale, thin child who was the delight of her parents. She married young but died in her midtwenties in a severe flu epidemic following World War I.

  The family also had a big gray tomcat, Tiger, who was Hattie’s special playmate and who seemed to have a mysterious way of walking through solid walls.

  During the day, the family let the cat into the house, but at night, Tiger slept in the barn on a pile of straw. Nevertheless, the Gottliebs were often awakened in the early morning hours when the cat walked across the foot of their bed. But before any one of the family could put him outside he would vanish. The next morning there he would be as usual, outside the back door, crying to come in. They never could figure out how he got out.

  Little Hattie was the unwilling witness to another strange episode in the old house. Her mother sometimes gave music lessons to a few students in nearby towns. She took the morning Pere Marquette Railroad to her pupils’ homes and returned late in the afternoon. Hattie stayed with the Mosey family after school, across Tupper Lake Street, until her mother returned.