Ghosts and Legends of Michigan's West Coast

The History Press

Contents

THE GHOST OF THE GRAND THEATRE

Sometimes work is the only thing people know. Their jobs become their lives, and in the case of John Buchanan, former custodian of the old Grand Theatre in Grand Haven, it became an afterlife as well. Many believe that John haunted the building when it was up and running as a movie theatre and maybe continues to do so to this day.

The Grand Theatre opened its doors on January 23, 1928, at a time when motion pictures were just starting to become popular. Vaudeville shows were still traveling the nation, and the word "Hollywood" was fresh to the ears. The Grand Theatre stage was equipped for plays and traveling shows, complete with dressing rooms behind the stage and in the basement. Traveling troupes and even the old "freak shows" entertained the people of Grand Haven, and from those old vaudeville troupes, the first rumors of ghosts in the dark corners of the building started to surface.

The original L-shaped theatre was built for about $380,000 and was inspired by Italian design, with its stucco roof and ornate tile work on the front lobby roof. The theatre boasted 833 seats for filmgoers. Frank Fisher was a longtime manager of the Grand for over twenty years from the 1940s to the 1960s. Having been on the vaudeville circuit with his wife for many years, Frank knew many of the actors who were appearing in the movies of his time and was able to bring a little bit of Hollywood to Grand Haven.

Many decades later, the 1990s brought about the dawn of the multiscreen theatre, and it became difficult for a single-screen movie house to compete. In 1996, Amy Lake and husband, D.T. LaVercombe, bought the theatre and hoped to do something exciting with the place, but as rumor circulated about a multi-screen theatre coming into Grand Haven, the end looked like it was near. The husband-and-wife duo tried to breathe life into the building one last time by getting a liquor license. They offered beer and wine with dinner during the movie, later renovating the old seating to add tables to create a dinner-and-a-movie experience. While it was a fun idea, it wasn't enough, and the pair sold the building to local businessman Steve Loftis. Many ideas bounced around about making a fine arts center or a fancy hotel out of the building, but in the end, the theatre portion of the Grand met its end with a wrecking ball to make room for high-end condominiums. It was a sad day as people poked around the rubble of the building, picking up a brick or two as souvenirs of times gone by.

Petie Oom, a lifelong resident of Grand Haven, remembers growing up and hanging out as a kid in the Grand. It was one of the places in town where she spent plenty of time, watching movies and getting into trouble. One day, Petie decided to be mischievous and write her name on a chair in the theatre. The manager, Frank Fisher, promptly kicked her out, knowing exactly who the little girl named "Petie" was. After being kicked out, Petie went around to the back of the building, and when the lights inside the theatre went dark and the movie projector beamed the image onto the screen, the custodian, John Buchanan, kindly opened the door and let Petie sneak back in to watch the movie.

Born on May 12, 1903, in Hastings, Nebraska, John Buchanan moved to Grand Haven when he was a kid. He went to Grand Haven High School and did odd jobs around town, working as a grocery store clerk for five years at City Grocery on Washington Street. When construction of the theatre began, John started working for the contractor, painting and installing seating. His hard work paid off and secured him a job as custodian of the place when it opened its doors. He worked as a custodian for thirty-nine years until he retired. He was also the custodian for the Robin Hood Theatre in town until it closed in 1951.

John became a fixture in the Grand. He would spend his entire day working, sometimes from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., cleaning up after a late show. An interview with him printed in the Grand Haven Tribune on January 24, 1968, stated that he was "one of the most dedicated men you'll ever meet ... probably the world's most efficient enemy of dirt." People who remember the Grand in its earlier days still remember John Buchanan. Alice Bos, a longtime resident of Grand Haven, remembers him clearly. "John would mutter and talk to himself," she said, "but was always very nice. He just seemed a little 'slow.'"

Petie Oom eventually secured a job at the theatre when she was a teenager. When she first started to work with John, she was a little frightened. He was slightly "off," as most people remembered, but as she grew to know him, she found him to be one of the most friendly guys around the place, always quick to lend a helping hand and taking care of any need the building had. Her fear of him faded fast:

John was always a nice guy, we even made sure to give him dinner when my mom had made a big meal. He actually lived right next door to me in an apartment house on Franklin, and when we had a big meal, my mom would send me over to his place with a hot plate of dinner for him.

Interestingly enough, Petie remembered that John was the one telling people ghost stories:

He would take me downstairs in the basement where there were all these tiny, cement dressing rooms for use back in the Vaudeville days. There was only a small overhead light bulb hanging from the ceiling and barely any light down there. I was scared just going down there. John would always tell me, "The vaudevilles are still here. If you ever hear any noises down in the basement, it's just the ghosts of the vaudevilles making noise."

This terrified Petie so much that she wouldn't go down to the basement alone after hearing that. One might say that the "ghost of the Grand" was the first guy to start telling ghost stories about the place.

Years and years later, when the Central Park Players were hosting a play at the theatre, Petie volunteered to help with hair and makeup. Some of the people in the play were interested in the now "old" theatre, especially the basement. They no doubt had heard a few rumors of ghosts and wanted to explore the hidden parts of the building.

Petie volunteered to take them all down into the basement and show them the tiny dressing rooms that John used to show her. That same spooky feeling washed over her as they looked around the basement, and Petie and the rest of the gang turned around and went back to the safety of the stage upstairs. Was it the ghosts of those vaudevilles that spooked all them out of the basement or was good old John already haunting his favorite place in the world?

Throughout the building's history, especially starting in the 1980s, strange moments and mysterious activity couldn't be ignored. Employees experienced things that couldn't easily be explained. Former employees reported coming in one day and finding garbage bags tied up and ready to go out. No one confessed to the mysterious deed, and seeing that it was a custodian's job to take care of the garbage, people started to wonder if John was continuing his job in the theatre even though he was long dead and buried.

In addition to the ghostly cleaning, other things would happen, such as phantom footsteps heard when no one was around, lights turning on and off by themselves and the occasional glimpse of someone from the corner of the eye. It was even rumored that a grave was in the basement. There were old tunnels under downtown Grand Haven connecting many of the buildings, but most are now blocked off. In a Grand Haven Tribune article from 1996 reporting on the haunting, a person told how he went beneath where the old concession stand used to be and found himself in a tunnel where a mound of sand "looked like an Indian burial site." There was speculation as to whether someone had been buried down there at some point.

Sara, a former employee, recalled working there during high school from 1991 to 1994. She worked behind the concession stand, took tickets and performed other odd jobs. She remembered the feeling of always being watched and was constantly looking over her shoulder or turning her head because she would see glimpses of someone standing nearby, but no one would ever be there. On her shifts, doors would often slam shut and open again on the second floor. One time, a friend of hers was in the projector booth loading a movie when a white feather fell from the ceiling. It doesn't sound like much, but the booth was tiny and cramped, and she couldn't figure out where on earth the feather had come from. Could it have been from John? Sara said that everyone who worked at the Grand had some sort of experience, some more intense than others.

Emily Bruno was also a former employee and really loved working at the Grand. Emily recalled some of her spooky experiences while working there in the 1990s. Her first experience happened before she even got a job there. She was in a play taking place at the theatre, and it was her first time being on the stage. She remembers:

There was a staircase that went up to dressing rooms and everything was very gothic, old and elaborate looking. Very pretty. We would sometimes wander up there when we weren't busy with other things, and I always felt a shift in the environment. Things were different back there. Boxes backstage seemed to shift on their own while I was there, and I felt like I was being watched. Before we had ever even heard about John, we had made up our minds that the place was haunted!

When Emily got a job there, other parts of the building gave her the same creepy feeling that she had experienced when she first explored the backstage area. Emily remembered the janitor's closet, no doubt John's closet at one point:

I hated going in there alone. I never felt threatened or anything but it was dark and old and I was fourteen. We would argue over who had to go and get the mop. We hated changing the mop water just because that meant more time in the janitor closet. I don't think there was one person working there who didn't have some sort of experience.

Emily had also heard that the old projector room had a "life of its own." Some of the people who worked in there experienced strange occurrences as well, such as the mysterious feather that appeared out of nowhere.

After noticing one too many strange happenings, Emily finally said something to her boss, and that's when she was told the stories about John. Emily remembered that her boss would sometimes say things to John if she sensed him around and his "activities" would change. If her boss said, "I'm busy right now John," whatever was happening would stop. After Emily heard the stories about John, she lost the uneasy feeling she got when something didn't feel quite right. "It was actually kind of nice sensing him around. I never did get comfortable with those dressing rooms though. I don't know what that was about, but perhaps it was because I was so young at the time."

Mike Naramore was a former manager during the Grand's last days as a cinema. When asked about the haunting, Mike stated:

I'm very familiar with the ghost of John, who was the old custodian of the theatre when it opened. I never saw any apparitions, but there were some extremely anomalous noises, drafts and strange electrical fields we encountered while working there. We usually attributed them all to John, however tongue-in-cheek it might have been.

As of 2006, the only part of the original Grand Theatre still standing is the front lobby, which is a restaurant called the Theatre Bar. Developers tore down the actual theatre for condos. It was a real shame to see the beautiful place torn down. Perhaps diners will find themselves sharing a meal with a custodial ghost, or maybe John decided to move on after his beloved theatre was torn down.

A Grand Haven Tribune article from 1968 stated:

The Grand is more than a building to [John] — it's alive with all kinds of memories — a changing world on film — a sea of friendly faces of patrons who call him by the first name, [and] John almost has a reverence for the Grand — A respect only a sincere workman can acquire.

So as you pass the old front entrance to the one-time theatre, say hello to John, as he might still be there. Only now he's enjoying fine dining and sushi rather than old movies. Let's hope that he's grabbed a table and put his feet up for a while rather than toiling away on the other side.

THE LEGEND OF THE MELON HEADS

Imagine it is a warm summer's night in the area that is now the Saugatuck State Park in the 1970s. A teenage couple drive their car down what used to be a dirt road and put it into park to get more "acquainted" with each other. The hormones start to fly, and the outside world becomes a blur ... until a tiny knock is heard on the passenger's side window. The couple unlock their lips and look toward the window, expecting to see an officer telling them to move on. Instead, they see a childlike, large-headed creature staring back at them, its nose just touching the bottom of the car window. The whites of its eyes are all they can see, as the irises seem to be at the bottom of the eyelid. The frightened couple scream in unison; the boy starts the car, shifts it into drive and they peel out of the park at high speeds, wondering what sort of monster they have just encountered. To this day, sightings of what have become known as the Melon Heads continue to circulate in the cities of Holland and Saugatuck.

According to the legend, there used to be a hospital in the area that treated children with a condition known as hydrocephalus, which causes the head to swell to large proportions. The doctor treating the children would experiment on the unfortunate souls until they were barely able to function. When the hospital closed down, the children were released and left to fend for themselves. Many say that they banded together in the woods around the Saugatuck State Park area, where they still live to this day.

Not only are the Melon Heads purported to live in west Michigan, but they also have some distant cousins in northern Ohio. The stories that come from Ohio tell of feral, vicious little creatures that will kill your dog, attack and potentially eat you or run alongside your car at cheetah-like speeds. This Ohio variety seems to be a little more dangerous than our Michigan brand of Melon Heads. The Ohio legend has many slight variations of the same story that involve a Dr. Crowe who was a cruel and sadistic man. The Ohio version says that he ran a hospital in the late 1800s to help hydrocephalic children. Instead of treating them, he tortured the helpless victims by injecting more fluid into their brains and conducting other experiments on them, eventually leaving them on their own. The stories are nearly identical, but there is no evidence of a hospital in the Saugatuck area that ever treated this condition or of a doctor who specifically housed and tended to children suffering from hydrocephalus. It's not known which version came first, but it is obvious that the two are related somehow.

Unlike the uncertainty of the Melon Heads' existence, hydrocephalus is a very real condition. About one in five hundred children are affected by hydrocephalus, or "water on the brain." The cerebrospinal fluid in the brain doesn't drain properly, and the result is an enlarged head, with a normal-sized face and features. It is especially noticeable in infants and children under the age of three because the spinal plates have yet to fuse; the head becomes very large since the skull is still able to expand, unlike in adults and older children, whose plates have already fused. The eyes of the children also have a downward gaze, as the pressure caused from the buildup of fluid in the head makes the irises look down, exposing the whites of the eyes as if they were zombies. Although it is a very sad condition, hydrocephalous can result in a very disturbing image, one that could easily give birth to legend. But how did this story ever get started? Was their a doctor in the area testing children?

Our logical sides tell us that there is no way a band of small children would be living in the wilds of the Saugatuck State Park, completely feral and ready to lash out at any person who happens their way. But our curious sides wonder. What if there were a couple of kids left on the side of the road like abandoned kittens who lived in the woods for a while? The story had to come from somewhere, right? There has to be some grain of truth in it somewhere ...

One possible theory is that this story got its roots back in the early 1900s. The Forward Movement Settlement was a charitable organization out of Chicago in the early twentieth century. It owned 130 acres of beautiful Saugatuck lakeshore that it called the Forward Movement Park. One of the services it offered was the Vesta Putnam Summer School for Crippled Children. One can only imagine that in an area of vacationers and people with money, just as today, the kids of the day probably made fun of the children from the school. Stories started, and maybe the school even had a few hydrocephalic students. It's just a theory, but a very probable one considering that the school was in the same area where the legend started.