Ghosthunting Michigan. Helen Pattskyn

      “Swaying lights” at the Battle Alley Arcade.

      My husband and I were greeted by Patricia Kenny and her brother John, who run the antiques arcade. After making our introductions, Pat invited me to step into a quieter corner of the shop so we could talk. She was candid about her shop’s ghosts. “What would you like to know?” she asked right off the bat.

      As usual, I didn’t have any prepared questions. I prefer to invite people to talk to me about their experiences, anything they’ve seen or heard themselves, or anything guests or customers have reported. I asked Pat to tell me about the shop’s ghosts.

      “We’re very haunted,” she began. “A lot of buildings in Holly are. We’ve had a number of paranormal investigators come out to see us.” Pat went on to tell me that the Motor City Ghost Hunters had recently been out for another visit, and she was looking forward to getting the full report as soon as they were done reviewing their findings. They’d already sent her a couple of preliminary photographs and let her hear a few audio recordings, and the evidence seemed tantalizing. “You can hear a little boy saying ‘buy it for me, Mommy’ really clearly on one of the recordings they made upstairs.”

      I was curious about how and why she’d contacted the Motor City Ghost Hunters to come up in the first place. “Did you call them?” I asked. “Or did they hear about you being haunted and ask if they could come out?”

      “They were up here conducting an investigation at the Holly Hotel,” she explained, “and came next door to see us too.” Pat told me that when the Ghost Hunters came into her shop, one of their sensitives said she felt the presence of their resident ghost cat. “It brushes up against peoples’ legs,” Pat told me. “My brother John has even felt it.” The ghost cat was the very first spirit Pat said a psychic had told her about, some 15 years ago.

      But the ghostly feline isn’t the only spirit who inhabits the arcade. Pat told me that customers are always telling her how they see shadows out of the corners of their eyes or feel as if they are being watched. “Make sure you go upstairs,” she added. Apparently, the second floor of the Antiques Arcade has seen some pretty interesting activity. “I remember one day a gentleman came down the steps pretty quickly and left without a word. It was a little odd, but I didn’t think that much of it until later when I went across the street to get some lunch. They asked me what I was doing to my customers over here. The man I’d seen rushing out the door had ended up across the street and was really shaken up.” Later, the customer returned and told Pat that he’d been upstairs and someone came up behind him and knocked his hat from his head.

      Except there wasn’t anyone else upstairs at the time.

      Of course, not everyone who visits the arcade believes in ghosts; not all of the vendors do, either. That doesn’t make them immune to unusual phenomena, however. Pat told me that one morning one of the antiques dealers was opening the arcade up for the day—“he doesn’t believe in any of this,” she added with a smile. “He follows the same routine every time he opens up. He always walks down and gets all the lights on this side, then turns on the lights on the other side on his way back to the front of the store.” She had me follow her down the long, narrow path down the middle of the arcade so I could see for myself. It’s a fairly long walk from the front of the store to the back of it. “It was first thing in the morning, and no one else was back here,” she said, as we got to the rear of the arcade. “But he told me that when he got back here, that light was swinging back and forth.” She pointed to the middle light in a row of three hanging from the ceiling in a rear booth area. The light is high up, definitely over my head; even a tall man would not have been able to reach it without a ladder. But, as Pat had just said, there was no one else in the store.

      “This area has a lot of activity,” she told me of that particular room. “One morning another vendor was back here opening up, and she said she heard fabric rustling behind her, like a woman’s long skirt. When she turned around, no one was there. She hurried back up to the front to wait for her daughter to come in. She didn’t want to be back here alone.”

      Just like most of the people I’d talked to over the last few months, Pat said she wasn’t at all uncomfortable working in such a haunted environment. For her, spirits are just a part of the day-to-day operation of an antiques store. “Whenever a new vendor comes in, or someone moves things around in their shop, it always seems to stir things up,” she told me. “Old furniture, mirrors, and especially dolls have spirits connected to them,” she added.

      But it’s not just the antiques at the Battle Alley Arcade that attract spirits. The building material used to decorate the interior was donated from numerous older sites to create the unique layout of the mall. Old fixtures, beams, shutters, and other odds and ends adorn the arcade’s interior and attract spirits as much as the antiques themselves do—at least according to people who believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. The theory is that spirits attach themselves to items that were important to them in life. That may be why ghosts are so often attached to dolls; who is more possessive of a favorite toy than a child?

      The arcade is structurally old as well and has had an interesting history. Pat told me that the back part of the building was built around 1916 or 1917 and was called the Liberty Theatre. By 1927, it was called the Liberty Theatre and Confectionery. “Part of the building used to be connected to the hotel, next door,” Pat told me. I discovered later that at that time the Holly Hotel was running a speakeasy, and the arcade was home to a brothel. I don’t know about the ghosts, but if the walls could only talk I imagine they would have some interesting stories to tell.

      While we were walking around the shop, Pat pointed out a few of the places paranormal investigators have gotten some of their best evidence, and she showed me one of the photographs the Motor City Ghost Hunters emailed to her after their most recent visit. You can find it on their website and decide for yourself if the reflection in the glass display case is really a human figure or just an optical illusion. According to the accompanying report, the reflection isn’t of anyone who was in the room at the time, nor was there anything near the case that could have been responsible for a human-shaped reflection.

      I took a picture of the same case but didn’t see anything unusual. Oh, well, maybe next time.

      Before I left, Pat gave me the name of another shop in town, Main Street Antiques, and said I would be sure to get in touch with Lynn and Mark to talk about their ghosts too.

      But that’s another story….