The Witch's Curse of Pere Cheney Michigan: America's Most Haunted Ghost Town

 

        By 1890 the town of Pere Cheney, Michigan was home to several prosperous sawmills, a post office, a general store, a doctor’s office, a school and a bustling railroad station located along the Central Michigan line.

Pere Cheney had approximately 1,500 residents all of whom had their livelihoods tied, in one way or another, to Michigan’s burgeoning lumber industry which supplied countless tons of lumber to building projects all across the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century.

Established in 1874, Pere Cheney was named after the nearby sawmill of local landowner George Cheney and was settled by lumberjacks and their families who had come to northern Michigan attracted by the region’s abundant woodlands.  For a brief few years, sometime in the 1870’s and 1880’s this lumber boomtown of Pere Cheney was even the county seat of Crawford County and was a frequent stop by many travellers on the Central Michigan Railroad.

But by 1917 only 25 hearty souls would be left residing in the once prosperous town of Pere Cheney.  The following year, in 1918, the land in and around the town would be sold off at public auction and Pere Cheney’s remaining residents would be forced to drag their few belongings on their backs and down dirt roads through the forest to the nearby town of Grayling.

Pere Cheney ca. 1890

They would leave nothing behind but the smoldering ruins and foundations of some old brick buildings and a forgotten and forlorn cemetery that was the home of ninety or so decaying headstones.

Today, the site that was once the booming lumber-town of Pere Cheney, Michigan, is considered to be one of the most haunted and cursed ghost towns in the United States.  There are no road signs that lead the way to what was once Pere Cheney.

The only thing left to history to remember the town by some one-hundred plus years later is the site of the old cemetery itself, where nothing but a mossy grass ever grows and where legend has it, the site of the town was once forever cursed by a suspected witch.

The cemetery sits, lost to history, down a dark narrow path deep in the woodlands and those who find their way there today report hearing the sounds of eerie disembodied laughter; they report seeing glowing orbs, shadowy apparitions and even of having themselves and their cars pushed by unseen hands.

On October 16, 2009 it was reported that a group of teens visiting (perhaps vandalizing) the cemetery were shot at by a crazed man who seemed to materialize out of thin air brandishing a shotgun near the spot where the supposed witch was once hung.

At the very spot where the shooting incident occurred there once stood a large oak tree with sturdy branches that stretched out from its wide trunk and sometime, in around the year 1890 or so, a large crowd gathered in the cemetery around that big oak tree.

Almost all 1,500 residents of the town of Pere Cheney were there in the cemetery around that big oak tree back in the year 1890.

“Hang her!  Hang the witch!” the crowd shouted.

A young woman with her hands bound by rope was dragged and shoved, kicking and screaming, to the base of the tree in the middle of the cemetery grounds among the headstones.  She was forced to stand on a chair as the noose swung from the tree branch just above her head.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself before you die, witch?” the constable of Pere Cheney demanded.

The young woman who lived just on the outskirts of town, and may have been a prostitute, or at the very least a woman of loose morals who many wives in Pere Cheney claimed had seduced their husband’s with her bewitching evil ways, stood before the assembled crowd and said, “I am with child.”

A gasp went up from the crowd.

“The devil’s child!” they proclaimed.  “Kill her!  Kill the witch!”

The noose was placed and tightened around the young woman’s neck.

“A curse upon all of you and upon this town! May all of your children die just as mine!”  The accused woman shouted seconds before the chair was kicked out from under her feet and she was hanged from that big oak tree in the middle of the Pere Cheney cemetery.  After a few moments her lifeless body was cut down from the tree branch and she was buried right among the headstones where she had been hanged to death.

Thus was born the legend of the Witch’s Curse of Pere Cheney, Michigan.

Ruins of a home at the ghost town site of Pere Cheney

There are some reports of a suspected witch being hung near Pere Cheney in the late nineteenth century, but there is nothing in the historical record in terms of when it actually might have happened, or who that person might have been that is completely verifiable.  Most of what has been passed down, has been passed down by the residents of Michigan through folklore and legend.

But there is no doubt that in the year 1893 an epidemic swept through the town of Pere Cheney.  The nature of that epidemic itself is not even one hundred percent known today, but most researchers believe it was an epidemic of diphtheria that ravaged the residents of the town.

Diphtheria is a bacteria that causes respiratory infections and blocks the airways of its victims resulting in a painful cough and often leading to eventual death through a mucus filled painful suffocation.

It is airborne and highly contagious.  Today there is a vaccine that can help prevent the spread of Diphtheria, but in the nineteenth century Diphtheria often attacked children and the infirm without warning and then spread like wildfire.

That’s exactly what happened in Pere Cheney in 1893.  Children in the town died in droves and many parents travelled to nearby towns seeking medical attention for their children but were turned away by frightened outsiders who believed in the truth behind the witch’s curse of Pere Cheney.

Diphtheria would return again to the cursed town in 1897 and once more in 1901, and each time the population would shrink and grow older and belief in the witch’s curse would intensify and spread in the surrounding area.

Fear of the truth behind the witch’s curse grew across northern Michigan and culminated sometime around the year 1917 in a heinous act of vigilante exorcism.

One night local residents from nearby villages and towns gathered together and marched with glowing torches held high.  They surrounded the town of Pere Cheney, and its few remaining bedraggled residents.  Men, women and children were forced to come out with nothing more than the clothes on their backs into the cold night and then what was left of the town was set ablaze

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.  Within months what remained of the barren land around what once had been Pere Cheney would be sold off.  The town would never be resettled and the land would prove unfertile and unable to be cultivated.

Nothing remained of Pere Cheney except for the infamous cemetery.

Within the span of less than one generation the Witch’s Curse of Pere Cheney Michigan had come full circle.

Each year, despite the warnings and despite the fact that the site of the once thriving town is only accessible through one largely overgrown dirt road, thousands of local residents, teenagers mostly, travel to the Pere Cheney Cemetery seeking to conjure up the evil of the supposed Witch’s Curse and experience firsthand for themselves the supernatural legend of American history’s most cursed ghost town.

In recent years there has been a concerted effort by Michigan residents, particularly after the shooting that occurred there in 2009, to cut down on the amount of visitation to the area and to protect the sacredness of Pere Cheney’s cemetery site from would-be vandals and thrill seekers, but sightings of the paranormal continue in and around the location of the Pere Cheney cemetery to this very day.

Dirt Road that leads to the site of Pere Cheney

Perhaps, somewhere out there, the Witch’s Curse of Pere Cheney Michigan is simply waiting to come alive once again and wreak vengeful havoc on the world of the living just as it did some one hundred plus years ago.  Or perhaps, the true curse of the witch of Pere Cheney, Michigan, resides somewhere within each one of us and has never really left, but is instead lying dormant and waiting for the moment that it can be released by the same spirit that enabled a mob to hang an innocent young woman with child from the branch of an oak tree or light a town of innocent people on fire for no reason other than fear.