Freaky Footnotes to Local Terror Tales

A young woman is murdered on Old Mission. A nun goes missing and is later found buried in the church basement. True happenings in northern Michigan – and the basis of two books you might want to curl up with … if you dare.

For this hauntingly Halloween version of The Ticker, we grabbed a few scary reads off the shelf and hunted down their local authors to find out the freaky facts behind – and eerie epilogues beyond – their books. Here’s what we uncovered:

Deadstream by Brad Platt
A boy arrives home and finds his mother dead, apparently from suicide. Add in drug trafficking, corruption and betrayal, and there’s a lot more going on (much of it unsavory) in this seemingly bucolic community.

The story is set in and around Deadstream Swamp, a real place just west of Houghton and Higgins lakes where Platt grew up and many have gone missing.

“It’s a legendary, spooky place,” says Platt. “Every three years, at a minimum, someone goes missing there.” Often times it’s a hunter, he adds, recalling one who suffered a fatal heart attack and wasn’t found until the following spring. “It’s probably the most remote area in northern lower Michigan.”

Isadore’s Secret by Mardi Link
Sister Mary Jannina, a young nun in the tiny religious Leelanau community of Isadore, disappears. Her body is later found, buried in the church basement. Who murdered her? A man of the cloth? One of her sisters?

Early in her research for the book, Link went to the Leelanau County Sheriff’s Department in search of crime documentation. Because the crime was more than a century old, she was told there was no police report.

But just last month, Leelanau County Sherriff Mike Oltersdorf approached her after a talk she gave for a local club. There might not be a police report, he said, but there is a historic crime book containing the signatures of many local criminals – and the nun’s murderer’s signature is in it.

Summer People by Aaron Stander
Do summer people and locals always get along? In this whodunit tale, an old money cottager is murdered. That murder is quickly followed by the suspicious deaths of three more summer residents, all unrelated. Or are they?

At one of the public readings Stander did after the book’s release, he recalls the response of one small town audience. “The people there identified every one of the dead people in the book … and this is fiction! It just goes to show every town, no matter how small, has its fair number of rascals.”

Murder on Old Mission by Stephen Lewis
In the summer of 1895, the son of a prominent Old Mission farmer went on trial for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. He had an alibi that placed him far away from the crime. Did the jury find him guilty?

While Lewis was writing the book, he gave a talk during which he mentioned how he had imagined the spot where the body had been found. The next morning Lewis received a call from Robert Mitchell, a land surveyor in Kingsley, who told him he had the map from that trial hanging on his wall – a map eerily similar to the one Lewis had envisioned. A picture of it is in his book.