First, I want to recommend any desert on the menu from the Fenton Hotel restaurant. Second, while you’re eating your desert, you might feel like you are being envied by a presence you can’t see. That’s because the Fenton Hotel is most definitely haunted and Michigan’s Otherside has experienced it first hand.
The Fenton Hotel rests in Fenton, Michigan and was built in 1856. At over a hundred and fifty years old, this beautiful restaurant has a lot of secrets to share. It seems not all of the guests have checked out and even the old caretaker and some of the old regulars are still enjoying the hotel to this day.
Sit and have a drink at the bar and ask any of the servers or bartenders about the ghostly happenings and each will have a story to share. There’s a man in a hat who sits at the bar and drinks whiskey, only he isn’t alive. There are ghostly voices, phantom touches and objects moved by invisible hands.
While the first floor has been tastefully restored and decorated, the upper two floors tell a different tale, especially the third floor. We’ve investigated the Fenton a few times with the Grimstone Inc. crew and never left the place with doubts of a haunting in our minds.
The very first time we went there, Grimstone was doing Halloween ghost tours. The tours were sold out and there were people everywhere. We waited for the tours to end before we went upstairs to hopefully run into the ghosts of the Fenton. At about midnight we finally gathered up our equipment and headed upstairs.
Walking down the second floor hallway, peering into rooms with flashlights, we shined our beams on storage rooms filled with old plates and random junk they didn’t need anymore. One room in particular had a very disturbing look to it. For whatever reason, the bottom portion of the walls had been spray painted black. Nothing was stored in the room. I went to stick my head into the room and jerked my head back instantly. If felt like I had hit a wall. It was the first time I had ever felt anything like that in my life. It was like running into a wall but without the physical wall, if that makes any sense.
I don’t always buy everything psychics tell me, but the resident psychic that night stuck her head into the room and said it was a “sick room”. She explained that meant the room had some very negative energy stagnating inside it.
Later on that night, we did some EVP work in the “sick room”. We sat in the room for a while, flashlights off, recorder going and asked some questions to the air around us. We got a little spooked when a shadow went past the door in the hallway. Even paranormal investigators get spooked sometimes, so we packed up and headed out of the room. My boyfriend Scott tries to deny it to this day, but he was walking so fast to get out of that hallway, I’m pretty sure he would have left me to the devices of the shadowy figure who walked past the room.
The third floor is the scariest part of the whole building. It’s in very poor condition but gives the best glimpse into the past when the place was operating as a hotel. Rooms have antique wallpaper peeling away, exposing the rotting wood beneath it. Old bathroom fixtures hang from walls and even parts of the floor are caving in. It’s one of those areas that even if you were told unicorns and fairies lived up there, you’d still be creeped out to be up there.
I’ve never in my seven years working with my good friend and fellow paranormal investigator Tom Maat, heard him say he was scared to walk around a haunted place by himself, but he did when it came to the third floor of the Fenton. Tom has always been able to feel things in his life and whatever resides on the third floor, Tom felt it was extremely negative. It’s been said by a few psychics that there’s a downright evil “something” lurking on the third floor. It keeps the other spirits of the hotel trapped there and brings in new ones through a vortex. Sound far fetched? Well, you are on a website devoted to paranormal occurrences, so don’t roll your eyes just yet. Regardless of what the psychics feel, every one of us who have been there has had something strange happen. When the whole wait staff and an army of paranormal investigators have all felt something, you just might have yourself an officially haunted place in the Fenton Hotel.
Learn more about the history of the Fenton Hotel at their website.
Update: January 2008
From stuff we heard recently, it sounds like the Fenton doesn't want anything to do with their ghosts anymore so no open investigations will probably be happening there again.
- Written by Amberrose Hammond