Story submitted by Selina Engle
In May 2007 I went to Traverse City for a bowling tournament. We didn't get up there until late and we were all restless. It was about one in the morning and none of us could sleep. We decided to drive around and see the town since I had never been there before. Being the ghost story nut that I am, I asked if it would be all right if we could go see the old state hospital. So we stopped, got directions, and drove out there. We never thought that we would be able to drive around the grounds and get so close to the buildings. And let me tell you, that the buildings are scary in the day and they are very frightening and eerie at two in the morning. Of course the freakiness intrigued the three of us enough to go back after we were done bowling the next day.
The architecture of the buildings and grounds is beautiful. We took a lot of pictures and when we got back to the hotel, the other two ladies that were with us wanted to see the pictures. So I got out my laptop and we started looking at all of the photos. At first, we didn't see anything unusual, just the beautiful architecture. Then a red dot showed up in a picture. We thought that it must have been something on the camera. But then it started showing up in more and more pictures in different places. This made us decide to look at these pictures a little more closely. I just happened to look at one of the windows of the building. I saw a face in a window and there shouldn't have been anybody inside because it wasn’t one of the buildings being remodeled. I didn't want to tell anybody that I saw the face, but then Carrie looked at me with the same look of disbelief that I had on my face. We both saw the same thing!
We then continued to find even more unexplainable things in other pictures. This of course warranted a third trip back to the hospital, this time with a video camera. We didn't see anything this time, but we heard eerie noises. We first parked in the circle drive in the front of the building and our radio started going in and out, making scratching noises. As soon as we put the car in gear and moved five feet, it all stopped and the station came back on. We then turned the radio off so that we could film. Carrie was driving, Ruth was in the passenger seat (taking pictures), and I was in the back seat filming. We drove around all of building 50 and the other buildings. We were on the road that leads to the upholstery shop when we hit a bump in the road and I jammed my finger in the top of the window case. I told Carrie and Ruth that if you hear anything on the video that it was just me cussing. At that exact moment, the battery went dead in both the digital camera and the video camera. Ruth was saying that it just had to be a coincidence, but Carrie and I both told her to be quiet. We were both hearing the same thing.
There were moaning noises and screams coming from the upholstery shop. We got out and looked around but the noises stopped. It left us with a real eerie feeling. We let the battery charge on the video camera for awhile and looked at the new pictures. While they were looking at the pictures, I decided to look at the video. I got to the part where I knew I said “ouch” from hitting the window and then the scariest thing happened. You could see the car hit the pot hole, hear me say “ouch”, and then there was the creepiest man’s laugh that I have ever heard in my life. I thought that I must have heard it wrong so I rewound the tape and listened again. I heard the same thing. I called Carrie and Ruth over to hear the tape. At the same time, they both looked at me and asked why I laughed into the camera. I said it wasn't me and that I thought it must be them. So we all listened to it again. All of us agreed that there were no other people around at that point in the video. And then we all remembered that that was the moment when we heard the moaning and when the batteries went dead in our cameras. Needless to say, we were all a little freaked out. But that was where we left the hospital tours. We bowled the next day and then went home.