Grand Rapids welcomes Halloween with haunted tours

To celebrate the month of October and Halloween, local arts and entertainment group Betka-Pope Productions (BPP) are hosting their annual GR Haunted Tours around downtown Grand Rapids.

Leading their group of 25 attendees on Friday the 13th was Eirann Betka-Pope, artistic director and co-owner of BPP. With over eight separate locations to visit and plenty of spooky stories to uncover, Betka-Pope set out from The Apartment Lounge and took us to our first haunting.

Outside of St. Cecilia Music Center, we learned how a professional ghost hunter was brought into the premises three years ago by facility director Carla Messing, who said she had experienced supernatural phenomena in the building firsthand. When the ghost hunting crew entered the performance hall, they heard a man's voice warn, "Move it." Messing claims that no one in the room could have said it.

We then learned that the ghost of a former employee is said to haunt the archives of the Grand Rapids Main Library, across the street from St. Cecilia, where visitors frequently report hearing a commotion in those rooms at odd hours. 

Similar strange occurrences have been reported at other locations, such as the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre. There, light switches do not turn off unless someone verbally says, "I'd like to go home now, please." In other areas of the theatre, stage props are inexplicably found turned over and moved to random locations overnight. Jared Graybiel, the Civic Theatre's outreach manager, who was present on the tour, told similar stories of hearing running water and strange noises coming from untouched areas of the building.

The spooky tour gave community members and tourists — many of whom traveled an hour or more to take part in the sold-out experience — the opportunity to see Grand Rapids in a new light.

One party’s visiting friend from Arizona, named Alycia, enjoyed the opportunity to explore her old hometown and see which storefronts had closed or opened since her cross-country move years ago. 

Betka-Pope slyly responded that the city’s real ghost stories are the high turnover rate of businesses on Monroe Center or the ridiculously long line that always haunts outside The BackForty Saloon every weekend.

Funny moments like these were well-balanced with some of the more distressing or disturbing tales, and Betka-Pope’s reliable humor cut through even the scariest stories. 

One particular conversation that stood out were the legends around the Lake Michigan Triangle, a stretch of freshwater that seems to attract lost shipwrecks and plane crashes. We heard stories of boats arriving in Green Bay with no crew, a sunk ship that took over 300 lives with it and even some underwater photographs that revealed our very own “Michigan Stonehenge” in 2007. 

Betka-Pope also shared some personal accounts of their own, telling a story of seeing fast-moving lights race back-and-forth across the sky above Ludington as a kid.

The tour continued on for approximately two hours until eventually concluding at the Kent County Civil War Monument downtown, where a courthouse and union drafting station once stood. A man named Edward Blakely, whose father had fought in the Civil War at only 15 years old, helped support the rededication of the monument in 2003. His special honor at the ceremony was to turn on the running water of the monument’s fountain, standing in the very spot where his father had stood over a hundred years prior. Blakely passed away in his sleep three weeks later.

“A lot of people will see his spirit or manifestation sit on the fountain, and he’ll stand up when he sees someone coming to sit there,” Betka-Pope said. “Hauntings don’t have to only be in a building, it can be where a building was. Especially when you remember and care for that space.”

The night ended with applause for Eirann’s theatrics, and our group parted ways in the rain.