A Bewitching Guide to Halloween: Michigan

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Ghosts in the Graveyard: Cemetery Visit to Glenwood Cemetery Flint, Michigan

There is a sharp contrast between the somewhat shabby status of Avondale and the well-kept grounds of Glenwood.

Glenwood was added to the Michigan Register of Historic Places in 1989 and the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. In 2015 Glenwood became a certified arboretum thanks to its massive oaks, beautiful maples, and gnarled catalpa trees.

Strolling through Glenwood you’ll find a historical who’s who of the people who made Flint. Even if you don’t know Flint history you’ll recognize street, business and building names on the gravestones. “Among the stones you’ll find lumber barons, civil war veterans, two Governors, one Lt. Governor and pioneers of the carriage and automobile industries.”

This is just a sample of the names of Glenwood’s residents that now grace Flint locations: William S Ballenger Sr (Ballenger Hwy), Josiah W Begole (Begole Street), Henry H. Crapo (Crapo Street), J. Dallas Dort (Dort Hwy), Williams M. Fenton (the city of Fenton), Charles Stewart Mott (Mott Community College, Mott Children’s Health Center, The Mott Foundation, Robert J. Whaley (Whaley House), and James H. Whiting (The Whiting).

“Not many places in a city collect history the way Glenwood has for Flint. A walk around the grounds will transport visitors into all the adventure, triumph, and occasionally, all the heartache of past eras. No chronicle reads quite as eloquently as the graves at Glenwood. “Look out over this cemetery at the names on the headstones,” says Peter. “They are the names of the streets we drive on, the parks we play in, and the schools we send our kids to.” Glenwood is the home of the city’s past, giving to the living a tranquil sanctuary as it gives to the dead a resting place.” (My City Magazine October 1, 2013)

Glenwood is peaceful and mysterious. Ornate stones full of imagery make us wonder who these people really were, who loved them, what were their lives like?

Headstones full of symbology draw taphophiles. “An obelisk broken in half represents a young woman taken before her time; a stone in the shape of a wooden stump marks the final resting place of not only a person but a line, the last to carry a surname. Many headstones have what appear to be sheets draped over them, representing the thin veil between life and death.” (MLive September 19, 2014)

One mysterious set of gravestones even had former Glenwood caretaker, Peter Lemelin perplexed. “The three gravestones bear the names Patterson, Pierce and Hubbard. The men they mark are not related, but all have the same kind of headstone, made from the same kind of stone, and they're in a perfect triangle. Perfect triangle, three exact stones, you'd think that was an accident? I don't have an answer to it. " (The Flint Journal July 16, 2013)

I visited Glenwood on a hot sunny day in July, not a living soul in site other than a few chipmunks and other furry critters seen scampering into the bushes as we walked the grounds.

Our first stop was at the large mausoleum.

It looked as though someone had recently broken into the large mausoleum…or something had broken out. In the front of the building a board was laying on the ground in front of an open window. On the side of the building slats were sticking out from the window in peculiar manner as if something had torn through them and pushed out from the inside. It was very odd.

Did Glenwood have a zombie outbreak? Perhaps a vampire rising from their burial tomb? Or just Flint teenagers trying to get a peek inside? My daughter tried to look inside the dark depths of the mausoleum but we didn’t have a flashlight and no one was brave enough to get too close to that open window.

A family crypt behind the large mausoleum was quiet and elegant, other than a shattered cherub lying next to a column on the cement.

Such odd things made you pause and wonder…did this just fall and break, landing here in this position? Or is there a deeper meaning to this shattered visage of innocence?

My daughter and I visited Glenwood again in the winter, this time we strolled the side of the cemetery full of Flint historical figures: Mott, Dort, Whiting, Crapo, Smith, Stockton....

On this chilly January day there was no one to be seen within the cemetery. It was a stark contrast to the bustling movement outside the gates of Glenwood where people had been walking, waiting on buses as sirens blared.

Inside the gates the city sounds were muted and the crunch of dry leaves and melody of bird song is what filled my ears.

The overwhelming sense of history here is immense and I love strolling the grounds and imagining how things were in the times when these people were alive.

Glenwood wasn't spooky or weird however this popped up when I uploaded the photos to my computer. I circled the odd area, then in the second image I cropped it so you could see just that area.

It looks like a head is rising up out of the grave and looking at me.

This was a flat headstone. Nothing had been sitting on it and it did not have any decorative structures on top.

I was hoping to find photos of this grave in another shot from another angle but I can't match up the location in other photos.

It could be a reflection from the sun glaring off the marble surface, I don't know. It just looks so odd.

This is the camera I always use when visiting "haunted" locations and I swear it is a ghost hunter. No other cameras catch odd ghostly figures or weird glares and flares like this one does.

Then there was the stripper tree, LOL. That's what my daughter and I call it because it looks like a female form upside down doing a pole dancer pose.

Haunted Flint

Haunted America Series

Roxanne Rhoads and Joe Schipani

Publisher: The History Press

Release Date: September 2, 2019

ISBN-10: 1467143049

ISBN-13: 978-1467143042

Book Description:

Sinister Secrets in Flint’s History

Home to ancient burial grounds, unsolved murders, economic depression, and a water crisis, Flint emits an unholy energy rife with ghostly encounters.

Colonel Thomas Stockton’s ever vigilant ghost keeps a watchful eye over his family home at Spring Grove, where guests occasionally hear the thump of his heavy boots.

Restless spirits long separated from their graves lurk among the ancient stones in Avondale Cemetery.

Carriage maker W.A. Paterson’s spirit continuously wanders the halls of the Dryden Building, and something sinister and unnamed resides in a Knob Hill mansion waiting to prey on impressionable young men.

Join authors Roxanne Rhoads and Joe Schipani on a chilling tour of Flint’s most haunted locations.

Amazon BN Chapters Book Depository Arcadia Press Goodreads

Avondale Cemetery Flint, Michigan

Located on the edge of downtown Flint nestled between an empty National Guard Armory and boarded up buildings lays one of Flint’s oldest cemeteries, Avondale.

Aventine Cemetery is also there, so close they look like one cemetery when you walk around the grounds. Aventine is the burial site of several area Civil War Veterans as well as Veterans from other eras. It is located on a portion of the grounds of Camp Thomson, a Civil War era rendezvous and training facility named after Colonel Thomson of Flint. The cemetery was abandoned by the city of Flint and left in disrepair. The Brothers of the Gov. Crapo Camp No. 145 decided to "adopt" the cemetery as a project and they keep it minimally maintained.

It is hard to tell where one cemetery ends and the other begins so I’ll just refer to the entire site as one location.

This sad, haphazard cemetery is full of crumbling headstones and toppled monuments that no one cares enough to repair. In recent years the cemetery has been vandalized repeatedly. These vandals not only damaged physical stones but destroyed parts of Flint’s history and heritage. Many of the stones damaged were over one hundred years old.

"Avondale represents people of all walks of life from Flint, from the mayor to the working person," said David White, president of the Genesee County Historical Society. "It's very unnerving to see the damage because it's so disrespectful to the buried and so costly to repair." (The Flint Journal May 7, 2015)

During my visit I noticed a large tree had split and fallen on top of numerous grave sites sometime recently because it was still full of leaves that had not completely dried up and crumbled yet. The tree branches and leaves conceal countless headstones and gravesites. Yet no one has made an effort to remove it.

The cemetery has been mowed but that seems to be the only maintenance occurring in this sad and lonely place.

This was my first visit to Avondale.

I knew of the cemetery but had never seen it before. Its location is on the outskirts of downtown Flint, an area where the gentrification has not yet reached, perhaps it never will.

Modern cemeteries are carefully planned and mapped out. Avondale is a scattered mess. Plots and stones are everywhere with no rhyme or reason. Some of this may be due to the old Flint Cemetery residents being disinterred and reburied in Avondale in the 1950s when the city moved roads and a hotel was built on top of the old cemetery grounds.

During my visit I was on high alert, mostly due to being in a bad part of town, but something sinister lurked in the shadows that were everywhere in this cemetery even though it was a bright, hot, summer day.

Most of the cemetery was historically interesting yet sad. Nothing overtly creepy, not even the eerie crypts and mausoleums that were becoming one with the natural surroundings, until we drove to the back of the cemetery to circle our way out. I think I discovered the source of the cemetery's sinister subtext.

Photo by Ari Napolitano

A derelict shed stood in shadowed darkness with pile of debris in front. Trees and vines had almost swallowed the structure whole. Only one garage door was visible and it hung open, darkness reaching out from its depth. Fear and trepidation filled me. Though it would have been a great subject for photos I would not get out of the car nor would I let my children get out. Something evil lingered in that old shed and I had no desire to face it.

My daughter snapped this photo through the car window

After that we hustled out of Avondale and made our way to the opposite side of downtown Flint to Glenwood. (More on Glenwood in my next cemetery post).

Here are more photos from Avondale by Ari Napolitano

Interestingly, right before setting up this post I read an email from Atlas Obscura with a link to an article about Tree Stump Gravestones.

I had to check it out because I knew there were several tree stump gravestones in Avondale that we snapped photos of.

To the best of my memory Avondale is the first place I have ever seen tree stump gravestones. If they are in a cemetery I have visited before I just didn't pay attention.

According to the author of Tree-Stump Tombstones, Susanne Ridlen, tree-stump tombstones can be found in graveyards all over the US. They date mostly from the 1880s to the 1920s, when funerary art was moving away from the grand mausoleums and obelisks and turning the focus of death back to life. A tree is a powerful symbol of both eternity and humanity, recalling the tree of life and tree of knowledge.

The tree-stump tomb stones qualify as folk art. They also have ties to secret societies, fraternal orders, and unions.