Detroit’s Supernatural Sights
by Christy Arbascolle
Many people say they’ve seen spirits in haunted places around the Motor City.
For seven years, Floyd Binns didn’t tell anybody about the things he saw go on at night while working at the 80-year-old Scarab Club in Detroit.
Binns, a maintenance worker for two decades at the arts, music and literature venue, said he saw an art class, a couple dancing and strangers in the basement—all of them ghosts, he says.
The 60-year-old only revealed his sightings after coworkers spoke of their own ghost encounters. “I didn’t want people to think something was wrong with me,” he said.
Image: Floyd Binns stands near the Scarab Club’s laundry room, where he says he has seen ghosts
As thousands of metro Detroiters visit haunted houses with costumed creatures and cardboard coffins from now until Halloween, Binns and other believers say real ghosts are revealing themselves year-round in random, nearby places.
From a prominent Detroit restaurant to small-town family businesses in northern Macomb County, ordinary people say they have encountered extraordinary things that are difficult to explain.
“We try to reassure them there’s nothing to fear,” said Robin Lemkie, founder of Ghost Hunters of Southern Michigan, who advises spooked clients to light a white candle for protection from God.
Lemkie’s group of so-called “sensitives” doesn’t charge clients to contact ghosts. They also carry cameras and tape recorders to capture sounds and sights they may not pick up in person.
Binns said most of his encounters with ghosts at the Scarab Club have been friendly, like the time he felt a finger tapping his shoulder as he searched for keys in the 80-year-old building’s basement.
“My keys were in the door. They tapped me on the shoulder to let me know,” he said.
The only sighting that truly frightened him, he said, was an incident late one night when he went to retrieve tablecloths from the washer and dryer area in the boiler room.
“There was a man in there pointing at the wall, and the washer and dryer wasn’t in there at all. And there were two or three people standing in there,” he said.
Binns said he ran upstairs, leaving the light on.
Lemkie said some people who contend they live or work in places haunted by ghosts are not afraid to coexist with them.
“It doesn’t bother us,” said Kathy Osebold, 48, who owns Main Street Café and an apartment in a century-old building in Richmond in Macomb County that she says is haunted by the original landowner, Earl.
“He doesn’t stay around all the time,” Osebold said. “While you’re sleeping, he likes to sit at the end of the bed. There’s an indentation.”
Mason Winfield, an East Aurora, N.Y.-based author and supernatural historian, said Binns’ and Osebold’s accounts are plausible because there have been well-documented ghost sightings.
“It’s just been going on too long to believe there’s nothing to it,” Winfield said .
Osebold said she and her husband, Bernie, were unfazed when the seller said the Richmond building they bought 11 years ago to live and work in was haunted.
Earl, whom psychics told the family was the German man who once owned the property, makes himself known by knocking items off shelves. Kathy Osebold says she even saw Earl once:
“It looks like a flash of a person. I actually did see color. It looked to be like blue overalls and maybe like a reddish-plaid shirt. He ran through the wall.”
Lumber baron David Whitney Jr. and wife Mary Jane didn’t die in their extravagant late 19th-Century mansion in Detroit that was converted to the Whitney restaurant, but their ghosts are still around, Lemkie said.
“I saw her go different times from her bedroom to her sitting room,” she said of Mary Jane Whitney.
Less-welcoming ghosts were found at the Pickle Barrel Inn in Willis and a Saline farmhouse.
Lemkie said the ghosts “can’t hurt us,” but added, “it’s a little frightening because it’s the unknown.”
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