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Haunted Holland: Hope College

 Spooky season is upon us, so I thought I'd look at haunted or supernatural occurrences in and around Holland, Michigan.  Early on in my blog journey, I spoke with Mr. Nick McNamara, who was a custodian/building & grounds technician at Hope College, who shared the following stories with me:

 

*Dimnent Chapel: Fall 2017 I was cleaning the chapel very early in the morning (around 3:00 am when this happened) in preparation for Christmas Vespers. I heard one of our locked entrance doors shut, but heard nobody else in the building. I was expecting a student to come help but he wasn’t coming until 5, so this freaked me out. Around 5:30 I had a light flash in front of me, like a camera flash, but the student was down in the handicap entrance and no lights around me had burnt out or blown. Right after that I heard a thump in the balcony above me, but when the student went up there and came back he never mentioned seeing anything that might have fallen.

 

*Voorhees Hall, one of our dorms: In our basement storage room, I walked in to see a box of tube lights shaking as though they had been bumped by something, but I didn’t see any kind of mouse holes or anything in the wall and couldn’t hear anything scurrying around. Supposedly the ghost of John Nykerk haunts the building; he died in the RD’s apartment in the late 30s.

 

*Van Wylen Library: I have seen human shapes moving between the stacks on a couple occasions, and get a very eerie and unsafe feeling if I’m in the basement when the building is closed.

 

*Dow Center: These are my most recent experiences. While vacuuming upstairs one day, I saw a shadow move across the wall in front of me but when I turned around nobody was behind me. Later that day I was vacuuming the stretch of carpet that runs beside our track when I saw an orb move along the track out of the corner of my eye. I stopped to check, and when I went back to vacuuming (in the time it might take an average person to run a lap) I saw the orb again go along the track.

 

 When I worked as a maintenance tech at a CityFlatsHotel (now Tulyp), they had 2 tales of hauntings on the property.  Housekeepers would hear voices, sighs, and footsteps in the basement and unoccupied areas of the hotel.  The  "urban legend" was that Al Capone robbed a bank and shot someone on the property that CityFlats was built on...the bank robbery they were thinking of was actually the Eddie Bentz bank robbery; Al Capone had literally nothing to do with that (and actually I'm working on a piece about the legend of Al Capone and why literally every single town in Michigan has a false Al Capone story), and it was a few blocks away, not on the actual site of the hotel.

Another urban legend is that there was some sort of tenement/orphanage on the site of CityFlats that burned, and the footsteps and voices were the spirits of the deceased.  This, of course, is total bunk as there was never a tenement or orphanage on that site.  There wasn't even an apartment or high-density housing there...the famous orphanage that A.C. Van Raalte built sat on a site at 12th St. and College Ave. on Hope College's current campus.

 

Works cited:

Dispatch, T. C., & Locker, C. (2017). Local History. personal.

Dispatch, T. C., & McNamara, N. (2019). Blog Help. personal.

History: About. Hope College. (n.d.). https://hope.edu/about/hope-college-history.html


 

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