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Haunted Holland: Downtown And 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.

Doing a little bit of Ghost Hunters-esque debunking at CityFlats, the culprit was basically that the building is a giant concrete box:  The areas that people heard voices in was the basement, directly underneath the bar area.  The area that people heard footsteps and sighs corresponded to being directly below the fitness center.  I can't say the building was old when I worked there, but the mechanical equipment, pumps, washing machines, etc. had been used heavily throughout their entire lives and they, too, had developed some creaks and moaning sounds through the years. 

 

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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