Tulip City Dispatch

 In an earlier post on Grandville's Grand Castle , I explored some Boss Hogg level, small-town politics conspiracy theories dealing with money laundering and grift.  Everything was pretty much exactly as I expected:  From an outsider's perspective it feels slimey, but it's basically just how business is run . A new, more salacious conspiracy theory came across my radar courtesy of the Grand Rapids subreddit :  This one involves nuclear holocaust, international espionage , and a 500 year old branch of the Catholic Church .  A woman has been handing out papers to passersby in Grand Rapids, and a few Reddit users got ahold of these and shared them online. One attachment from May 2022 reads as follows: Dear Fellow American, I come to you today to ask that you seriously consider what I am about to tell you because it is of the greatest importance.  You must take steps for your own safety from a nuclear attack planned to occur on our soil during the month of May ...

The internet is great for a lot of things.  It allows the collective experience of humanity to be recorded and saved for posterity.  It allows collaboration and sharing thoughts across borders and across oceans.  It allows fact-checking, and corroboration of rumors.  Unfortunately, it also allows the dissemination of fake news, vigilante justice, false hype, and some of the worst misinformation grifts humanity has ever seen.  I used public records, freely available on the internet, for the vast majority of the research on this post. The famous Grand Castle in Grandville, Michigan , is polarizing.  It's unique, sure, but some consider it to be an eyesore.  It's certainly a distinctive bit of architecture.  And, because it's so weird, a lot of rumors have sprung up about it. There are entire threads of rumors that have been brought up on the Grand Rapids Subreddit , ranging from accusations of money laundering, to political grift, to covering up str...

 ...or, a brief glimpse into how urban legends can start and spread.  Imgur user kingfi1822  makes a claim in this post on how he purports to have started the legend of Melon Heads in Ohio .  His story is as follows: So, where I grew up in Ohio...we have the Legend of the Melon Heads. Kids used to drive down a lonely road in the woods and see, hear, and feel all kind of weird things, like children with giant heads and glowing eyes etc... Definitely a creepy story and a creepy area... When I was 15, I found a website with local ghost stories and legends...and emailed the webmaster a string of crap that I made up about the Melon Heads. I claimed to be a “long time resident of the area...” and that I’d had personal experience. It was a heck of a story for a 15 year old, and he posted it on the website-along with my email address. For years afterwards, I would occasionally receive an email from someone asking about my “knowledge,” and I would happily recite my made...

With the recent passing of former Secretary of Defense, and noted war criminal responsible for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld , some bits of trivia came to light:  Namely, that his family had a vacation home in Castle Park, just south of Holland . There are a lot of myths and legends about Castle Park, due to its impact on the world of literature, as it's where L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard Of Oz , but that's content for another blog entry. Anyway, anything I could write on the topic of Secdef Rumsfeld has pretty much already been written here: https://www.castlepark.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2011_Spring_Banner.pdf https://www.ft.com/content/6fefa640-c19b-11dd-831e-000077b07658 If I had literally anything else to add, I totally would have.  I've spent weeks roaming the internet, Googling and Duck-Duck-Doing my way around, but the Wood TV link says it best:  Ol' Rummy tried to keep a low profile, and succeeded!

 Some archetypes run deep.  There are common myths and legends that span humankind, across continents and oceans.  We, as humans, aren't very different, so there's no wonder that legends of cryptids and other unknown, unseen humanoids lurk the wilderness just out of our perception.  These tropes come up time and again, from culture to culture.  There's Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, the Yeti in the Himalayas, El Chupacabra in the Caribbean and Central America, the Skunk Ape in the Southeast United States, the Yowie in Australia, and countless other examples around the world.  Michigan has its own spin on this legend - common, yet shockingly, individual stories about werewolves or man-sized canines.  Shockingly individual until 1987, when a local radio deejay decided to write a song about it, and the public response blew up. Steve Cook, of WTCM (a pretty poppin' country station out of Traverse City) wrote this song: The legend holds that every 10 yea...

Charlie's Dump, the Georgetown Soccer Bowl, and Rosewood Park all describe the same common area in Jenison, Michigan, at the northeast corner of 20th Ave. and Rosewood St.  It's, simply put, a giant pit surrounded by residential subdivisions (and lately, a nice playground).  It was our local sledding hill.  It was where we'd go in the winters.  Every year, it seemed, one kid would come to school with a broken arm.  There were low-key "gangs" that would push and shove you if you went down the wrong side of the 4-sided structure.  And, late at nights, the bad kids (you know, the ones who would smoke cigarettes underneath the Rush Creek bridge on 12th Ave. or ride BMX bikes behind the Pizza Hut on Baldwin) would tip over the port-a-potties and push them down the hill. Starting at the rim and going down the hill, there's a bump about halfway down that served as a launch ramp for kids on sleds.  The really cool kids could manipulate their sleds mid-air, doi...

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...

The Melonheads of Saugatuck Dunes are a truly unique bit of local lore and urban legend. While most urban legends have a grain of truth in them, my research into the Melonheads has turned up many dead-ends and false leads. Here's what we know for sure: Felt Mansion was built by Dorr E. Felt, a wealthy businessman from Chicago, situated on Shore Acres Farm (present location of Saugatuck Dunes State Park). Within a few days of being completed in 1928, Agnes Felt passed away. Within a year and a half, Dorr Felt himself passed away, in 1930. This is all freely available information from Allegan County. In 1949, the estate was sold by the family to the Archdiocese of Chicago and was used as a seminary, called Saint Augustine Seminary. By 1962, cloistered nuns moved in, and a boarding school was established. This is all verifiable by Archdiocese of Chicago records, and by yearbooks, available at Herrick District Library in Holland. The Seminary was closed and the property was sold t...