Ghosts on the Trail: Famous Haunted Hikes throughout Metro Detroit

Highland State Recreation Area - White Lake

Rationale for Infamy: The Destruction of the Ford Family's Wilderness Estate
Haunted Hike: Haven Hill Loop Trail

As you stand in the midst of the ruins of the Haven Hill Estate, you get the sensation that you're intruding. Yes, you fully know that you're in the great outdoors as you glance at the ruinous stonework and brilliant foliage surrounding you. The informational signs further evidence that you are well within your recreational rights to explore this famous area of Highland State Recreation Area.

And yet...there you are. A modern guest standing in the ruins of the Ford Family's wilderness refuge. A destination of utmost privacy utilized brilliantly by the Fords to escape from an intrusive 20th century America. A lodge in the woods that hosted inventors, foreign dignitaries, and celebrities of a bygone era. A monument to luxury and extravagance, lost in a matter of moments to an all-consuming fire in 1999.

One can only imagine what world-changing conversations must have occurred next to the skeleton of the still-standing hearth, or the grand business ideas that originated throughout Haven Hill's trail system. Who knows - maybe the spirits of those great men and women still continue those hikes and conversations, all the while perplexed by our blatant intrusion. Regardless, we wouldn't mind being joined by a ghost or two on our haunted hikes around the beautiful Haven Hill Estate this fall.

Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground - Detroit
Rationale for Infamy: The Terror of Segregation
Haunted Hike: Eight Mile Wall Mural Walk

Certain sectors of Detroit's Wyoming neighborhood are verifiably haunted. No - not by curses, ghouls, werewolves, vampires, or any other apparitions that tend to parade around the Detroit region this time of year. These particular haunts are tangible, visible, and long-standing for the whole world to witness.

This neighborhood remains permanently haunted by the most visible scar of Detroit's segregationist past: The Eight Mile Wall.

Dating back to the 1940s, developers erected the half-mile long wall in order to preserve the value of a planned "white neighborhood." The Federal Housing Administration ("FHA") deemed the prospective development as being too close to an existing "black neighborhood," which under the FHA's redlining policy meant that the developers would forfeit an opportunity to obtain federal funding for the project. Thus began the idea for the Eight Mile Wall, and the barrier remained the de facto racial divider for residential development between Mendota Street and Birdwood Avenue until 1968.

While the Fair Housing Act abolished redlining for good, the Eight Mile Wall remains a living relic of Detroit's tragic history that continues to haunt its present. Urban explorers can visit the wall and embark on haunted hikes around its community murals at the Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, just north of Van Artwerp Park, in Detroit.

Lake Erie Metropark - Rockwood
Rationale for Infamy: The Forgotten Rout of U.S. Soldiers
Haunted Hike: Downriver Linked Greenways Trail (East-West)

Over 200 years ago, the Detroit region was at war. Scratch that - the villages and forests bordering the Detroit River were ground zero for some of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812. Hallowed grounds where thousands of young men, fighting for the continued existence of their fledgling country, perish en masse along its northwest frontier.

Of all of the battles that contained such deaths, there's one that the history books have all but forgotten: the Battle of Brownstown.

On August 5, 1812, within what is now Lake Erie Metropark, 200 U.S. soldiers were ambushed by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and 25 warriors. Despite the notable superiority of the U.S. force, Chief Tecumseh routed the soldiers and pursued them for several miles as the U.S. retreated north to Fort Detroit. By the time the Americans had reached Detroit, their regiment had lost 18 men, sustained 12 wounded, and were missing 70. Only 1 Native American warrior perished.

According to prevailing ghost hunting lore, the fact that soliders die at a particular battlefield does not automatically mean that said battlefield will remain haunted by their ghosts. America’s most famous “haunted battlefields” consist of those where the souls of the departed remain “tied to the location of their death, usually a sudden or tragic one, and they often don’t realize that they are dead . . . in most cases, they have ‘unfinished business’ as the deceased person does not accept the way in which they died.”

During the Battle of Brownstown - and very similar to the later Battle of River Raisin, another alleged haunted battlefield - those fallen American soldiers spent their final moments engulfed in panic, trudging through marshland, and evading an unseen enemy that rained bullets and arrows down upon them. Given those abhorrent circumstances, we certainly see why those souls have "unfinished business" with the East-West Downriver Linked Greenways Trail of Lake Erie Metropark.