Record-Eagle
January 28, 2007
Friends In Spirit
Woman pens tale of knowing a ghost
by Tom Carr,
Record-Eagle staff writer
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GLEN ARBOR — The setting is perfect for a ghost story: a hap hazard, 100 year-old cemetery hidden in the woods with several unmarked graves.
And Linda Dewey said the ghost story that started here for her is real. Dewey said people can decide for themselves whether it’s fact or fiction.
According to a Harris Poll last year, 51 percent of the public said they believe in ghosts. But few report having had friendships with a ghost.
Dewey’s began on a July evening in 1991, when she was here visiting her family cottage from Scottsdale, Ariz., where she taught junior high school music and reading. She and some friends looked around the hodgepodge of headstones lying just off a hiking trail, when they sensed a sudden, unexplainable change in the mood.
“It felt real heavy,” she said. “The air literally had weight to it.”
A friend of hers, who is not Catholic, knelt down and made the sign of the cross. It was twilight and she and her friends began to leave. “I’ll tell you what; it was really spooky,” she said.
Nobody knew what the eerie feeling was, but Dewey said her intuition told her there might be a ghost nearby. “I couldn’t leave here without letting them know that somebody knows and cares,” she said. So as her friends walked on ahead, she stopped and said, “Whoever is here, our hearts are with you.” She believes that’s what brought her visitor.
Later that night, when Dewey went to bed in the cottage, there was a thump at the end of her bed. The second time it happened, she turned on the light. She wondered if it was the ghost whose presence she had felt in the cemetery.
“I took this as a positive thing,” she said. “I thought, ‘What can I do to help this person?’ I decided not to go into my fear.” She also came to the conclusion she could help the ghost get to his loved ones, but under certain conditions. “I told him, ‘No more bumps in the night and no more tricks,’” she said.
Dewey says the ghost was that of a man named Aaron. She uses the last name Burke in a 232-page manuscript/narrative she’s written about his story. She doesn’t want to use his real last name because there are families living in the area who have that name she said.
What she learned about him is that he was working on a farm near Dayton, Ohio when he died in 1922 at age 35. He was in a hayloft as part of a crew bringing hay up by a pulley. He looked away to see a mouse run across his shoe; a bale struck him and he fell off the loft, breaking his neck.
Before he went to Ohio, he had lived in Glen Arbor, where he and his wife had had three children. After the third child died, his wife’s health went downhill and she soon passed away, too.
“She just sort of faded away after the third child, who she was very attached to, died,” Dewey said.
Aaron took his remaining children to his stepmother’s house, went home, got drunk and then abandoned his family. He felt he couldn’t care for them alone, Dewey said.
But after he died, his spirit returned to northern Michigan. “Deep inside, he felt he was wrong for leaving,” Dewey said. And because he had that unresolved issue – abandonment of his children – he could not cross over into the next life, Dewey said.
So for the next two weeks, the ghost stayed with Dewey and even went back to Arizona with her. A friend of hers channeled another spirit that helped Aaron cross over and reunite with his family.
During his reunion, the uncontrollable tears came out through Dewey. “They were so emotional and I picked up on that,” Dewey said, tearing up as she spoke.
Dewey has begun to research Aaron in an attempt to verify that he actually existed. She also said she knows her story won’t be accepted by everyone, but she doesn’t care.
“It just doesn’t matter what anybody says,” she said. She believes the story has important lessons regardless.
“Death isn’t the end of the story,” she said. “There’s more to the story than what we see. And sometimes what we feel has more validity than what we see or hear with our eyes or ears.”
- Tom Carr
