Sometimes hauntings and legends spread like a game of telephone.  The story starts out with the truth and, as it’s passed from person to person, it morphs and changes, picking up sinister and mysterious details along the way until it becomes a thing of its own.  Whatever the truth is, all that the residents of the former town of Pere Cheney needed to know to prove that the witch’s curse was true was to look around at their dead.

What if I told you that in America, there are entire towns which are said to be cursed—places of such sorrow and bad luck that they have been abandoned altogether, the buildings and structures left to rot like old fruit.  It’s seems outlandish that an entire town could be cursed—of course, we read about it in books, Stephen King’s Derry Maine in his novel IT, for instance.  Still, that could never happen in real life.

Right?

That brings us to a little town that once existed in Northern Michigan.  Pere Cheney was a village located in Crawford County and established in 1873 when founder George Cheney received a land grant from the Michigan Central Railroad company to establish a stop along the railroad.  The small lumbering town was the first community in the area and was established by lumberjacks who trailed the nearby railroad headed north to Mackinaw City.

Though Pere Cheney was a small community, it served as the temporary county seat and had a train stop called Cheney Depot, a general store, sawmills, a carpenter, a doctor, a post office, and even a hotel.  For a while, the town seemed to thrive in its own little way and, by the mid 1870s, the population of Pere Cheney had grown to 1,500 people.  Like other villages of its kind and size during the time, you might assume it would continue to grow and flourish, becoming a larger and more established city by the twentieth century.

That was not the fate of Pere Cheney.  In fact, by 1915, the town had been completely abandoned and declared a ghost town. So what happened?

Some say it was the witch's curse.

 Music Credits:

"Quinn's Song: The Dance Begins" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

"Lone Harvest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

"Come Play with Me" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

"Classic Horror 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

"Evening of Chaos" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/