- [Will] Coming up on a Halloween themed episode of "One Detroit", we're going in search of ghosts at two Detroit area haunts.

First, we'll visit The Whitney restaurant in Detroit where employees and guests have experienced spooky encounters with spirits, and then we'll stop by the historical Orson Starr House in Royal Oak, which has a reputation of being one of the state's most haunted places.

Plus, we'll let you know what's happening in Metro Detroit this weekend and beyond.

It's all coming up next on "One Detroit".

- [Narrator] From Delta faucets, to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Narrator 2] Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator 3] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator 2] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(bright upbeat music) - [Will] As Halloween approaches, we're going ghost hunting in this episode of "One Detroit".

The Detroit area's haunted history includes two historical houses that have long been said to be the sites of paranormal activity.

First, the Whitney Mansion in Detroit, which was owned by 19th Century lumber baron, David Whitney Jr, and today is a popular restaurant.

And then, the Orson Starr House in Royal Oak, which is the oldest existing home in the city, and is now a museum and historical site.

"One Detroit"'s Chris Jordan was brave enough to visit both locations to get the backstories from the site's resident historians.

Then, he and his camera crew went in search of ghosts with paranormal investigators, here are his two reports.

- Once we start it running like this, you let it run for a second, but then we'll start asking questions, hopefully questions that make sense to them, the spirits, something that's relevant.

But if anybody has a question, ask it out loud.

- Do you like that we're up here?

(static buzzing) Do you like that we're up here?

(static buzzing) - [Chris] Chad and Heather Dye are paranormal investigators under the name Dye Paranormal.

They are also the official resident ghost hunters at The Whitney, the 19th Century lumber barons mansion in Detroit, which is now an iconic restaurant, and which has long been said to be haunted.

They invited "One Detroit" to participate in one of their twice a month public ghost tours.

- It's good being the resident investigators because we get to come back to a place that's familiar.

- Mm.

- We get to try some of the same things we've tried before, maybe with a different result.

- Hm.

- Yep.

- But hopefully, if there are spirits here, they get used to seeing us, they'll, you know, maybe know us.

- Mm.

- Maybe that'll give them an opportunity to reach out to us.

- Mm, yeah.

- That's our hope.

- Make them more comfortable, as opposed to just walking into a random space that you've not been in before.

I think that maybe this year we've gotten to a point where they're starting to engage with us more.

(static buzzing) That was loud and clear to me.

- We take people out to the carriage house and we try to recreate some of the things we've done in the past to try and quantify, you know, what's happening out there.

And like I said, we can't make things happen, we can only hope that maybe one of the guests, their vibe, their energy, will cause a spirit to connect with us.

And that's what we're there for, we want to connect in a respectful way to whatever spirits are here, and hopefully get answers from them as to why they're here.

- [Chris] But first, I spoke to The Whitney's house historian, Yvonne Szymczak, to learn more about the building's rich history.

- So, before it was Motor City, it was Lumber City, and David Whitney Jr. was the most successful lumber baron in the state of Michigan.

The Whitney family lived in the house from 1894, when the build was completed, and it was until about 1917 when David Whitney Jr.'s wife, Sarah, had passed, by choice of the Whitney family, they wanted to give it to the Wayne County Medical Association, which they did do.

So that was the next in line, in terms of ownership.

My favorite stories are the ones that come from the people that come here, and I had a gentleman on one of the tours tell me, "I know about this place in a totally different context."

And he said, "My grandfather came here to get a physical so that he could go off to war."

- How does your job as a historian kind of interact with the myths and legends and folklore of this place, being a famously haunted building?

- It validates a lot of things, it opens up a lot of questions.

It just makes things more colorful, it brings things to life, and it gives people names.

You suddenly have names of people that have been here, you know, and it's not just the Whitneys, because this place was a party house.

I mean, this place was wired by Thomas Edison, this place has seen a lot of notable people pass through it.

- So you're the resident historian, we're also here with the resident paranormal investigators, how do different worlds interface?

- Our stories intertwine because there's so much of that history that backs up a lot of those stories that lead people to ask, "Hey, who haunts this place?"

I mean, obviously we think David Whitney Jr., but why?

He died in his bedroom.

This is something that people are really intrigued with and they often say, "I can feel that, I can feel that in this room."

It gives them something to hang onto.

- We know for a fact from our research, three people have died in the house.

- [Chris] Mm.

- We don't know if anybody died during the construction of the house.

- [Chris] Mm.

- We know David Whitney Jr. died in the house, in his bedroom.

After he had passed, it's believed that Sarah, his wife, moved in her brother and parents for a short time.

- Hm.

- Her brother, John McLaughlin, died in the house, on property.

- Mm.

- And then of course, she died after like an 18 month illness being bedridden.

- We are always exchanging stories and photographs and videos and EVPs, and it all makes sense because as you talk about the story of the house, and the story spans from 1894 to now, that ghost storytelling culture has been such a part of it.

- The carriage house is where a lot of the paranormal activity is said to happen.

What's the history of why that would be?

What's the history of the carriage house?

- One of the youngest daughters, Catherine, did take care of orphans, and there's connection somewhere in there having to do with the sound of children's voices.

- We have an EVP, audio capture electronic voice phenomenon, for those who don't know, of a guest asking, "Would you like me to get out of your seat?"

And I was wearing headphones and I heard, "Yes."

Whispered.

Nobody else heard it, because I was running my audio recorder with my headphones on, so I said, "Who said 'yes'?"

And I'm looking at the crowd thinking somebody's pulling my leg, and they're all like, "What are you talking about?

What do you mean?"

And I hear, "I said yes."

Underneath it.

- Can you say hello, Felix?

- [Chris] What are the tools that you use?

- I always tell everyone that you yourself are your primary tool.

- Mm.

- What you feel in a space, the energy that you pick up, you know, did it change, did it shift, did the temperature drop?

And then the first tool most people buy when they're investigating is a digital voice recorder, which gathers audio evidence.

We use equipment that detects electromagnetic fields, we use spirit boxes that are basically transistor radios that are broken to run through white noise so that the spirits can manipulate it.

- [Chris] The spirit box white noise radio, locked in a faraday cage to prevent interference from ordinary radio waves, is what my colleague, Andrea Riley, used to ask the spirits in The Whitney carriage house if they were happy we were there.

Both of us and our colleague, Leland Stein, all independently reported hearing a girl's voice say, "No."

- Do you like that we're up here?

(static buzzing) - [Chris] A trick of audio and imagination, or potentially a paranormal encounter?

This electromagnetic field sensor goes off when the field around it is disturbed, it went off when Chad was alone in the room and we were filming next door.

(sensor beeping) - What?

- What was that?

- That was REM pod going off.

(footsteps thudding) If you're here with us, can you touch that again?

No, I just, I reached for the the candle- - Oh.

- To put it in the bag.

(sensor beeping) There it is.

Thank you for touching that again.

If you get closer to it, all the lights will come on.

(sensor beeping) - Hey.

- Oh.

- [Chris] See, it's going off again.

- [Chris] Oh, whoa, whoa.

Was the sensor sent off by a spirit trying to communicate?

That will remain a mystery, perhaps "One Detroit"'s contribution to The Whitney's tradition of ghost stories and folklore, which is so interwoven with the building's rich history.

- If you're looking for an authentic experience, and stories, and history, go on a paranormal investigation.

And once you've been on a paranormal investigation and you've enthralled yourself in that environment, then you can truly say that you've been a part of something that isn't manufactured and isn't commercialized.

We are authentic and genuine, and we want that to be your experience.

(bugs chirping) - [Andrea] Did you want me to leave?

Or are you okay with me staying here?

Oh.

- Oh!

- It flashed - Yep.

- Yep.

Sure did.

- Oh, wow.

- [John] Well, if you want her to stay in and you want me to help keep the guys out, hit the bell for us.

Go touch it, go ding it.

Ding it.

(John laughing) - Can you make a noise for us?

(bell dinging) - Ah.

- Thank you.

- [John] Three seconds.

- [Andrea] Thank you very much.

- [Chris] The Orson Starr House, a historic 19th century farmhouse preserved in period accurate style as a museum, much like something you would expect at Greenfield Village, but hidden in plain sight along Main Street and Royal Oak, just south of 13 Mile.

It is also famously said to be haunted.

- It had a history, or a reputation, through the city workers that it was haunted, and that's kind of always been that way.

(Alexandra laughing) So when I came in, I was very skeptical, so I didn't really believe it until something happened to me.

- [Chris] I stopped by the Starr House to learn about its history from Royal Oak Historical Commission Chair, Alexandra Kerrigan, before our "One Detroit" team of myself, Andrea Riley, and Nate Turner joined a paranormal investigation of the house, with its resident ghost hunters, John Yost and David Boyer of Flyer Paranormal.

- You have a family that came in and was pioneering, essentially, setting the economy for this area.

13 Mile Road was Starr Road, we have Starr Presbyterian, so you can tell that they had an impact on the area, they were a quite prominent family.

Orson Starr, him and his wife Rhoda, came from Upper State New York in 1831, and they were looking for land and to continue manufacturing cowbells.

This area is perfect for manufacturing cowbells, the soil's just the right mixture of clay and sand.

Five generations in all lived here.

- Oh, wow.

- And then the family line decided to sell it and the city took over and made it into a museum.

- [Chris] Alexandra leads the open house tours of the Orson Starr House that happen one Sunday a month from fall through spring.

She also joins Flyer Paranormal on their once a month ghost tours.

- She will give our groups basically a history lesson on the Orson Starr House, and then once that's over, we start our investigation.

- So what do we know, as far as the historical record goes, about who died here?

- Right.

- Who these ghosts are thought to be?

- Right, so the family had 10 children in all, and only five made it to adulthood.

- Mm.

- So you had five children passing away, like I said, three in one week, Mr. Starr dying, and it was presumably in this house, there's not a lot of record as to why or how.

And for a time period, there was a descendant who had a husband who was a funeral director, so there was also funerals being held here.

- What was that first experience that made you think the stories of this house being haunted might be real?

- Well, I was here cleaning one day, it was in April, and April's a big month for the house, because when the a lot of the family members had passed away.

Beautiful sunny day, you wouldn't expect, you know, to hear anything on a nice, bright sunny day.

And I was in the master bedroom cleaning, and I heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

And at that point I thought, "Well, you know, maybe it's just somebody on the front porch and I'm hearing an echo."

So I go to the front door, there was nobody outside, there was nobody around the house, and I hear footsteps upstairs, in the children's room, walking across.

There was nobody in here, and so I'm like, "Okay, the first thing that everyone had described as their experience in house, the docents before me, it was the footsteps."

- Do things like that happen often when you're here?

- I have heard footsteps since then, I've had the doors be left open that I know I've locked, I've had my hair touched in one of the rooms, I could feel someone touching it.

- [Chris] John and David from Flyer Paranormal have had their share of equally spooky experiences.

- I'm in the kitchen at the counter and I noticed something come to the kitchen door, there was a figure that came to the kitchen door.

- Mm.

- And I thought it was my wife, and I turn around and I look, and there's nothing there.

I go back to, you know, doing what I'm doing on the computer and next thing you know, it comes back.

So I see it outta the corner of my eye and I turn real slow.

- Mm.

- And this time, this shadow figure stayed in my eyesight a little bit longer and then it disappeared.

And I'm shaking my head and go back to doing what I'm doing, here it comes a third time.

On our way home that night, me, David, my wife, I said, "Hey, I gotta tell you guys about an experience."

And my wife cut me off and she said, "No, I have to tell you what happened."

She said, "John, when you were in the kitchen, someone kept walking up to the kitchen door."

And she said that she'd seen someone walk up to the doorway to the kitchen and watched what I was doing, three separate times.

And that was our very first night here.

- Yep, the very first night.

- So when you do a tour here, what do you do?

- I try to interact with the spirits before we start using any kind of devices.

I want to try to get interaction as far as feeling what kind of energy is in the room.

Are you coming to see what we're doing in here?

- [David] Well, maybe you find a good spot.

- You can join us.

- Feel free.

- Yeah, come say hi.

- Come join our circle.

- We'll do like a baseline K2 reading, or an EMF reading, and we'll set up a REM pod.

- [Chris] EMF, electromagnetic field, which spirits are said to give off, and which the devices used in this investigation measure in different ways.

- Get it off green, help me out here.

We'll have that, we'll all sit around in a circle, maybe say our names, you know, respect the spirits and have them, you know, get to know us a little bit better- - Mhm.

- And go from there.

- We've got new friends.

(bell dinging) Yep.

We've got new friends here.

And we ask spirit for communication, if there's any way that you can let us know that you're here, give us an indication, give us a sign, and you know, questions, and basically games, "Can you play with us?

Is there anything that you can do for us?"

And, you know, we get hits on our devices and whatnot.

- Can you push it just a little bit my way?

- [Chris] We got quite a bit of device activity in the children's bedroom.

- I'd really like the ball back.

- [Chris] Where the legends of the house say that the spirits of the Starr family children who died on the property might reside.

- Yeah!

- Hey.

- [John] That's what I'm talking about.

- Can whoever's in here say their name?

(bell dinging) - What did you just ask?

- The name.

- One of them is Orissa.

- Yeah.

- Ethan, Lydia.

- Is Orissa here?

Is Ethan here?

- [David] Hey John, I'm about to run that Necro for a minute.

- Yeah, go ahead.

- [David] And get a little, (bell dinging) sense of what that sounds like.

- Whoa, was that- - Was that Ethan?

Ethan, if you're there, make the bell go off again, or you can say something to our friends out there.

- Yeah, say something to this device, make it go off.

(bell dinging) Oh, that was quick.

- Hi, Ethan.

- Knowing the history that we know, we will go into questions about Orson Starr, Rhoda, some of the kids' names- - Mm.

- And we will try to get, you know, verification using our devices, "If this is so and so, can you do this?"

- Mhm.

- And we've gotten names, multiple names of the kids- - Right.

- Here in the house, and that's just by asking, "Who's here with us?"

- Mm.

- We'll get those names repeated.

Kind of incorporating the history into our questions and how we go about, you know, getting those answers.

- [Chris] John tried communicating with Rhoda Gibbs Starr in her bedroom.

After he felt a cold spot that he found unsettling, he asked if we were unwelcome in her personal space.

- We definitely respect your wishes, if you let us know somehow that you wanted us out.

Whether by the bell, or- - Oh.

- Okay, there's the lights.

Out.

- Okay.

- [David] Thanks for communication.

- [Chris] John later went back into Rhoda's bedroom to try communicating again using a different method.

- We did an experiment called the Estes Method, and it's a sensory deprivation experiment where you use noise cancellation headphones, and a eye mask, and you listen to the spirit box.

- [Chris] The results were pretty spooky.

- I'm trying to tell you, I'm telling you.

Kids.

- They should be in bed by now, don't you think?

- Yeah, they should be asleep.

- Are they upset?

Are you upset because we're keeping the kids awake?

- Yeah.

- He said, "Yeah".

- Oh.

- Well, we're sorry.

Is that you Rhoda that's trying to communicate with us?

- In the morning.

- Are you wanting to go to sleep?

- Ah, so it feels like someone's putting their arm around my neck, around the back of my neck.

Is someone in here right now?

- No.

- No.

- No!

- Huh?

- No!

- I can't hear you, touch me if you're in here.

- No!

- Okay.

- Okay, what?

- All right, all right, yep, done.

- Whoa.

- Oh.

We took that as our cue to wrap things up for the night.

We can't offer an explanation, but we can say that it was a fascinating, extremely memorable night, where ghostly local legend intersected with very real local history in a way that rewarded curiosity about both subjects.

- We get a lot of different folks, different backgrounds, different beliefs, and you can tell that when someone comes in with, you know, excitement and they're ready to figure out what the heck's going on on the other side.

- Yeah.

- We tend to see more activity.

(bugs chirping) - [Will] And if you want to find out more about these two haunted places in Metro Detroit, we've posted links to their websites at onedetroitpbs.org.

There are plenty of Halloween themed events to choose from this weekend and beyond in Metro Detroit.

Here's "One Detroit"'s Sarah Zientarski with today's "One Detroit Weekend".

- [Sarah] First up, "Four: Lester Johnson's Selected Works" is the current exhibition at Stamelos Gallery Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Plus, Halloween is next Thursday, and Metro Detroit is full of spooky events leading up to the big day, like Hush Haunted Attraction in Westland.

The location offers four different opportunities to be scared.

The horror can be enjoyed through November 2nd.

This Halloween season, get down at Nightmare on Groove Street on Friday, October 25th, featuring live music from Zosette and the Groove, with "One Detroit"'s own Zosette Guir, and Patio Heroes.

The concert is at North Rosedale Park Community House, doors open at 6:00.

Also Friday, October 25th, the Vitamin String Quartet is breaking out their classical twist on contemporary music by playing the songs of Taylor Swift, "Bridgerton", and more at The Strand Theater in Pontiac.

And October 25th, 26th, and 27th, the University of Detroit Mercy is presenting the play, "Witch", at the Marlene Boll Theater.

October 26th and 27th, the Cranbrook Institute of Science is celebrating the holiday with Halloween science, where there will be plenty of decorations, accompanied by exhibits focused on kid friendly, spooky activities, like a wicked weather program, a pumpkin launch, and more.

If you're into the scores of scary movies, look no further than "Candlelight Halloween: Best Horror Movie Soundtracks" at Detroit's Masonic Temple on October 30th, where the Kalkaska String Quartet will play songs straight from terrifying cinema.

And "A Masquerade Evening: An Opera Soiree with the Detroit Opera Resident Artists" at The War Memorial is October 30th.

Get ready to be mesmerized with masquerade-themed music, and an array of food prepared by The War Memorial's executive chef, costumes are encouraged.

(bright upbeat music) - [Will] That'll do it for this week's "One Detroit", thanks for watching.

Head to the "One Detroit" website for all the stories we're working on, follow us on social media, and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Narrator 2] Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator 3] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundation's committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator 2] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) (bright music)