The Banshee of Michigan

Welcome to the Homespun Haints podcast, where we interview guests who have some of the scariest true ghost stories! In this interview, a camp counselor found herself face to face with something (perhaps a ghost, perhaps something worse) in the haunted woods surrounding the campsite. To this day, she doesn’t know quite what it was, other than it was horrifying.

Did you ever go to a sleepaway camp when you were a kid? Stay in a cabin or a tent in the woods, go horseback riding during the day, and tell spooky ghost stories around the campfire at night?

Did you ever wonder what your counselors did after you went to sleep? Because, you know that there were ghosts in those woods. And someone—like your brave camp counselor—had to keep those ghosts from bugging you while you slept.

Today, on Homespun Haints, we talk to Emily, who had to serve as a buffer between her little campers and some very sinister entities, deep in the Michigan woods.

Listen now:

Episode Summary: Emily’s Scariest True Ghost Stories

Emily Brown, like us, is a podcaster and someone who finds herself running into unexplainable things on a regular basis. When she was much younger, she worked at a sleepaway camp in a particularly haunted section of Michigan woods, not too far from Flint. Many stories of ghosts circulated about these woods, including the following.

• A lake that the camp had to make off-limits because of repeated sightings of a boy jumping into the lake and never re-emerging. Years before, a boy about the age of the one seen drowned in that very section of lake. His ghost still goes for a dip on a regular basis.
• A strange man dressed as an 19th century cowboy seen laying traps in the woods around the campsite.
• The hat man who would appear in the haunted slaughterhouse where many of the counselors stayed.
• A woman who was murdered in the woods in the ’90s whose soul still wanders, tormented, among the trees.

We won’t tell you which of these things Emily came face to face with; you’ll need to listen to the episode and then decide for yourself if it was a ghost.

About the Guest: Emily Brown

Emily, our guest this episode, is the host of the podcast Practical Chaos. You can check out the podcast’s site at practicalchaospodcast.com, and you can check out her Facebook page here.

What is a banshee?

Diana says that what Emily saw in those woods resembles a banshee. But what is a banshee? And what would it be doing in Michigan? And why was Emily the only one to see or hear her?

Irish folklore legend has it that only descendants from 5 Irish families possess the ability to hear the banshee’s wail. We didn’t quiz Emily on her ancestry. Besides, this Irish ghost’s wail is only audible if a family member is about to die. We didn’t quiz Emily on her premonitions of death.

The ghost in the haunted woods

Interestingly, though, Emily has a completely different theory for why the “banshee” appeared to her. She discusses Slender Man, the Creepypasta legend that comes into being just by pure will.

The strange thing Emily saw as a camp counselor isn’t the only thing she saw in those woods in haunted Michigan. As a young child, she saw something else as well. Like the banshee, that entity also started appearing after the stories started. Did this ghost—if that’s what it was—appear in those woods from the power of pure thought?

Could the Hat Man of Episode 9 be something made manifest through thoughts and fears alone? Would that explain why he appears all over the world, but to only certain people?

Much current thought suggests that it is possible to make dreams, nightmares, and fears, manifest merely by devoting the right amount of thought to them. In business buzz this is usually meant to be a good thing (not a method for conjuring demons from pure thought), though most of these methods do insist you work with positive thoughts.

Want to learn how to bring your dreams into existence through positive words and thoughts alone? Here’s a step-by-step guide for you. (Yes, please keep them positive—we don’t need any more Michigan banshees).

We want to bring you the scariest true ghost stories

Think your story is scary enough? Submit it here for a chance to be the next guest on Homespun Haints. Until then, have a spooky day!