Bowers Harbor Inn

The Genevieve Stickney hanging legend is almost entirely fiction. Staff see an elegant Edwardian woman smiling in the Bowers Harbor mirrors.

Almost everything the Bowers Harbor Inn legend claims about Genevieve Stickney turns out to be wrong. Her name wasn't Genevieve. It was Jennie. She didn't hang herself in an elevator shaft. She died in March 1947 of heart disease, diabetes, and likely dementia, in the couple's winter suite in Grand Rapids, not at the inn. Her husband Charles, confined to a wheelchair, kept using the Bowers Harbor house for another two years until he died at Munson Hospital in August 1949.

The popular story, the one on ghost tours and cable specials, claims Charles left Jennie a pittance in his will and split his fortune with a younger nurse. Jennie, humiliated, hanged herself in the elevator shaft, which is why the ghost appears in mirrors and why the elevator "still" runs by itself. None of that happened. Jennie survived Charles by nothing, because she died first. The elevator was installed because Charles needed it, not as some strange monument.

And yet.

Jolly Pumpkin and Mission Table, the two restaurants that now share the old Stickney summer home on Old Mission Peninsula, have enough first-hand accounts from staff that dismissing the haunting entirely feels stubborn. The woman they see is older, dressed in late Victorian or Edwardian style, and appears most often in three places: the dining rooms after closing, the ladies' restroom mirror, and on the staircase.

Servers describe her as elegant. Calm. Not obviously distressed in the way a vengeful ghost in the legend ought to be. One waitress, washing her hands in the downstairs ladies' room, has said she looked up at the mirror and saw a woman standing behind her who wasn't there when she turned around. The woman was smiling.

The smile is the wrinkle that breaks the legend. A ghost produced by the story everyone tells should be bitter, should be raging, should be the wronged wife in the elevator. The ghost people actually see is composed. Nostalgic, maybe. Like she's checking on a house she loved.

The house was built in the 1880s as a summer home for Chicago lumberman J.W. Stickney, Charles's uncle. Charles and Jennie bought it in 1909 and summered there for decades. The grounds roll down to West Grand Traverse Bay. It was, by every account, the happiest place in their lives. If anyone were going to linger in it, Jennie is the obvious candidate.

So the inn's ghost is real in the way most inn ghosts are real, which is to say there are accounts, and the accounts line up across years and employees. The elaborate hanging-in-the-elevator legend is separate. The legend is a story invented to explain a feeling. Jennie, or whatever the feeling attaches to, was already there.

Bowers Harbor Inn is a fun case study in how legends eat their subjects. The real Jennie Stickney is less dramatic than the version on the ghost tour. She's also more believable, and probably closer to whatever the staff actually sees in the upstairs mirrors.