In Brief
Holmdene Mansion, a 22-room Tudor house on the Aquinas College campus in Grand Rapids, glows green in a third-floor window at night. The locksmith who runs the Halloween tours walked the floor to find the source, and found only the lit EXIT sign.
The Full Story
Holmdene Mansion, a 22-room Tudor house on the Aquinas College campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan, glows green in one third-floor window after dark. People have reported it for years. The strange part is who finally went up to check.
The campus locksmith, Ryan Wendt, saw the green light himself. So one night he walked the third floor, the offices and the hallway, looking for whatever was throwing it. He found nothing lit up there at all. The only light burning on the whole floor was the red EXIT sign at the end of the corridor. Whatever turns that window green from the outside doesn't appear to be inside the building.
That detail is what sets Holmdene apart. The people reporting it aren't paying ghost-tour guests. The house has been the college's administrative offices for roughly eighty years, so the witnesses are day-shift staff, named on the college's own website in a 2023 article. Housekeepers say they hear a small child say "hi" with no child in the room. Others report footsteps down the hallways, creaking floors, the elevator running on its own. A security officer reported a distinct puff of air blown into his face in the lobby one night, and afterward stopped working nights.
It's a grand house to be hearing children in. Edward Lowe, a lumber man, built it on a 69-acre dairy farm and moved his family in by 1908. Theodore Roosevelt slept in a second-floor guest room here in 1911. The formal garden out front was laid by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of the most sought-after garden designers in the country at the time. The Dominican Sisters bought the estate in 1945 and turned it into a college.
The legend behind the haunting is a drowned boy. The story goes that James Lowe, the youngest son of the family that built the place, drowned on the property, and that he's the one switching the lights back on after security locks up.
Except a book went looking for him. In *Ghosts of Grand Rapids*, Nicole Bray and Robert DuShane checked the record and found that none of the Lowe children died here. James Lowe, the boy at the center of every telling, lived to 65 and died in San Francisco.
Wendt still runs the Halloween "Haunted Holmdene" tours, ten dollars, half an hour. He's been clear about where he stands. "I personally have never seen any ghosts in Holmdene or on campus," he's said, "but I know many others have."
The boy in the story never drowned. The staff keep reporting the room anyway.
