Ladies Literary Club

An apparition of Mary Ann Starkweather in the upstairs hall, footsteps overhead, and a janitor who left the basement with invisible hands on him.

A janitor working alone in the basement of the Ladies Literary Club House in Ypsilanti once reported invisible hands beginning to touch him. He left the basement. The story is thin on detail (no name, no date, no follow-up incident) but it's one of the three things every account of this building comes back to. Footsteps overhead. An apparition in the upstairs hall. And a janitor who didn't want to finish his shift.

The Ladies Literary Club of Ypsilanti is one of the oldest continuously operating women's clubs in Michigan, founded in 1878 by Sarah Smith Putnam with 17 original members. The building at 218 North Washington Street isn't their original home; it's a brick Italianate that went up around 1843 for William M. Davis, likely designed by the firm of Norris, Cross, and Ballard. When the Davis House came up for sale in 1913, the Club bought it for $3,000. Their first meeting inside the new clubhouse was October 1914, and they've been there ever since.

In October 1965 the building was designated a registered Michigan Historic Site, the first in Ypsilanti to earn that status.

Local folklore names the ghost Mary Ann Starkweather.

Here's where local folklore starts to diverge from the documented history, and it's worth flagging. Some sources describe Starkweather as a former homeowner who donated the building to the Ladies Library Association in 1890, which possibly conflates this club with the Ladies' Library Association of Ypsilanti, a related but distinct organization that Starkweather did support, and whose building stood on what's now the Eastern Michigan University campus. The spirit stories and the building histories don't cleanly line up, which is an Ypsilanti-specific tangle that deserves more research before the page commits to one version.

What repeats across accounts is what she does, or what people say she does. Employees and club members have described her apparition walking the upstairs hall. People working late hear faint footsteps on the floor above them when they know the building is empty. In the basement, the story is physical contact: the janitor who was touched, guests who describe being brushed against or tapped on the shoulder. One persistent claim holds that the haunting started after the building was converted from library use to something else, as if whoever is in here objected to the change of purpose.

The Ladies Literary Club still meets in the building. Members still keep the space active with lectures, book groups, and the same kind of programming Sarah Putnam would recognize from 1878, and they're understandably protective of the clubhouse. This isn't a paranormal tourism site. You can't book a ghost hunt here. What you can do is read the club's history on their site, visit during their rare open-house events, and take the Ypsilanti haunted-walk tours that pass the building on the sidewalk.

A small thing to flag. The most credible paranormal claim here isn't the apparition. It's the janitor. Ghost-tour operators in Ypsilanti have been telling his story for long enough that the original source is lost, and nobody has picked it back up with a name or a year. If anyone is sitting on an account of a basement worker who left mid-shift in the 1960s or 1970s, the Ladies Literary Club page is where the story belongs.

In the meantime, the apparition in the upstairs hall keeps showing up, and whoever she is, she seems to be walking.