In Brief
The Ladies' Literary Club at 218 N. Washington in Ypsilanti, Michigan is said to hold the restless ghost of Mary Ann Starkweather, who walks the upstairs hall and touches the janitor in the basement. Dig into the records and the ghost has the wrong address.
The Full Story
The Ladies' Literary Club at 218 North Washington Street in Ypsilanti, Michigan is a haunted house with a borrowed ghost. The story everyone tells is Mary Ann Starkweather's — her apparition pacing the upstairs hall, faint footsteps in empty rooms, a janitor working alone in the basement who felt unseen hands start to touch him. Staff and guests are said to have reported all of it for years.
The trouble is that none of it happened here.
The building itself is real and well documented. It's a one-and-a-half-story Greek Revival brick house from the early 1840s, fronted by four square Doric columns with heavy molded capitals, built for William Davis and likely designed by the architect Arden Ballard. It passed through a chain of owners across the 1800s, and once wore a cupola topped with a spire, long since removed. The women's study club that gives it its name was founded in 1878 by Sarah Smith Putnam, who had belonged to a reading group in Lansing and wanted one of her own. Members took up a different country each month to read about.
The club bought the Davis house in 1913 for $3,000 and meets there still, Wednesday afternoons, working through poets like Emily Dickinson. It is one of the longest-running women's groups in Michigan; it counted around 150 members at its peak in the early 1900s. In 1965 it became the first building in Ypsilanti the Michigan State Historical Commission designated, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Nowhere in its careful institutional history is there a ghost.
Mary Ann Starkweather belongs to a different Ypsilanti institution. She gave the city its Ladies' Library, on the condition her home be used for one, and the story goes that her spirit only grew restless after the place stopped being a library and was turned into offices. Two clubs, near-identical names, one shared word, and a haunting that drifted off the building it started in and onto the one with the similar sign out front.
Even the basement detail won't stay put. The same scene — a janitor alone, touched by unseen hands — is told word for word about Starkweather Hall on the Eastern Michigan campus, another building Mary Ann's money helped raise. The ghost moves between three addresses depending on who's telling it.
No death, no fire, no tragedy is recorded at 218 North Washington. The club kept the building. The ghost just kept the name.
