In Brief
The Peck Block in Grand Rapids, Michigan is named for a family murdered in New York. John and Hannah Peck were poisoned by their own son-in-law for the fortune they built here, and the ghost tours say both came back to the building that still carries their name.
The Full Story
The Peck Block stands at 34-50 Monroe Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a three-story brick Italianate building put up in 1875. The Grand Rapids ghost tours say it is haunted by two people who never died here. John Peck's apparition is seen standing quietly near the room where his old office used to be, and upstairs, residents are said to hear his wife Hannah's voice come through as a whisper.
The strange part is where the Pecks actually died. Not in this building. Not even in Michigan.
The corner of the block once held the Peck Brothers drugstore, which made the family their fortune and kept the space until 1968. The building wasn't even called the Peck Block at first; it went up as the Rathbone Block and took the Peck name later, after the drugstore became its most prominent tenant. John Peck served as a bank director on the side. His daughter Clara married a Grand Rapids man who called himself "Dr." Arthur Warren Waite, though he was neither a registered physician nor a dentist. Waite wanted the Peck money, and in 1916 he set out to get it.
He started with disease. He obtained bacterial cultures from the Rockefeller Institute and Cornell Medical Center and dosed Hannah with them; detectives later found test tubes in his apartment labeled typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, tetanus, and asiatic cholera. When the germs didn't kill her fast enough, he ground glass into her Dundee marmalade. Then arsenic. Hannah died on January 30, 1916, and Waite, acting as her attending physician, had her cremated, which destroyed the evidence.
John came next. Waite poisoned his food during a dental exam, then added arsenic to his meals, and when death came too slowly, he used ether and a pillow to finish it. John Peck died March 21, 1916, at an apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
Waite confessed. "I wanted them to die," he said. "I wanted their money." It became one of the most heavily covered murder trials of the decade, and New York electrocuted him at Sing Sing on May 24, 1917.
The drugstore outlasted the whole family by half a century, and the building still carries the Peck name on the National Register today. The two people who were poisoned in New York, for the fortune their family made here, are said to have come back to the one place that was theirs.
