Peck Building

Arthur Waite poisoned John and Hannah Peck in 1916 to inherit this Grand Rapids mansion. Hannah whispers upstairs. John stands near his old office.

Arthur Warren Waite tried to kill his mother-in-law, Hannah Peck, by driving her through a Michigan rainstorm with the car windows down. When that didn't work, he put glass in her marmalade. Then he sprayed her throat with cultures of anthrax, diphtheria, and influenza he'd smuggled out of a research lab. She survived all of it. Arsenic finally killed Hannah Peck on January 30, 1916, at the age of 64.

The murders are the story you need to know to understand the ghosts in the Peck Building on South Division in Grand Rapids. The building itself is a 6,500-square-foot, ten-bedroom Queen Anne mansion with a brick drugstore built into the ground floor. John and Hannah Peck built it in 1887 with money from the pharmaceutical business they ran out of it, Peck's Drug Store. They raised their daughter Clara there. In 1915, Clara married a man calling himself "Dr." Arthur Warren Waite (he was neither a registered physician nor a dentist, a detail that came out later) and the newlyweds moved to Manhattan.

Waite wanted the Peck family money. That was the whole motive. He started working on Hannah first. After the arsenic finally succeeded, he invited John Peck down from Grand Rapids for a visit and poisoned him during a fake dental exam on March 21, 1916, then smothered him with a pillow when the arsenic worked too slowly. Waite confessed to both murders. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and electrocuted at Sing Sing on May 24, 1917. The case was one of the most-covered American murder trials of the 1910s. Grand Rapids still talks about it.

The haunting is split across the building the way the family was. John Peck's apparition stays near his former office on the ground floor, standing quietly, looking the way he did in life. Hannah is auditory. Her voice comes through as a whisper in the upstairs rooms, often mid-sentence, often unintelligible. Neither ghost interacts with the living much. They're the two people who were murdered for the building itself, and they've stayed in the parts of it that belonged to them.

The drugstore operated under the Peck family name until 1967, when it was sold to Revco. Revco ran it until 1988. After that, the building cycled through uses until its current configuration split it between retail on the lower floors and condos on the top. People who work in the ground-floor shops and people who live in the upper condos have both contributed to the ghost log. The shop staff describe footsteps in rooms above them at hours when no one is supposed to be walking around. The condo residents describe Hannah's whispers. The two sets of accounts don't overlap, and somehow that separation is what sells it.

Grand Rapids has its share of haunted locations. The Pantlind Hotel. The Old Judd Buhl Building. The Griffins Hockey House. But the Peck Building is the one that comes with a true-crime backstory most cities would spin into a podcast. A bigamist fake dentist poisoned a drugstore-owning couple on two continents to inherit a mansion. The mansion is now a condo building with a CBD shop on the ground floor. John and Hannah are still there.

US Ghost Adventures runs the Grand Rapids Ghost Tour that puts the Peck Building in its rotation, and it's the stop that reliably gets the most attention from the group. Waite's name still comes up on the sidewalk in front of the building, 108 years after he died. The ghosts who were his victims have outlasted him by a wide margin, which feels, if not like justice, at least like a reasonable consolation prize.