Stuart Avenue Inn

A Victorian B&B in Kalamazoo's historic Stuart neighborhood. Lovely old bones and one of the city's most charming historic streets.

The Stuart Avenue Inn occupies the Bartlett-Upjohn House, a Queen Anne-style mansion built in 1886 by newspaper publisher Edgar Bartlett at 229 Stuart Avenue in Kalamazoo's Historic West End. The house was purchased in 1907 by Dr. James T. Upjohn, a Michigan state senator and one of the four brothers who founded the Upjohn Company, the pharmaceutical giant now part of Pfizer. The home has been the oldest continuously operating bed and breakfast in Kalamazoo since its conversion in 1983, and its 140-year history has given it the quiet, accumulated presence that old houses develop when they've sheltered generations of lives.

The Stuart Avenue Inn doesn't promote itself as a haunted destination. When asked directly whether the inn is haunted, the proprietors have responded with a characteristically understated reply: "No more so than any 136-year-old home." But that answer itself acknowledges something. A house of this age, built during a period of high infant mortality and long before modern medicine, has inevitably been the site of births, illnesses, and deaths that were simply part of domestic life in the nineteenth century.

Guests at the inn have reported the kinds of experiences that are difficult to classify but impossible to ignore: sounds in the hallways at night that can't be accounted for, the feeling of being watched in certain rooms, and pockets of icy air that appear and disappear without corresponding to drafts or the heating system. The six guest rooms, each with private baths and period furnishings, sit within walls that have absorbed nearly a century and a half of human habitation. The tree-lined street in the Historic West End, directly across from Kalamazoo College, adds to the atmospheric setting.

The Stuart Avenue Inn has been listed among Kalamazoo's potentially haunted locations, though it falls in the category of places where the evidence is more atmospheric than dramatic. There are no named ghosts, no documented tragedies, and no history of violent death associated with the property. What there is, according to guests who've stayed in the Bartlett-Upjohn House, is the unmistakable sense that the building remembers everyone who has lived within it, and that not all of them have entirely moved on. Whether that qualifies as a haunting is a question the inn leaves to its guests to decide.