Sweet Dreams Inn

William Wallace built this 1890 mansion, died in 1933, and whispers "get out" into unwanted guests' ears on the staircase.

If William Wallace doesn't like you, he'll whisper "get out" directly into your ear at the Sweet Dreams Inn. Staff and overnight guests have heard it in the hallways and the bedrooms. His footsteps come first. Heavy, slow, unmistakable. Then the whisper, close enough that people turn around expecting someone behind them.

Wallace built this house in 1890 as his family mansion. He owned the Wallace Stone Quarry, most of Bay Port, the local bank, and a chunk of Michigan Sugar Company, and he spent three election cycles as a Republican National Convention delegate, in 1908, 1916, and 1924. He was, by every local measure, the most important man in Huron County's Thumb for forty years. He died in a car accident in 1933, was buried up in Bad Axe rather than in Bay Port, and his tenants and customers started saying almost immediately that he hadn't really gone.

One correction: this building was never a funeral home. The mixup shows up constantly on paranormal sites, and it isn't accurate. It was the Wallace family residence, then a private home, then a B&B called the Sweet Dreams Inn that operated from about 2001 until it closed. The confusion probably comes from the number of deaths associated with the house itself.

Wallace's first wife Elizabeth died in the home in 1893. His second wife Margaret died in 1935. Guests report Margaret on the second floor, rattling bedroom doorknobs like she's checking in on sleeping children. Downstairs and in the stairwells, it's William's footsteps. On the third floor, it's Ora, Wallace's young daughter, who's been spotted looking out a third-floor window. Ora likes attention. She touches guests, moves small items, and according to the B&B's old owners, sets up what they described as tea parties when nobody's watching.

The family used the first two floors as living space and the third floor as a ballroom, where the Wallaces hosted Saturday-night parties that ran until morning. A lot of the reported activity sits in that third-floor space: music, voices, objects moving, the sense of a room still full of people.

Michigan Haunted Houses and the Thumbwind paranormal guides have both called Sweet Dreams one of the most active homes in the state. The old operators used to say openly that many overnight guests didn't make it through the night. Doors open on their own. Lights flip. Furniture shifts. Guests have picked up orbs on cell-phone cameras in the second-floor bedrooms. None of it is violent. Wallace's "get out" is about as aggressive as the house gets, and even that only happens if he decides he doesn't like you.

As of this writing the Sweet Dreams Inn is closed as a B&B. The phone number 586-863-2920 still circulates online for private tours and paranormal-investigation bookings, though anyone wanting to stay the night will have to check current availability before making plans. The ghosts, as far as anyone in Bay Port can tell, don't care whether the inn is open.