There will be no shortage of ghosts and goblins roaming the neighborhoods of Traverse City this weekend. But what about the ghosts that don’t just come out at Halloween? From lighthouses to cemeteries to the infamous ghost at Bowers Harbor Inn, northern Michigan isn’t lacking in ghost stories or unexplained paranormal activity. The question is: Do you want to believe? To celebrate Halloween weekend, The Ticker caught up with two locals who absolutely do believe.

First, meet Karl Bielman, co-owner of Nawbin Beads & Curiosities and founder of the Cherryland Ghostbusters. While Bielman is quick to note that his Ghostbusters are a cosplaying movie fan group and not “spectral investigators,” that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his own fair share of experiences with spooky phenomena.

“My grandma used to talk about folklore of Ireland and stuff, so my dad grew up very open to the ideas of [supernatural] things,” Bielman explains.

That openness was passed down, which helps explain why Bielman’s childhood stomping grounds were disproportionately made up of supposedly haunted Michigan landmarks. One was Big Bay Point Lighthouse in the Upper Peninsula, near where Bielman grew up. Legend has it that Big Bay Point is haunted by the ghost of its first lighthouse keeper, with visitors reporting sightings of a ghostly man roaming the grounds, among other strange occurrences.

Bielman’s liking for spooky playgrounds stayed with him when his family relocated to Traverse City

“When we moved here, my dad worked for the county,” Bielman explains. “It was his job to go board up the State Hospital when it was abandoned. So I got to go over there a lot.”

For a time, the only ghost haunting the State Hospital might have been Bielman himself. Back in those days, it wasn’t uncommon for local teenagers to seek out thrills by breaking into the abandoned buildings at night. Bielman took it upon himself to make those adventures unforgettable.

“When someone would break in, the next day, my dad would have to go board up the State Hospital again,” he says. “I’d tag along in daylight, so then I knew where all the blind corners and dead-ends were, where I could jump out and scare the crap out of other people when my friends and I were in there at nighttime.”

These days, Bielman is a go-to resource for locals who are seeking assistance with paranormal happenings. He says Nawbin frequently sees customers hunting for “good luck totems and talismans” that might help them “clear the energies up around their places of business or their new houses.” As for the Cherryland Ghostbusters, that group is more likely to make appearances at comic cons or nonprofit fundraisers than at sites of true spectral hauntings, but still gets frequent calls when people think there might be “something strange in the neighborhood.”

If Bielman is the person locals call when they want to rid themselves of ghosts, then Desirae Dine is the contact for folks looking to get a bit closer to the region’s spirits. In 2010, Dine founded Haunted Traverse, the business behind both the Ghost Farm of Kingsley and a popular series of haunted walking tours in downtown Traverse City.

The way Dine tells the story, Haunted Traverse was her destiny. Her family lineage, she says, includes a great-great-grandmother who was a known Kentucky witch – the type who could reportedly levitate tables and see premonitions of the future. Dine didn’t inherit those powers, but from a young age, she’s had what you might call a sixth sense: an ability to see, hear, and detect the paranormal. “I realized that I got to have this wonderful benefit of being able to peek behind some sort of curtain that most people don't get the chance to,” she says.

Dine parlayed that sense for the supernatural into a business opportunity. Lucky for her, Traverse City had no shortage of ghost stories to explore.

One of those stories surrounds the Chase Bank building at the corner of Front and Park, formerly the site of the Front Street House Hotel. The hotel burned to the ground in the late 1800s, and while almost everyone made it out alive, the flames did claim the lives of the hotel’s porter and his puppy.

“When the Chase Bank started to be constructed there, and the National Cherry Festival and a lot of other office workers were moving in, that's when people started to experience things,” Dine tells The Ticker. “They started to smell smoke in the middle of the night. When they would try to find the source, they would come up empty handed. But they would always experience something else that accompanied the smell of the smoke, and that would be the panicked sound of a dog barking.”

As for Dine’s favorite northern Michigan ghost story? That might be the “White Lady” that haunts a roadside out near Kingsley. Years ago, her brother, Don, was driving a Kingsley road in the middle of the night when a woman dressed in white wandered out of a cornfield and into the road.

“He slammed on his brakes, trying not to hit her, but he realized that he had,” Dine says. “He got out of his car, and was frantically looking for her everywhere, but he couldn’t find her.”

Dine’s father ended up coming to help Don look for the woman – a search that led to a nearby house, where the two knocked on the door and asked the homeowner to call the police.

“And the neighbor said, ‘Yeah, I'm not calling 911; I get this all the time. People are always frantically knocking on my door, saying they've hit a woman here. And we never find the woman.’”

While Dine says it’s become family tradition to tell this and other ghost stories around the campfire, she also sees ghost stories as more than just a way to set a mood or inspire a few jump scares.

“There are a lot of wonderful great ghost stories here in the Traverse City area and, and ghost stories are a wonderful way to reflect the history of a location, or to help people respect those who have passed before us, she says. “And Halloween is a wonderful time of year to share a good ghost story.”