The Story Behind the Story of Ghostly Tales

Every once in awhile, I'll get books in the mail at work. They usually come from publishers hoping I'll writing something on their book. A lot of the books I just file away because I don't have the time to write anything. But occasionally I, or someone else, will have some time. For this weekend's paper, I talked to author Diane Telgen about her book "The Ghostly Tales of Michigan's West Coast" (read the story here).

I received the book a couple of months ago, but I wasn't planning to write anything on it either. However, when the photographer told me he was going to be on vacation last week, it opened up a spot on the Focus page (I was going to run his bi-monthly photo page this weekend). It seemed like a good fit for Halloween weekend, so I dialed up Diane on the Zoom machine.

We talked about the book and her career for about half an hour, and then I got lost down the rabbit hole. One of the tales in the book is the SS Chicora, a steamer that went down during a storm in 1895 on its way back to St. Joseph from Milwaukee. Because all our microfilm was digitized by newspapers.com, it was easy to look up how the papers of the day covered the accident. It was a little humorous how one of the papers basically called out the other papers, saying the Chicora was probably fine. More than 125 years later, the ship still hasn't been found (probably ... there's a guy working on it). I touched on the other ghostly tales, too.

In other business: this weekend's column was about Halloween, the start of the holiday season. Last weekend's column was about all that election mail I've been getting. And my column two weekends ago was about the tale of my new camera. I'm up to a column every weekend now since no one has told me to stop writing them yet. So be sure to grab a weekend edition of The HP every weekend.