Scene from Pine Ridge Cemetery with monument to maiden, perhaps appropriate to the Carrie Fairweather ghost.

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Does Bay City Really Have Ghosts? Halloween Prowlers Read This and Find Out

October 16, 2011
By: Dave Rogers

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Readers are urged to keep open minds about these stories -- first in a series for your Halloween enjoyment. Although based on real people and events, some aspects of the stories may have taken on apocryphal aspects over the years and some names have been changed to protect the sensibilities of descendants.)

Perhaps a dozen ghostly stories have emerged from the mists of Bay City's historic past dating back a century and a half.

Such tales are to be expected in view of the city's thriving start in lumbering and as a multi-county hub of northeastern Michigan trade and transportation. Here are examples of several local ghost stories.

Our first ghost is a workman on the soaring City Hall, a Modern Romanesque structure that took taxpayers 20 years to decide on and contractors four years to build.

Robbie Waldo had a job working on the roof of the new City Hall. It was 1896. Bay City was booming. Visions of a new Chicago danced in the heads of city fathers.

Taxpayers fought for years about whether a new City Hall should even be built and over its size and style. This magnificent nine story high Michigan sandstone palace was erected over four turbulent years at a cost of $170,000.

Several workmen died working on the immense stone structure with its tower soaring 185 feet in the sky. According to eye witness reports, Robbie wailed as he fell from one of the gables of the roof, perhaps a height of 75 feet. If you had been on the job site that day you could have seen his hammer still grasped firmly in his hand as his body lay lifeless on the ground.

What soon became front page news was that Robbie was a child laborer. He was only 11 years old. Three weeks after his tragic death the City Council passed a law against child labor.

In the 115 years since City Hall was built, some passersby would claim they had heard a thump, a sickening sound like a body falling to the turf. Police said it was just the overactive imaginations of drinkers from local pubs who may have heard the tale of Robbie.

The building mirrors city halls built for Grand Rapids and Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate connection took on more realism when cannons from Fort Sumter, where the Civil War was started in an 1861 bombardment, were located on the front lawn. They remained as decorative history until melted down for bullets in World War II.

Carrie Fairweather, we'll call her, was a slim girl, not yet a teenager. It was the fateful year of 1879. She lived near Pine Ridge Cemetery, on 11th Street to be exact, with her father, mother and large family.

Carrie had one big problem: she was prone to sleepwalking. One dark, moonless summer night her folks, brothers and sisters discovered that Carrie was missing from her bed.

Grabbing torches the family rushed to the street to find her before any harm could befall her. Meanwhile, Carrie was sleepwalking several blocks away and wandered into Pine Ridge Cemetery.

She plodded unknowingly past the graves of hometown folks who had been buried in rows along lanes named Myrtle, Cedar and Sycamore. Folks like judges, ship captains, congressmen, lawyers, lumber barons, ministers and the like.

It was a place of restful repose, a city of the dead where Carrie walked, and walked, past Soldier's Rest where nearly 200 Civil War veterans lay in circular rows around a grand monument shaped like an obelisk.

As she trod her way the family, torches in hand, discovered her path and gave chase. Carrie, awakened by the commotion and not knowing who was chasing her with torches, must have been startled. It was a scene from a Frankenstein movie, a torch-carrying mob chasing the monster. Except in this case it was a young girl they were chasing.

Well, the family finally caught up with Carrie, but she was in such a state of shock and alarm that it was said it affected her nervous system and her health. She died a young woman, the family never knowing for sure whether the events of that fateful night had put Carrie on the path to her death.

Does Horace Warfield haunt Elm Lawn Cemetery? Neighbors on Green Avenue for years said he does. They claim a ghostly figure walks from a house to the cemetery gatehouse in the early morning fog and has been seen returning home at dusk.

Warfield, who had been a Captain in the Union Army in the Civil War, was the superintendent of Elm Lawn Cemetery in 1907. He was a happy man with a good job and a faithful wife, Olive. The couple lived in a white house across the street from the cemetery gatehouse.

It was a placid fall day, November 6, 1907. Warfield was planning on going hunting with his old friend from Civil War days, Ben Burbridge, that evening. He had never talked of suicide or of being depressed or unhappy for any reason.

He headed from his home to his office in the gatehouse. Soon, workmen said they heard a shot. It was 7:20 a.m. Rushing to the office, the workmen said they found Warfield slumped across the desk, a bullet hole in his head.

Police rushed him to Mercy Hospital where he died and pronounced the fatal wound self-inflicted. But there were ominous reports: Warfield had hired the two workmen to put an addition on his house. Perhaps the men were upset; maybe they weren't paid for their work.

This cemetery was for the elite, the wealthy of the town. Warfield had arranged that prominent people who wanted their relatives to be among the rich and famous to be dug up from their graves in other cemeteries and reburied here. The cemetery would even throw in a nice headstone to boot. Five members of one family were dug up in Pine Ridge Cemetery reburied in Elm Lawn one day in 1893.

Was fate working to punish the man who had accomplished that ghoulish task, Horace Warfield? Did the men who perhaps were dissatisfied with their pay murder him and report to police they had heard a shot and discovered the body?

What really happened that awful day in 1907 may never be known. What we do know is that Horace Warfield's name is on one of the gravestones in Elm Lawn Cemetery, prisoner for eternity in the midst of the burials over which he presided for many years.

(To be continued.) ###