Abandoned Grandmothers House Sits Majestically in the Brush
WARNING: Under no circumstances should you enter this property. By doing so you risk bodily harm and/or prosecution for trespassing on private property.
Not sure where this old 'grandmothers' house is located…but I am assuming it is somewhere near a body of water. Why? Because of the Widows’ Peak cupola/tower. Usually a “widows peak” refers to a V-shaped point in the hairline of a forehead (think vampire hair), and the term is not used much for this type of structure. It’s also known as a “Widows Watch” where lonely wives would climb the narrow staircase into the tower, sit, and wait for their sailor husbands or boyfriends to come home. Sometimes they never returned, having been lost in a shipwreck – some ladies waited for years to no avail…many Michigan ghost stories are about these ladies who died in the tower – but still wait. So it was intended to be a lookout room, even if it turns out NOT to be near water. It’s a very cool little area that you will see depicted in the gallery below.
There is a small cement staircase out in the yard, near a cliff that looks down on a road (looks very easy to fall off).
Inside is typical of an abandoned house – stuff all over the place and holes. I don’t recall seeing any graffiti, which is a refreshing change. Many of the appliances look like they’re from the 1970s…the kitchen looks full of stuff, even a walled spice rack is still packed with various spices. There’s an old typewriter (explain to your kids what those were), a boxy TV, plenty of toys, and clothes still hanging in closets.
There are three stairwells here, each one gets narrower than the previous one. At the top of the first flight of carpeted stairs, someone placed a mattress in an attempt to keep people out of the second floor. Was this put there by a squatter? Hard to tell – but some of the beds look as if they’ve been slept in. By the time you reach the super-skinny stairs to the lookout, you better not be too overweight, or you’d never make it to the top.
The second stairway is uncarpeted; on this floor are rooms with tall thin windows, an old cheap record player, and a mummified animal. What is it? Could be a big rat, raccoon, squirrel, or cat. It’s curled up on a chair as if it crawled up there to spend its last moments.
Finally, the third set of steps goes up to the Widows Peak…these stairs are not only very narrow, but very steep. Once inside, you’ll see the sharpness of the house gables and green all around you from outside. Aside from being a place where ladies watched for their husbands, it’s believed these lookouts were also used during the Underground Railroad, where a tower watcher would wait for a signal that someone was on the way who needed a safe place to hide.
Again, I’m not sure just where this place is, and the videographer isn’t saying, which is very wise. So just enjoy the photos in the gallery below and imagine what it must have been like when someone was actually living here…
Abandoned Grandmother's House
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