Have You Heard of Pere Cheney? – An Abandoned Michigan Village
Somewhere just above the knuckle of your middle finger, lies the abandoned town of Pere Cheney. Once home to about 1,500 residents in the height of the city's history in the 1870s, Pere Cheney was a promising lumber town that attracted many settlers looking for work. So what happened? Why did this once thriving village turn into a ghost town? Is the town cursed?
You see, in 1893, a bad case of diphtheria spread through the town. Without time to recover from those losses, a second wave of the disease hit Pere Cheney two years later, wiping out most of the already decimated town. Superstition based gossip started to spread about a curse on Pere Cheney. Rumors of the town having been built on an ancient Indian burial ground surfaced, with villagers reporting seeing specters and orbs. Another urban legend surrounding the curse on Pere Cheney is a curse put on the town by an unwed mother who was banished from the town. In some accounts of her story, she was hunted down and hanged for practicing witchcraft and buried under a big tree in the Pere Cheney Cemetery.
Perhaps seeing so many friends and neighbors die of disease forced the remaining Pere Cheney residents to move on. Maybe seeing the lengths they would go to to find reason for the disease was something that others wanted to turn their backs on. Whatever the case may be, Pere Cheney remains a destination for the curious, and the courageous.
Bonus Video: THE CURSED TOWN | Pere Cheney Ghost Town - CHILDREN CAUGHT ON EVP?