{"id":222,"slug":"pere-cheney-cemetery-roscommon-michigan","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Pere Cheney is the town the plague emptied — the lumber village George Cheney's railroad grant made in 1874, fifteen hundred people at the peak, Crawford County's first seat, dead of diphtheria and cholera in the epidemics of 1893 and 1897. By 1901 there were twenty-five people; by 1917, eighteen; the land sold at auction and the buildings burned to stop the sickness or just to end it. The cemetery of ninety graves is all the town left.","The witch is the legend the emptiness made — the banished woman who cursed the village for the disease, or the unmarried mother they cast out, hanged from a cemetery tree and buried in an unmarked grave. The handprints on the cars and the children laughing and the lights in the ninety graves are Michigan's most famous ghost town keeping its dead; the town is gone and the cemetery is the town.","The file keeps Pere Cheney: the lumber village, the two epidemics, the auction of 1917, and the witch's curse on the graves that are all that's left.","Pere Cheney is the archive's Michigan file — the plague town and the witch the cemetery made."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Pere Cheney is the archive's Michigan file — the lumber town, the epidemics, and the witch legend.","A town that burned itself down keeps its graves — the file's suggestion being that Pere Cheney's hold is the erasure: the village that vanished so completely the cemetery is the only map, and the witch that folklore put in charge of the dying."]}],"name":"Pere Cheney Cemetery","aliases":[],"type":"CEMETERY","type_label":"Cemetery","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["cemeteries","hauntings"],"desc":"Cemetery associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"Pere Cheney Cemetery is a cemetery in Roscommon, Michigan. Cemetery associated with documented cultural history. The archive files it under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":null,"city":"Roscommon","county":null,"state":"Michigan","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":44.488292,"lon":-84.589938,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":"Tourism says cemetery access ends at sunset.","ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":170,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Local folklore associates a witch with the cemetery. The burial ground at Roscommon is exactly the setting the account needs — old graves, older grief, and a story that won't settle. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. Sources including 'Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan' keep the claim in circulation. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.7,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan","url":"https://www.michigan.org/article/spooky-places-visit-fall-michigan","publisher":"Pure Michigan","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Local folklore associates a witch with the cemetery. Pere Cheney Cemetery's dead are the site's permanent residents; the reports are how the living say they keep noticing. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. Sources including 'Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan' keep the claim in circulation. It's the version the place will be remembered by, whether or not it's the true one.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan","url":"https://www.michigan.org/article/spooky-places-visit-fall-michigan","publisher":"Pure Michigan","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan","url":"https://www.michigan.org/article/spooky-places-visit-fall-michigan","publisher":"Pure Michigan","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Pere Cheney, Michigan","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pere_Cheney%2C_Michigan","desc":"Ghost town and former village in Michigan, United States","extract":"Pere Cheney, also called Cheney and Center Plains, was a village located in Crawford County, Michigan in the late 19th century. It is located in Beaver Creek Township and was once a small lumbering town. Pere Cheney was the first community in Crawford County, Michigan and was established by lumberjacks who trailed the Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw Railroad north headed for Mackinaw City. Established in 1874 around the sawmill of George M. Cheney, it served as the temporary county seat when Crawford County was officially organized in 1879, though it soon lost this distinction to the more heavily populated town of Grayling. It had a station on the Michigan Central Railroad called the Cheney dep","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Pere_Cheney_Cemetery.jpg/330px-Pere_Cheney_Cemetery.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":68,"lat":44.5775,"lon":-84.63777778},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}