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CHAPTER 7

Main Street Antiques

HOLLY

IT WAS A SHORT WALK from the Battle Alley Arcade down to the Main Street Antiques Shop, a store that has been a mainstay of downtown Holly for many years. It’s also one of the oldest buildings in Holly’s historic district. In 2008, Lynn and Mark Hay purchased the business, and they happily agreed to talk to me about their shop and its resident ghosts.

The two-story, red-brick shop is home to 40 antiques dealers selling a wild variety of heirlooms, antiques, artifacts, and collectables, including some rather unusual merchandise. The first thing my husband spotted when we walked in the door was a vampire slaying kit. The kit, which Lynn speculates originated somewhere in Europe, contained rosaries, holy water, wooden stakes, a mallet, and even a revolver loaded with actual silver bullets. Leave it to my husband to find the strangest thing in the shop!

Lynn told me sometimes she feels like her shop is “a magnet for the unusual.” In addition to the vampire slaying kit, she has had numerous Native American items and even real shrunken heads come into her store over the years. Looking around the store, it wasn’t hard to find a few curiosities tucked in amongst the teacups, antique buttons, and costume jewelry. It was no wonder that prop masters from six movie production teams have visited Lynn and Mark’s shop to find just that “perfect piece” to complete a movie set.

The only things Lynn told me she would not allow in her shop were Ouija boards and tarot cards. She explained that she believed in the paranormal and that there were both good and bad spirits out there, but that certain items just naturally attract energy she didn’t want around her. I had heard before how dangerous Ouija boards were because they somehow attracted malicious spirits. I had a friend many years ago who was absolutely petrified of “witch boards,” as they are sometimes called.

Other people, of course, dismiss the boards as nothing more than hoaxes or parlor games. As for tarot cards, Lynn couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read with used tarot cards, anyway. “You never know the kind of person who owned them before you,” she said.

After we chatted for a few minutes, Lynn invited my husband and me to follow her up to the second floor, where we could find a quieter place to talk. She led the way up the narrow wooden staircase, at the top of which sits a portrait of a little girl.

“A lot of people say they see a little girl running around up here,” Lynn told me. “And we all hear footsteps coming from up here, like someone’s walking around, even though there isn’t anyone up here.” She directed us to a corner by the windows overlooking Main Street, where she cleared the place settings off a seventies-era wooden dinette table so we could sit and talk more comfortably.

I asked her a little bit about the shop.

“Mark has been in the antique business for a long time,” said Lynn. “So when we found out that this place was for rent and that the owners wanted it to remain an antiques shop, it just seemed like the right move to make.

“Antiques attract spirits; they get attached to them,” she went on, echoing what Pat Kenny from the Battle Alley Arcade had told me already. “Whenever something from a new dealer comes in, we notice a lot more activity. It’s like the ghosts who have been here awhile feel like they need to ‘check out’ the new guys.” Lynn has also noticed that spirits seem attracted to dolls and mirrors.

Another reason the shop might be so haunted, she speculated, is that the downstairs was “where they used to wash down the hearses” in the late 1800s when the building was owned by a wagon company.

“When did you first start to notice things that made you think the store might be haunted?” I asked.

“As soon as we moved in,” she said. She explained that shortly after they set up shop, she and her husband would notice that things seemed to have been moved around overnight. They were both certain they had locked up the night before, and no one else should have had keys. Nothing was stolen; things just weren’t where they remembered them being the night before—nothing huge, just small objects. “It looked almost like someone was cleaning up,” she said. Neither Lynn nor Mark could imagine anyone breaking in to clean, but they went ahead and changed the locks anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Small objects continued to get moved overnight. Then, one winter morning, Lynn discovered something far more bewildering than just a few items moved around. “The city puts salt out on the sidewalks during the winter months,” she explained. “It gets on peoples’ shoes and they track it in, where it gets all over the hardwood floors. Usually we clean it up at night before we go home, but that particular evening we were just too tired to sweep up. Mark and I decided to come in a little early the next morning and clean it then. Only when we came in the next day, we found fresh footprints all through the white salty residue. They hadn’t been there the night before, and I know I locked the door when we left that night,” she concluded emphatically.

Haunted “white room” at Main Street Antiques.

Lynn said she thinks the spirit may be the ghost of someone who used to work in the store; the building has been an antiques shop for many years, long before she and Mark bought the place. “She—or maybe he—is just cleaning up the way they did when they were alive and worked here.” We should all have ghosts who are so helpful!

But not all the spirits who seem to haunt Main Street Antiques are as benevolent as their ghostly shop assistant. When I asked Lynn what her favorite ghost story was, she had to stop and think a minute because she had seen and heard so many things in the four years she and her husband have owned her shop. “I don’t know if it’s my favorite story,” she began thoughtfully, “but one of the freakiest things I ever saw happened downstairs on that yellow ramp, right after we moved in.” The first floor of the shop isn’t just one big room—although the main room is impressively large. However, in addition, there are a number of smaller, adjacent rooms, and one of them has a bright yellow ramp leading up to it (thus making it wheelchair accessible).

What Lynn told me she’d seen there would have been enough to make me turn around and run out the door.

“I walked in and I saw this headless guy, flailing around, right on the ramp. It was like something you’d see in a movie or something. His movements were real fast and jerky, and he looked like maybe he’d been burned.”

“What did you do?”

“I just took a deep breath and waited for him to go away.” Lynn told me she’s found that if she doesn’t pay too much attention to them, the ghosts don’t usually stick around for long. I don’t think I could have been so calm.

“There was a fire here,” she went on to explain. “They think it was arson and that the arsonist died in the blaze. The ghost I saw was probably him.” She hasn’t seen him since. Many people believe that when a person dies violently, their spirit somehow gets tied to the place where they died.

Besides the headless arsonist, Lynn told me about some of the apparitions that numerous people have seen. “There’s a woman that people have seen walking through a closed door downstairs,” Lynn told me—and later she pointed out the door. Other customers have reported seeing a man in a top hat, dressed as if he’s going out for a night on the town. Lynn told me to make sure that I checked out the “white room” when I went back downstairs, as it is also one of the more reputedly haunted areas of the shop.

One night, Lynn decided to conduct her own investigation of the shop, with the help of some friends. “We kept hearing a little girl’s voice over the walkie-talkies. It definitely wasn’t one of us, so at first we thought we might be picking up something from outside.” Walkie-talkies can pick up radio signals pretty easily. “But then the voice started saying our names. It was pretty freaky and it convinced us that whatever we have here, it’s real.” Not that Lynn needed much convincing; she told me she had always believed in the paranormal.

Like many of the residents of Holly, Lynn believes that the whole village is haunted. “It’s such an old town, and so many people have lived and died here,” she said. She told me that she and her family had experienced a number of unusual things in their home as well, and that later, when she started looking into the history of the shop, she discovered a connection between the house they’re renting and the store. Apparently, many years ago, long before the previous owners purchased either building, both the antiques store and her home were owned by the same family.

“Is there a place in the shop that seems the most haunted?” I asked.

“Definitely up here. When customers tell me they feel like they’re being watched upstairs, I usually tell them it’s just the security cameras—but not all of them believe me. Some people are just more sensitive to spirits than others. We have some customers that won’t even come up here anymore.”

It’s not just customers. Lynn told me how one of the antiques dealers who used to have a spot in the corner came to her one day and asked if she could bring a radio in. She told Lynn that she kept hearing scratching along the floorboards and it was really unnerving. If she had music, she wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore.

Lynn had no objection to the radio. When she checked the floorboards later, she couldn’t find scratch marks; there wasn’t any evidence of vermin, mice, or rats that might have been responsible for the scratching either.

There’s another part of the upstairs that is blocked off to customers; I had thought it was just an old storage area, but Lynn told me that the ghost she saw in there unsettled her so badly that she decided to close off the room. She said he smelled strongly of tar and was wearing soiled clothing. He didn’t do anything, but Lynn said she felt his presence was “disturbing.” Considering the things she took in stride, I was just as glad that area of her shop was blocked off.