Ada Cemetery (Ada Witch Legend Area)

Local tradition holds that the Ada Witch walks the rural cemeteries and fields northeast of Grand Rapids on full-moon nights, dressed in a long pale gown consistent with late-nineteenth-century mourning clothing. The story published by Gary Eberle in 1982 describes a woman killed by her husband in a field after he followed her to a meeting with another man; the husband and the other man are said to have died in the struggle. Witnesses report a bluish mist or a woman walking through the fields between Findlay Cemetery, Seidman Park, and the small woodlot along Honey Creek Avenue.

Reported phenomena collected across decades of local retelling include a soft greenish-blue mist and orbs, footsteps in dry leaves where no one is walking, the sound of a woman weeping, the sound of two men arguing and a brief crying out, and reports of being touched on the shoulder or the arm with no one present. Visitors most often report these phenomena at Findlay Cemetery on 2 Mile Road, but accounts also surface at the Ada Cemetery proper and in the woods of Seidman Park, two miles south.

The story gained a second life during the late-1990s ghost-tourism revival that followed the release of The Blair Witch Project. Local journalists and a generation of teenagers turned the cemetery into a regular legend-tripping destination, to the point that the headstone associated with the legend has been repeatedly damaged. In 2013, Nicole Bray identified that headstone as belonging to Sarah McMillan, who died of typhoid fever in 1870, not of foul play. Bray's reporting has not displaced the legend among local visitors, but it has clarified the documentary record.