Dixboro General Store

In the fall of 1845, Isaac Van Woert, a tenant described in period accounts as a member of the Dixboro Methodist Church, swore before William Perry, Esq., in Ann Arbor on December 8, 1845, that he had repeatedly seen the apparition of Martha Mulholland, a widow who had recently died in the house he now occupied near the Main and Mill Streets crossroads in Dixboro. Van Woert's statement described a woman carrying a candle, her head bound in a white cloth, who told him she had been robbed and killed and named her brother-in-law, James Mulholland, then pointed him toward a well at Main and Mill Streets and toward Frain's Lake. Van Woert also reported a drawer opening and closing on its own, with nothing found inside. Searches of the well and the lake turned up nothing.

When Van Woert's statement became public, Dixboro residents petitioned to have Martha's body exhumed. A coroner's inquest in January 1846 found that she had died of poisoning "administered by some person unknown," according to the Dixboro General Store's own account. No evidence ever proved James Mulholland guilty, but he left the area and was not seen again, according to the store's account, and his property was sold at a sheriff's sale in 1852. A 1972 Ann Arbor News retelling gives a different version of the ghost's accusation, blaming a doctor aided by some of her relatives. The Ypsilanti Sentinel and the Ann Arbor True Democrat covered the case in 1846, and the Ann Arbor News revisited it in a 1972 feature by William B. Treml. Sources place the house where Martha died across the street from the general store, at the southwest corner of Plymouth and Cherry Hill roads, not on the store's own site.