Looking for ghosts in odd places is one of my favorite pass times. This is even more fun when I am traveling. Before I go anyplace, I do a quick internet search to see what places in the area I am going are haunted. Then I do more research to try to confirm that they are haunted. While travelling to Michigan and Ohio, I noted that according to several internet sites The Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky, Michigan is haunted. This was curious to me. This is what Shadowlands Haunted Places says:
"At night if you are not in your room at midnight someone comes on the loudspeaker and says LOCKDOWN and the doors and the lights turn off and the TVs shutoff and then the elevators come and monastery figures come out and spikes come out of the wall and ceiling and the ceiling caves in and then its all gone in the morning."
I found a carbon copy of this statement about Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky, Michigan on several other paranormal sites, but I didn’t find any real information. Several things bothered me about this story. First the story itself seems more than a little unbelievable to me. Surely if someplace this haunted existed, it would be featured on every paranormal television show in existence. Secondly, after I explored the small town of Sandusky, Michigan I found there was nothing resembling a Great Wolf Lodge there. There is a Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky, Ohio. It was once Bear Lodge before it was bought out by the Great Wolf Lodge chain of resorts. I decided to focus my study on the Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky, Ohio.
I travelled to the Great Wolf Lodge in Cincinnati, Ohio as Sandusky was too far out for me to visit. I asked staff about the haunting in Sandusky. They laughed or gave me that I’m too polite to laugh blank stare that you get when you ask a ridiculous question. I also phoned Sandusky and no one there acknowledged any kind of haunting. After exploring a couple of the resorts in the Great Wolf Lodge chain, I have to say that this is a least likely place to be haunting. They all look pretty much the same so the photos I took in Cincinnati might as well be Sandusky or the resort I visited in Charlotte or Traverse City. They are packed with screaming children until 11pm when the magi quest and arcade close down. After this, the grownups sneak out quietly looking for the bar. I got a mudslide. If anything like described above ever happened at a Great Wolf Lodge, the reports would be everywhere. All this to say, I think that the story above is a bunch of crap. This isn’t the first load of crap internet ghost story I’ve found, but it is the most silly. What is the moral of this story? Just because someone has posted a ghost story on the internet doesn’t make it true. Although I love a good ghost story, some ghost stories are utter nonsense.
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I noticed on two occasions, that bags (backpacks) which were leaned against the wall, fell over while I was looking in their direction. At first, I didn't think anything of it. But this morning, one of the little table advertisements (plastic stand-up thing....like you see a beer menu at a restaurant) started rocking back and forth right in front of me ....the first movement that it made actually "unstuck" it from the table. (Guess it hadn't been moved in a while)
About 30 seconds later, I got the idea to hit my "ClearRecord" app on my iPhone. A few seconds into the recording you can hear a "sigh" that wasn't audible at the time. Later, I let my wife hear it - it wasn't something hard to hear. It was clear as a bell.
I never felt any uneasiness in this room. Very pleasant stay, even with kids running up and down the hallways.
Room 373 - Family Room/Fireplace/Balcony.
We"re leaving in about an hour- I'll take a few pics after we get our stuff out.
Chris- Southport NC
We stayed two nights in the family suite with two beds and a balcony. My husband slept in one bed and I slept with our 5 year old daughter who refused to sleep by herself in an unfamiliar location. The first night I was continuously awoken by something in the room, yet when I would look around I did not see anything out of sorts (though it was pretty dark in the room). It was around 2 am when I was first awakened, and like clockwork on the hour, every hour, until about 5 am something would startle me awake and I would feel a spooky presence.
By 7 am when our daughter was ready to eat and swim I was exhausted! I told my husband (out of earshot of our daughter) about my unsettling night, knowing full and well his skepticism would cause him to laugh at me like I was a loon. Only my husband (looking as tired as I did) proceeded to tell me how he felt someone sit down next to him on the bed during the night and stroke his leg! We still had one more night at the resort left and we didn't want to break my daughters heart by leaving. We discussed asking the lobby for a different room, but we knew we would sound like lunatics for wanting to switch rooms because we feared ours was haunted. So we decided the spirit? was a good one and one more night with it would be fine. We were having a blast at the lodge and agreed if we didn't think about it, it would leave us alone.
It was late when we made it back to our room for bed, and all three of us were exhausted. In our exhaustion we pushed the spirit incident to the back of our minds. Our daughter fell asleep fast, and my husband (surprisingly still a little spooked out lol) asked if I would sleep next to him in his bed. During the night I heard my husband go into the bathroom and shut the door. I drifted back deeper to sleep on my stomach, only to then have a hand press down hard on the back of my head. In between dream state and the state of being awake, I was being suffocated with my face shoved into the pillow and my arms trying to reach out around me for something to grasp! I could feel the air leaving my body until the bathroom door opened and my husband came back over to the bed. I sat up in bed with my heart was racing and I was scared out of my mind. I knew that whatever it was that had attacked me had done so through a dream.
We discussed leaving the resort then and driving home (the clock said 3 am) but we decided to all sleep in the same bed as our daughter, with all the lights and tv on! Needless to say we did not get much sleep that night and we were out the door by 7 am! We still had a fantastic time at Great Wolf Lodge, and to this day we laugh that we actually experienced a haunting there, of all places! I did a few online searches once home to see if others had experienced a haunting at this location, but I was unable to find anything. We did toss around the notion of calling the lodge and asking them outright about the room, but both of us were too chicken to make the call. I will admit that we are thankful whatever it was didn't follow us home, and on our next visit, we will not be staying in the two bed suite!