Holmdene Mansion

A 22-room Tudor Revival mansion constructed in 1908 on Heritage Hill, one of the largest urban historic districts in the country. The mansion is now owned by Aquinas College.

Holmdene Mansion is a twenty-two-room estate built in 1908 for lumber baron Edward Lowe and his wife Susan Blodgett Lowe on Heritage Hill in Grand Rapids, one of the largest urban historic districts in the United States. The mansion featured stunning gardens, a third-floor ballroom for entertaining the city's elite, and a swimming pool on the grounds. The Lowes hosted notable guests, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who spent the night in a second-floor bedroom during one of his visits to Michigan.

The haunting of Holmdene centers on a tragedy involving the Lowe family. According to the most widely told legend, the original owner's adolescent son drowned in the garden pool, and his spirit has never left the property. Security guards working night shifts at the mansion have reported encountering the boy's ghost, which they hold responsible for a variety of persistent paranormal phenomena. Faucets turn on by themselves, lights flicker and switch on and off without explanation, and electronic devices activate on their own. The third-floor ballroom is particularly active, with unexplained green lights visible from outside the building, glowing in the upper windows when no living person is inside.

Children's laughter has been heard echoing through the halls of the mansion after hours, and multiple witnesses have reported seeing the figure of a child in the building's windows, particularly the third-floor windows that look out over the garden where the pool once stood. Fox17 West Michigan investigated the haunting in 2019, interviewing staff and students about their experiences in the building.

In 1945, Aquinas College purchased the Holmdene property, and the mansion now houses the college's administrative offices. Students and staff at Aquinas have continued to report the same phenomena that security guards documented decades earlier. The Saint, Aquinas College's student newspaper, published an investigation in 2020 asking whether Holmdene Manor is truly haunted, collecting contemporary accounts from students who work and study in the building.

It should be noted that the authors of "Ghosts of Grand Rapids," Nicole Bray and Robert DuShane, investigated the Holmdene haunting and believe the story may be fabricated or at least significantly embellished. The drowning of the Lowe son has not been conclusively verified in historical records. But verified or not, the phenomena continue to be reported by people who spend time in the mansion, and the green lights in the third-floor windows remain unexplained.