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Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Sunlight dances through towering deciduous trees, highlighting Linda Alice Dewey’s ivory hair as she moves through the Glen Arbor Cemetery. Her eyes, a striking Lake Michigan blue, shimmer with emotion. As we walk, Linda’s strides are confident yet aware; she makes not a single misstep as she weaves between the markers that dot this forested plot.
Her love for this place—for the people buried here—is palpable.
Above, warblers trill around a wild perimeter that once grew free. Below, young ferns and periwinkle fill in between grave markers—a mix of old, ornate headstones and shiny new slabs.
On this Memorial Day morning, Glen Arbor locals walk a lush path into this place that holds so much of their history—a history that lay dormant until only recently. They’ve come to honor, and pay their respects.
Looking at the dozens of headstones scattered across the grounds, it’s hard to imagine the overgrown jungle that once claimed this space, tucked discreetly within Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. This gravesite, formerly known as Forest Haven Cemetery (due to its location off Forest Haven Road), dates back to the late 19th century. Burials ceased after 1927, and over the years it was … forgotten. A relic that fell into disrepair.
Today, this community has come to celebrate a cemetery that’s been given a new life.
Linda, too, has lived many lives—artist, teacher, metaphysicist, journalist, author—and in recent years, she’s added cemetery advocate to that list. This celebration is the culmination of the more than three decades she’s spent thinking about the Glen Arbor Cemetery and working tirelessly toward its revival.
For Linda, it all started in the summer of 1991, when her brother first brought her and her friend, Lisbeth, to the small, woodland cemetery. The air seemed heavy, and Lisbeth felt a presence that made the hairs stand on the back of her neck.
Her brother rolled his eyes. He didn’t feel anything.
But Linda did.
On her second visit the following year, she chose a midday excursion with family. Linda brought her camera in the hopes of catching a ghost in a photo. When she got home, she realized she had forgotten to put in the film.
And her third visit to the cemetery? It changed her life.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
“My heart is with you”
It was a sunny July evening in 1995 when Linda returned for a third time to the Glen Arbor Cemetery.
On this night, there was no breeze—the trees were still. And the birds, if they were there, didn’t sing. Ambient light diffused through leafy trees, painting the cemetery in an ethereal green light. “It was glowing,” Linda recalls. But it was also a bit eerie.
Accompanied by her friends and their sons, Linda was visiting to see if she felt something—or someone—there.
For much of her life, Linda has felt called to the metaphysical world. Her grandmother and great-grandmother read tea leaves, and she grew up listening to psychic Jean Dixon on the radio. As a child in Sunday school, Linda quickly earned a reputation for asking “doozies”—questions that often derailed a more mundane topic in order to ponder life’s complexities.
Later on in life, after agreeing to move her family from Glen Arbor to Arizona in 1982—the request of her then-husband—Linda found herself once again drawn to the metaphysical; this time, in the form of channeling. She studied, went to classes, and four years later, she read The Nature of Personal Reality. It resonated deeply with her.
“It took me all summer to read that book,” she says with a smile. “It was dense. But by the end of it, I had learned how to meditate, how to listen, how to write. By the end of it, I thought, ‘I’m going to be able to do this.’”
So, on that summer evening nearly a decade later, Linda listened. She felt a heaviness. A sadness.
And she felt someone there. She was sure of it.
What she wasn’t sure of: what to do next. Linda decided in that moment to call out into the still of this 100-year-old cemetery:
“Whoever is here, my heart is with you!” And then … she got spooked. Something felt off.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Her friends and sons had decided to leave and were well on their way back down the path by the time Linda realized they were gone. She hurried down the trail to find them.
As she caught up with the others, thoughts circled: “Did I just disturb something? Is it my imagination?
“Is somebody behind us? … Did I make a mistake?”
Feeling caught up in the moment, she admitted to her friend Carolyn that she felt corny for saying “my heart is with you.”
What did that even mean?
“It means you care,” Carolyn answered. Later that evening, tucked into her small yellow cottage along Sleeping Bear Bay, things were different. Linda felt a presence with her. She woke to bumps in the night, and the next day, saw something move in front of her that, well … shouldn’t have moved.
She came to believe that this was the spiritual energy of someone who had been forgotten, just like the cemetery. And this entity wanted her help, to find peace in the afterlife.
It was this experience—and the events that followed—that inspired Linda to write Aaron’s Crossing, a tale about her encounter with a ghost.
Some will find this story implausible; others just plain uncomfortable. But when faced with the option of fictionalizing the book, Linda knew she had to be true to herself.
“I have to be honest. It doesn’t matter what people think—I know what I know. And everybody else … we’ll all find out anyway,” she says. “Eventually we all find out one way or the other.”
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Resurrecting the cemetery
Whether or not you believe in life after death, one thing is certain: It was Linda’s experience that bonded her to the long-abandoned Glen Arbor Cemetery.
“There was an affinity for that place. It just felt sacred to me,” she says. “So when the windstorm came … it was my first thought.”
It was August 2, 2015, when straight-line winds ripped through Glen Arbor—the cemetery straight in its path. Gusts up to 100 mph downed thousands of trees in the area, and the already-overgrown acre of land became a tangled puzzle of crisscrossed trunks and limbs. The cemetery was no longer accessible.
Crushed by the desecration of the site, Linda sought solutions, but faced roadblocks for the next couple years. The cemetery was under the jurisdiction of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and, as such, the National Park Service. Rehabilitation of the site was on the park’s to-do list, but not something that could be prioritized.
When Linda interviewed the park’s deputy superintendent, Tom Ulrich, in 2017 for a story for the Glen Arbor Sun, he told her the cemetery repairs “might need a squeaky wheel.”
“I remember driving by Forest Haven Road afterward and thinking, ‘I’m the one who has to do this.’ And knowing it was going to involve a lot from me. I could feel it. You just know when something is for you.”
She was right. It was a lot. But Linda continued to champion the cemetery’s revival and, in April 2019, the park finally completed its first clearing of the site so she and other volunteers could have access and begin repair work. In November, she organized a group to help clear a new entrance to the cemetery; Parshall Tree Care Experts in Traverse City offered to assist, free of charge.
“I think without that windstorm, things would have just gone along as they were,” Linda says. “It was cathartic.”
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Thirteen headstones
The tangle of trees wasn’t the only puzzle to solve at the cemetery.
Shortly after the clearing began, Andrew White, a historian based in Traverse City, took an interest in the project. He started researching the history of the cemetery, including the names on the 13 headstones scattered throughout the grounds. The forgotten cemetery’s records, perhaps unsurprisingly, were lost, too. So, Andrew started from scratch.
Among his findings: A deed from March 5, 1880, that showed local land-owner Dr. William H. Walker and his wife, Eliza Ann, sold the one-acre parcel to the township for one dollar, specifically for use as a public cemetery. According to newspaper clippings, the cemetery was active from 1879 to 1927. Four Civil War veterans were buried there: James Lawrence Green, Daniel Parker, Edmund Trumbull and Ruell Russell Welch. And the first to be buried: Two sailors—Robert Dowey and Frank Golden—from the schooner W.B. Phelps of Oswego, New York, which tragically met its ruin in Sleeping Bear Bay on November 19, 1879.
As he delved deeper into his research, Andrew came upon a game-changing discovery.
“He called me and said, ‘Linda, I don’t think the park owns the cemetery,’” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘This is crazy.’”
Andrew was, in fact, the first person to question the National Park Service about ownership of the site.
“Have you ever heard of a township selling their public cemetery?” he says. “I started looking into how the sale came about, and the answer was, it never did. Glen Arbor never sold the cemetery to anybody.”
It turns out the cemetery was erroneously transferred in 1977 to the Department of Interior as part of the creation of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Presented with that information, Andrew says the National Park Service was quick to rectify the situation, even in the midst of a pandemic. Within a couple years, ownership of the Glen Arbor Cemetery was transferred back to the township.
“There was storm damage everywhere, and all sorts of deferred maintenance,” Andrew says. “It wasn’t something [the Lakeshore] was going to be able to realistically do. It was a win-win for everybody.”
Andrew continued his research—work others describe as “instrumental,” especially in light of the cemetery’s lost records. He spent hours and hours sifting through microfiche, searching for death certificates and obituaries to help identify those buried in the wooded plot.
Luckily, he didn’t have to wait long for help.
In thinking of ways to connect the community to the history buried in the cemetery, Linda turned to Glen Lake Middle School—specifically, eighth grade social studies and English language arts teacher Melissa Okerlund, and now-retired eighth grade English teacher Lisa Nadlicki.
Melissa says developing a research program for their students was a natural fit—the eighth-grade curriculum aligns with the years the cemetery was in use, not to mention the Civil War connection.
“When the students learned that what they were working on was going to help the community complete records that have been missing for decades … I remember one student that first year saying, ‘You mean we’re going to get to do real history?’”
The program thrived. Over the last five years, students have contributed to the cemetery’s documented history, while forging meaningful connections to their community’s past. That includes, Melissa noted, the area’s rich Indigenous history.
One student researched a child who was buried in the cemetery; coincidentally, the student’s family owns the building that was once a general store owned by the family of the child. On another occasion, the class discovered that one of Glen Arbor’s early settlers had been friends with Susan B. Anthony. And the anchor from the W.B. Phelps shipwreck can still be seen today, sitting in a resident’s yard.
“I heard a student say, ‘I didn’t realize all this history was right here,’” Melissa recalls. “This program connected her to her community in a whole different way.”
“It’s a buy-in to history, learning that history isn’t just about books. It’s about people who lived and people whose lives affect us today—in the same spots where we are today,” Linda says. “I foresee these students someday bringing their own kids back to the cemetery and telling them about the person they studied—showing them this cool cemetery in the middle of the woods, just like my brother did that very first time for me. That’s a legacy. For them, and for me.”
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Lost, but not forgotten
Just last year, the township unearthed additional cemetery secrets.
Ground penetrating radar detected the presence of more graves. Many more graves. Beyond the 13 headstones that still stand at the site, 75 unmarked graves were found which, Linda notes, were likely once marked with wooden crosses or shingles that deteriorated over time.
A “potter’s field” was also discovered—a mass grave for those who are unknown, unclaimed or who could not afford a burial. Linda estimates there are anywhere from 50 to 150 people buried there, bringing the cemetery to a total of between 138 and 238 people.
“For the most part, it’s people who came here back in the lumbering days, and mostly, they were people who were very poor,” Andrew says of the potter’s field discovery. “That’s why there are so many un-marked graves there.”
Thanks to their research efforts, 52 of the individuals buried have now been identified by name, with another 15 that are not yet confirmed.
And with each milestone, the community continued to rally around the cemetery. Glen Arbor Township Clerk Pam Laureto worked diligently to keep the project on the town’s radar, and in the summer of 2023, Township Board Treasurer Don Lewis took on the task of placing an additional 67 stones to mark the newly discovered graves, following in the footsteps of his friend and former civil servant, the late John Peppler.
Linda and local surveyor Zach Baker (who also donated his time) placed pin flags throughout the cemetery, marking where each headstone would go. Having been in construction as a general contractor for more than 50 years, Don had a “bone yard” of every kind of stone, rock and boulder imaginable. He chose Wisconsin Fond du Lac stones, previously purchased for a cemetery in Omena. Installing the stones, however, was trickier than he imagined.
“It seems simple before you put a shovel in the ground,” he says with a chuckle. “But there are so many roots and rocks buried in the soil.”
On one particularly steamy 95-degree day, Don became overheated and had to literally lie down in the middle of the plot.
“I laughed to myself. I’m looking up into the sky and thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is my day to die or not, but what an irony this is going to be!’”
Don’s wife, Annette, decided she would help from then on. They enjoyed the solitude together. And the chance to reflect on their loved ones who have come and gone.
“It’s quiet, it’s peaceful. There’s nobody but you, unless a bird flies through and sings,” Don says. “It is just kind of neat, because it lets you reflect on what a cemetery is really all about, and all of those past souls who are buried there. The project almost took on a spiritual aspect that I never would have anticipated.”
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Finally, a resting place
This year marks the fifth Memorial Day ceremony at the Glen Arbor Cemetery. Community members gather, including some descendants of those buried here. A eulogy for Civil War veteran Edmund Trumbull is read—he and members of his family are buried in a small center plot marked with a wire fence. (His son, John Trumbull, was the last person to be buried here.)
Local author Anne-Marie Oomen reads a poem she wrote for the first observance in 2020, “Honoring the Graves”:
There is a sluice of time
that wanders the grasses
and cries out like a small grey goat
remember me, remember me.
It’s all we’ve ever wanted.
After Norm Wheeler’s last reverent note of taps has dissolved, Melissa’s students tour the grounds—seeing, for the first time, where the people they studied are buried.
Attendees chat and linger before filtering out. Twig-snapping footsteps fade down the trail. Muffled voices disappear behind the thud of car doors. And then, quiet. The Memorial Day crowd has left; but I’m not alone.
Bird calls slowly trickle in. Crickets sing their familiar chord. I stand in this peaceful place—this once-forgotten cemetery—thinking about the lives this community has shined a light on. The new relationships formed between the living and the dead. The history buried here that weaves a tapestry of place and time and people.
I’m reminded of the last line in Linda’s book: “Death is never the end of the story.”
A warm summer breeze picks up and one by one, small bits of pollen, backlit by the sun, take flight from the lofty trees. The glowing orbs bounce and twirl, inviting me to follow them back the way I came.
As I walk to my car, I’m treated to a grasshopper ballet among the puffed-out dandelions. The faint drum of a woodpecker echoes in the distance.
This cemetery in the woods that was once so still, now vibrates with life; with histories no longer forgotten—and some that may never be known.
Even so, the people of Glen Arbor have shown those buried here that they care. Their hearts are with them. All of them.
Maybe their souls will find comfort in that.