Bloomfield Hills and the immediate surrounding areas are wealthy in both the material comforts of life, and incidents of strange phenomena and occurances, some of which would warrant entry into the Twilight Zone. This section will include an assortment of other strange-ities.
Much of the material posted here will not be found on other web sites and reflects research by the author rather than paste/copy from other web sites.
A Rainy Day at St. Hugos in the Hills, at 2215 Opdyke Rd., just two miles from Trodes Bridge. Here is the UPI account of the incident:
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., June 18 [1966](UPI) -- As heavy rains doused lower Michigan on Tuesday, flooding was blamed for the death of a suburban Detroit doctor who drove his car into a pond.
Flooding also blocked roads and snarled rush-hour traffic across the Detroit area. Across the lower peninsula homes were evacuated in low-lying areas along river and streams. The National Weather Service posted flood watches for most of lower Michigan, from Cheboygan to Benton Harbor to Detroit. Bloomfield Hills police said the victim, 55-year-old Dr. Orekonde Ganesh, was driving across water-covered pavement on a church parking lot when he accidently plunged into the pond.
Police responding to the scene dove into the water and pulled Ganesh from his Cadillac, which was submerged in about 10 feet of water near St. Hugo's Church.
Ganesh was brought to St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital in Pontiac where he was revived for a short period but later pronounced dead.
Ganesh, of Bloomfield Hills, operated a clinic in Southfield.
In the mid-nineties, after Andiamos Restaurant bought the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Birmingham (Maple and Telegraph), Andiamos was using only the bakery portion in the rear of the former Machus restaurant, with plans of moving at a later date. The old banquet rooms were located in the basement.
The Amdiamos team discovered some vintage bar stools they thought were well worth salvaging, and hired a furniture refurbisher to restore them on the premises in the banquet room in the basement. Unexpectedly the craftsman tore up the basement stairs and ran through the bakery/kitchen. When asked what had happened, the man said he just had a face-to-face encounter with a ghost. He refused to return the banquet rooms to retrieve his tools. A worker for Andiamos had to go down and get the craftman's tools. He was willing to leave them in the basement rather than go down for them himself, if a Andiamos worker had not done so. For the record, the Machus Red Fox Restaurant was the last place ex-Teamster kahuna Jimmy Hoffa was seen alive in 1975.
My source for this incident is a personal friend. His sister was the bakery manager at the time of this incident and she was present when the furniture refurbisher bolted up the stairs and refused to either return to the job he was hired to do, or fetch his tools.
Across the street from the Kensington-Trowbridge enterance at 1250 Kensington Rd. is the Sacred Heart Academy Elementary and High School. A legend of its own lives behind the school's gates, a "haunted" statue of the Virgin Mary. The local legend is that two young boys were playing at the statue after dark, after they were supposed to be home, and they never returned home. A bloody message was found at the statue: "Don't let your kids play after dark." Two fingers of the statue are missing and the eyes were gouged out. Visit Shadowland's Haunted Michigan Page.
I went to Academy of the Sacred Heart on 7 August, searching for this statue. Not a minute into my search, a Bloomfield Hills police car pulled up right behind me. I turned in a lot in the back and got out, heading over to talk to one of the ground's keepers. The police continued on. I found no Virgin Mary statue. The next day, I called the school, asking the receptionist if she knew where I might find the VM statue. She transferred my call, and an indentified woman who began interrogating me, wanting to know who I was, why I wanted a photo, if I was writing an article, or if I would sell the picture. I assured her I am an amateur photographer and that was the wrong answer, as she asked me again who I was, etc. etc. I again asked her if she knew where I could find the statue, and she said she would have to check, and that she would call me back. I gave her my email address and never heard from her.
This is an unconfirmed urban legend and perhaps does not belong here. No doubt, stories originate around any old cemetery, and this certainly qualifies for that, since the marker's death dates include pre-civil war dates.
This neighborhood legend was active more than twenty-five years ago, within a few miles west of the Trodes Bridge, on Beach Road, just north of Long Lake. Click here to access that page.
Crazy Charlie, an elderly man, lived in the neighborhood, on the outskirts of a cemetary. His wife had passed on before him and to keep her memory alive, he buried her on his property. The neighborhood kids got together and dug up her remains and left them on Charlie's front porch. When he discovered this, Charlie went over the deep end and caught a few of the neighborhood kids and butchered them. The time frame of the original story/legend is unknown, but the grave markers in the Beach Road Cemetary are mostly dated in the mid 1800s. The story source was unable to remember where he had heard this story, but found it effective in scaring girls. He was sixteen at the time.
Details forthcoming.
Details forthcoming.