Forester's saddest ghost story

Forester was a busy lumber town in the 1870s, the kind of Lake Huron port where schooners pulled up to the pier to load boards and the sailors who crewed them came and went with the season. Mary Jane Quay — everyone called her Minnie — was fifteen, and she fell for one of those sailors. Her parents didn’t approve. A drifting deckhand was no match for their daughter, they decided, and they forbade her to see him.

Then his ship went down somewhere out on the lakes. The story says that on April 27, 1876, Minnie was left to mind her baby brother. She put the child down to sleep, walked down through town past the old Tanner House inn, out onto the dock, and into the water, in front of whoever happened to be watching. She was buried in the Forester cemetery up the road.

That’s where history hands the story over to legend. For nearly a hundred and fifty years people around here have said Minnie never quite left the shore. Some claim to have seen a girl in a long dress walking the beach at dusk, still waiting for a ship that isn’t coming. Others tell it darker — that she calls to young women near the water. The old-timers have a piece of advice for anyone who visits her grave: leave something behind, a coin or a flower, or she’ll follow you home. It’s a tragic little tale dressed up as a scary one, and on a gray evening with the lake heaving against the stones, you can see exactly how it took root.