Soop Cemetery is located off of I-94 and the service drive of Old Denton Rd in Bellevue, Michigan. Owned by the Soop family, for many years the cemetery was known as Pleasantview Cemetery, but its name eventually changed back to Soop. The Soop family owned this property and a portion of the area around the cemetery until the early 1900s.
The stories of Elizabeth Soop peaked our interest. It's said that she practiced witchcraft and we decided to do some research and head out to take a closer look at the Soop Cemetery and her grave site ourselves. Upon doing some research we discovered Elizabeth's family is still in the area. It's said that her distant cousin confirmed that Elizabeth was indeed a witch as the rumors state.
It was a beautiful day, mid-eighties temperature and a slight breeze. It didn't take us long to find Elizabeth's grave site. We knew from research that it would be situated along the back of the cemetery among the oldest graves.
Five team members, Mike, Jeff, Kim, Kristie and myself were present. Kellie popped up our camp chairs around Elizabeth's gravesite. You could tell she had a fan club for her grave was adorned with trinkets and coins positioned in a heart shape. It was difficult to make out her headstone. It was cracked and the writing was weathered from the years. We looked up her death certificate while we were there and found out she died from dropsy, which is congestive heart failure.
We started our session by turning on our recorders and Kim used an ovilus app on her phone. The first words were "UNDER CHAIR". Our team doesn't put a lot of stock in phone apps but the irony here was just too uncanny. We quickly repositioned our chairs. We asked multiple questions in hopes of receiving responses on our recorders. Kristie used her dowsing rods but they kept pulling toward the nearby water. We continued to receive ovilus responses that were interesting. The ones that related the most were: "under chair, damned, Alice, pain, any soul".
There were a few words that didn't relate that came across the ovilus as well. When the name Alice came up on the ovilus, we discovered there were two Alice's buried just a few feet from where we sat.
Before leaving we did a 10 minute SB11 session where Kellie heard a female say "heart attack". As noted earlier, Elizabeth Soop died from heart failure. Upon reviewing her recorder she picked it up but it was faint. See if you can make it out. Also, Jeff asked if the spirits got together there to communicate to which we heard a "NO" reply in a male voice.
It's our belief that the cemetery isn't haunted in the sense that spirits are wandering about haunting the place. It's just a resting place for spirits and if you talk to them they may communicate back if you're lucky.
