{"id":75161,"date":"2026-09-28T11:59:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T15:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=75161"},"modified":"2026-09-28T14:40:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T18:40:07","slug":"the-haunted-mill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2026\/09\/28\/the-haunted-mill\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haunted Mill of Greenville, Michigan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Haunted Mill, Greenville, MI, October, 2002<\/p><\/div>\n

The following is an excerpt from \u201cPsychic Infrastructure: Mike Kelley and the Haunted Underground,\u201d an essay on Kelley’s art, Detroit culture, and Mobile Homestead<\/em> for a future anthology marking MOCAD’s 20th anniversary. In October 2002, Kelley came to Detroit to hang with artist, filmmaker, and friend Cameron Jamie, who was filming Spook House<\/em>, a project commissioned by Artangel. The experience would have a lasting influence on Kelley’s work, including Day is Done<\/em> and, eventually, Mobile Homestead<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Haunted Mill<\/h2>\n

One morning in October 2002, Cameron Jamie, Mike Kelley, Dave Markey and I traveled 160 miles west of Detroit to Greenville, Michigan, just northeast of Grand Rapids, to visit a nineteenth-century wood mill converted into a haunted Halloween attraction. From 1993 to 2003, the Haunted Mill was run by James Westra, a former professional skating-show performer in the 1950s, and a local TV personality who also ran “Mr. Jim’s Animal Kingdom,” an exotic pet shop in downtown Grand Rapids.<\/p>\n

In a small office up on the third floor, Westra told us his history and about another haunted attraction at his home in Byron Center, the legendary “House of Dark Shadows,” complete with a faux torture chamber in the basement and an underground maze of tunnels dug out beneath the house. The house interior was filled with exotic wildlife and plants, and the outdoor property doubled as an animal refuge. Westra ran the attraction not for cheap thrills, but to bankroll his wildlife sanctuary and offer shelter to local youth who had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Jim,\u201d as he was called by his crew, was a legendary figure in the Grand Rapids area. He supervised a group of about twenty young performers who acted in silence, miming the dialogue at different stations throughout the Haunted Mill. An electrician wired the entire building with speakers, lights, and timers to set off each display when being viewed. Mr. Jim referred to the displays as \u201cstations,\u201d and each had an uncanny Disneyesque, audio-animatronic quality only staged with live actors. Westra was less of a carnival ghoul-master and more of a devoted, eccentric community figure building a strange haven of his own.<\/p>\n

A \u201cMonster Meeting\u201d came to order soon after our arrival. A large room filled up with assorted vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other creatures in full costume and makeup. Some of the actors related how they came out of drug rehabilitation programs to work here as volunteers. Westra had someone read the minutes from the last meeting, and he critiqued each of their performances. He explained we were there to make a film, and they needed to put on their best show tonight.<\/p>\n

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Monster Meeting at the Haunted Mill, Greenville, MI 2002<\/p><\/div>\n

The Haunted Mill was off-kilter and campy. Prerecorded lines came from hidden speakers, but the actors still had to learn and mime the words. One cobwebbed room held a dinner party of zombies eating a ghoulish meal. In a corner, an older woman in a lace veil petted a giant spider while sipping tea. The sets, dialogue, and actors seemed suspended in time, acting out their gothic rituals as if imagined by Charles Addams and Ed Wood, Jr. There were jokes embedded throughout the horror-show shtick\u2014Osama bin Laden masks and figures in the \u201cDeath Row\u201d gallery, topical references and cheap effects. This mansion of inspired weirdness combined grotesque horror with the ridiculous and absurd. Westra seemed to aim his props and horror shenanigans as a subtle critique of pop-culture, social values and politics.The Haunted Mill had the exaggerated theatricality of a vaudeville horror show, with a touch of John Waters-style trash.<\/p>\n

A main attraction was the Frankenstein monster station. It began in the basement, with an elaborate mad-scientist laboratory where the fighting monster is subdued and strapped to a gurney attached to a mechanical chain lift. The hunchback lab assistant yanks the chain, slowly raising it toward the ceiling, nearly three stories high, as lightning flashes above and a thunderstorm begins. The booming thunder and strobe-machine created strong low-fi effects. The lift stopped on cue at the second floor, where the monster breaks free and stumbles about. \u201cWatch out! Watch out! The Monster is loose!\u201d warns an announcer voice from a loudspeaker. The voice directs us down another ramp where the black-light tombs of the vampires await. Psychedelic skulls, snakes, and spiders glow in cheesy fluorescent paint on the walls and caskets.<\/p>\n

At day\u2019s end, Mr. Jim appeared in a black turtleneck sweater with a giant vat of hot dogs to feed his crew. Kelley noticed that he wore a thick gold chain with a large gold medallion around his neck. \u201cYou know what that means?\u201d Kelley said. \u201cDid you see what he had on? That gold medallion. That means this guy is the head of a cult.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

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Filming Swamp Gas, Dexter, Michigan, 2002. Cameron Jamie, Mike Kelley, Emi Fontana and Dave Markey, documenting the alien landing site.<\/p><\/div>\n

One year after we filmed the location, the Haunted Mill burned to the ground, and Mr. Jim collected $300,000 in insurance money. He later went to trial for arson and was convicted in 2009. He died in Jackson Prison one year later at the age of eighty. A controversy still surrounds the arson, as a disgruntled worker who burned the Haunted Mill down implicated Westra in a plea deal.<\/p>\n

When Kelley returned to Los Angeles after his haunted house experience, he was deeply inspired, revived, and knew exactly what he would do next. Many of the carnivalesque layouts and attractions of Day is Done <\/em>were directly inspired by Greenville’s Haunted Mill and other Michigan attractions. When Cameron Jamie returned to Paris he put the director of Artangel in touch with Kelley and the Mobile Homestead became an almost secretive ten year project, and an artwork that Marsha Miro and Julie Taubman helped deliver to MOCAD.<\/p>\n

In October of 2003, Jamie, Kelley and Markey returned to Detroit to finish Spook House<\/em>. Some of the most intense scenes were shot at a small house in Berkley, Michigan, known as “The Bone House,” this two room house had a yard filled with horrors that rivaled anything we’d seen before. On Halloween that year, after filming and hanging out at the Bone House, we recorded music all night at Bill Brovold’s Royal Oak studio.<\/p>\n

In a 2008 feature for Interview Magazine<\/em>,<\/a> Kelley wore a black turtleneck sweater with a medallion on a thick chain. It might have baffled some people who thought he was riffing on hip-hop. \u201cI wore that as an homage to Mr. Jim, from the Haunted Mill,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is an excerpt from “Psychic Infrastructure: Mike Kelley and the Haunted Underground,” an essay on Kelley’s art, Detroit culture, and Mobile Homestead for a future anthology marking MOCAD’s 20th anniversary. In October 2002, Kelley came to Detroit to hang with artist, filmmaker, and friend Cameron Jamie, who was filming Spook House, a project […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1006,71,17,108,18],"tags":[1039,196,1035,1037,1034,1036,154,1038],"class_list":["post-75161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-beat-journal","category-destroy-all-monsters","category-detroit","category-essays","category-monsters","tag-cameron-jamie","tag-cary-loren","tag-greenville","tag-haunted-house-attraction","tag-haunted-mill","tag-jim-westra","tag-mike-kelley","tag-spook-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}