Phantasmal Crime

During Detroit's bootleg wars, a ruthless gang of Jewish immigrants rose up. They killed nearly 500 people during their reign of running the city of Detroit. The Purple Gang accomplished more in their five years of dominance than anything Al Capone and his gang achieved. In their wake, they left behind spirits in various locations that have been connected to their crime spree. The Purple Gang was a Jewish gang that ran the city of Detroit. The story behind the gang's name is that two Detroit market owners were having a conversation and one said of the group, "They’re rotten, purple like the color of bad meat." They were led by Abe Bernstein. Bernstein was born in New York in 1892. His family moved to Detroit when he was young and he joined a teenage street gang that hung out in the Hasting Street neighborhood called Paradise Valley in Detroit's Lower East Side. He was joined by his brothers Raymond, Isadore and Joseph and they specialized in pick-pocketing. This g...

Cemeteries tell stories. If you are willing to listen, a life can be revealed. Charles Memorial Gardens on Point Lookout Road in Leonardtown holds a large tombstone featuring the etching of a church with a trefoil above the door. That trefoil is a representation of the Trinity, so the church must be Christian. This is one of those headstones shared by a married couple. The story it tells is one of deaths that have come to soon: she died at thirty-three, he died at forty-nine. The symbols above their names indicate that he was a Mason and she was the female counterpart, an Eastern Star. In front of the large headstone is a smaller marker still waiting for its occupant. The man found love again and just three years before he would die, he was married again. A search for an obituary reveals he had succumbed to a long illness and left behind two children and several step-children. But the part of his story that this episode focuses on is not about what happened to him, but what happened to...