Joshua Nieman: If you had a map of Washtenaw County in front of you and you drew a line from Ann Arbor to Dexter Township to Scio Township back to Ann Arbor, you might never expect that in the dead center of that triangle lies the remnants of a civilization almost entirely lost to time. In fact, it likely would have been lost entirely had it not been for the efforts of some very passionate local historians and researchers. It's also, as you'll come to see, widely misunderstood, like Saline's Maple Road Bridge from last episode.
It's a place without commonly known context, and thus people in the area have filled in the blanks with all sorts of occult explanations. But don't worry, we'll unravel this mess together. Welcome to WEMU's Hidden in Plain Sight, the show where we shed light on some of the people, places and things that help comprise who we are as a community.
Today, we will be exploring the forsaken early American settlement Scio Village, a place of rich history and current, inexplicable urban legend. "How did you even find this place?" I've been asked that question three times by three key individuals involved in this episode. The story is embarrassing.
Each time I asked myself, "Do I really have to say?" Well, first off, the credit goes entirely to my coworker Ana Longoria. I was knee-deep in Maple Road Bridge research at the time when she began regaling me with the legends of Scio Village's decrepit cemetery and the cursed grave of Warlock Willie. And, well, I was entirely hooked.
In fact, here's Ana right now to fill you in, too.
Ana Longoria: So, in Scio Township, there was a warlock. Warlock Willie was his name, who practiced witchcraft and magic.
When he died, his grave sprouted a thorny tree vast and wide and split in two. And they say that if you lie in his grave in the pit of the tree, his soul would pass through you, damning you to hell when you die. The site itself is spooky at times because there's been reports of rituals that happen there, sometimes that there's offerings left along the gates of the old Scio Cemetery or just trinkets or, you know, even sacrifices left behind.
Joshua Nieman: Fascinating stuff, right? It's the kind of spooky story you'd love to believe is true. I wanted to see it with my own eyes, but, like, without the getting cursed part. I'm not huge on getting cursed, but first I had to find local professionals and hear what they thought.
I learned that Scio Village technically fell under the jurisdiction of the Historical Society of Dexter. That's when I quickly learned that there's very little a Scio Village historian hates more than the legend of Warlock Willie. Why?
Because it's entirely not true.
And I don't like to be this guy, this debunking of urban legends guy. It brings me no joy disintegrating people's sense of whimsy and wonder like this. But it's almost hilarious how well-documented Warlock Willie's ‘grave’ is and how much proof exists for the reality of the location.
This is where I'd like to introduce you to Caryl Burke, president of the Dexter Area Historical Society. She once told me that through a collaboration with a local school, young creative writing students come through the Dexter Area Museum and all they want to know about is Warlock Willie, despite it having no historical precedent. There seems to be, though, some sort of darker fascination in the legend, which has manifested into some truly bizarre superstitions.
Ana showed me some Facebook discussion posts from last year about the area. Here are some of the things people online have claimed.
Olivia Aldanondo (Voice Actor): “Went there several times my senior year in high school, '71, '72, to take photos. At that time, the stone was wedged between two tree trunks about two to three feet off the ground. There were three of us. Lots of fresh snow on the ground. We trudged through the snow. I took photos for my photography class.
When we turned to leave, there was a fourth set of footprints that followed ours to the stone. We ran to the car and took off. When I developed my film, none of the pictures taken there came out.”
Matt Jones (Voice Actor): “There was a gravestone that had a honey locust tree growing up into it and the gravestone was grown into the tree trunk.
People chipped away pieces of the gravestone over time and once I visited it and a bird of prey had been nailed to the tree.”
Brooke Boyst (Voice Actor): “The challenge is to visit the site at night, preferably during a full moon. Lay down on your back and look up at the tree.
Legend is you will experience a glowing or paranormal phenomenon.”
Karina Witmer (Voice Actor): “I live in Scio Township with a Dexter mailing address. There have been mutilated animals displayed at the entrance to that area.”
Joshua Nieman: Psh – I don't know. Maybe I'd be more inclined to entertain these claims if I hadn't gone there myself, if I hadn't learned what I have learned, if I hadn't dug deep. Here are some things that we know are true. The locust trees exist. They have enveloped a burial site, but not just one grave. Two.
On a rainy September morning, Caryl and I made our way out there to take a look.
Caryl Burke: So, you see that this one tree right here, right? That has two stems that go way up and it's big and old. It's got the big leaves. That's an oak or a maple. I think it's an oak. So that's, that's not our tree.
Joshua Nieman: Interesting.
Caryl Burke: Yeah.
Joshua Nieman: Oh, you know what? Is it this?
Caryl Burke: Yeah, check out the leaves.
Joshua Nieman: Yeah.
Caryl Burke: And if you see a fence there to your left, that's the back boundary.
Joshua Nieman: Yeah.
Caryl Burke: Yep, that's the one.
Joshua Nieman: Oh my goodness.
Caryl Burke: And that's where the stones were. Clearly, they're gone now. Somebody's carried them off.
Joshua Nieman: But this is the tree and this is where Warlock Willie...
Caryl Burke: Isn’t.
Joshua Nieman: Is not, yes. Bogus urban legend. But yeah, looking at it you can definitely see how it inspired spooky stories.
Caryl Burke: There was a grave here. Two of them actually. Yeah. And one was for a woman, a couple by the name of Seymour. And until 1970 something, the gravestones were also here. Yeah. But they are gone now. But the spot where they were still shows. They're between the roots of the tree.
Joshua Nieman: Indeed, the site of the supposed Warlock Willie is actually the resting ground of Betsy and Joseph Seymour. Joseph was Betsy's son. He died at the age of 29 and was actually the first recorded burial in the cemetery. I had a chance to talk with Nicholas A. Marsh, the author of the book "Scio Village: Ghost Town with a Past," which has proved invaluable to my research, by the way, and I asked him about Willie.
Nick Marsh: For the entire time, the decades I've been working on Scio and familiar with Scio, I've never heard that name before.
Joshua Nieman: That's fair.
Joshua Nieman: So Willie is officially debunked. So let's stop saying his name now. You may be asking yourself, though, if there's nothing sinister about the graves, how come there's two thorn trees growing out of where the gravestones used to be? To which I say, excellent question.
In fact, the origin of those trees turned out to be a wilder story than I ever could have imagined. Back in the early '30s, there was a Lansing-based historian by the name of Theodore G. Foster. Foster authored many papers, and within one of them, he recounts exchanges he had with Scio's postmaster at the time, a man he simply referred to as Mr. Crytz.
Nick Marsh's book includes direct passages from these papers that go as follows.
Patrick Rady (Voice Actor): “While talking with Mr. Crytz about the locust trees on the north side of the old Foster homestead, where Crytz resided, I remarked about the sharpness of the thorns. He said those are nothing compared with the two in the cemetery, and then he volunteered this information.
You know those seeds for those locust trees that were brought from Jerusalem and are seeds from the same trees from which the thorns were taken with which Christ was crucified. I do not know that they were the same trees, but they were seeds from the trees that were from the seeds from which the thorns were taken and used for Christ's crucifixion. These two trees of which I speak are the same two trees that are over the Seymour graves.”
Joshua Nieman: Dismissing that as laughable would be understandable. What makes doing that a bit harder for me is the fact that around 65 years later, the story was corroborated by historian Norma McAllister. She wrote…
Katherine Hacanyan (Voice Actor): “Captain Elias Hayes, a privateer in the War of 1812, came to Scio Township in July 1832. With him he brought from the Holy Land a thorn tree, the same kind from which the Crown of Thorns was made for Christ. Captain Hayes had followed the seas since he was 12 years old, visiting nearly every country in the world. A large thorn tree of the same variety was planted in the Scio Cemetery in his honor. Roy Waite, Captain Hayes' great-great-grandson, authenticated the story to me in a letter. He also told me that he took two seedlings from this thorn tree and planted them on the campus of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, where they became thriving large trees. Roy was a teacher there and is now deceased.”
Joshua Nieman: To my knowledge, there's no way to authenticate that claim beyond the sources I've just provided. So I'll let you take away what you want from that.
Nick Marsh seems unconvinced.
Nick Marsh: Yeah. Yeah, that seems like a stretch, but it's interesting.
I was going to call the university and see if they have any information about that or if the trees are still there. But I never did.
Joshua Nieman: That thread looking into Bob Jones University remains a mystery for another time. But I will always be amazed at the fact that trees with such a supposedly divine origin are now the center of an urban legend of black magic and curses. Sometimes the world seems to have a way of retaining that something is special, even if it doesn't remember exactly how.
Suddenly, the rain really let loose, but Caryl and I decided to continue in the overgrown graveyard looking for headstones.
Caryl Burke: It's a large tombstone that would have been this high originally, and it's knocked over. So it's out here somewhere.
Joshua Nieman: Yeah, let's find that.
Caryl Burke: Yeah, let's see where it is.
Joshua Nieman: Oh, maybe... Is it one of the blocks back there? Wow. Oh, that is so interesting.
Caryl Burke: We were trying to...
Joshua Nieman: Make that out, yeah.
Caryl Burke: We were trying to make it out.
So, it's Nancy L... Nancy Lyon, I think it's Nancy Lyon. And I bet you we'll find her on our... On the list. On the list, but there's names here and here as well.
Joshua Nieman: Wow.
Caryl Burke: And maybe it sat on top of that to begin with. Hard telling.
Joshua Nieman: Yeah, maybe it did.
Joshua Nieman: The list we're referring to is the list of individuals buried in Scio Village's cemetery from Nick's book. And right there, about three-fourths down the row, was indeed the name Nancy Lyon.
Joshua Nieman: We did find the last surviving visible headstone in that cemetery. It matches a name in your list, which I actually thought was pretty cool.
Nick Marsh: Oh.
Joshua Nieman: Nancy Lyon.
Nick Marsh: Yeah, that's interesting.
Joshua Nieman: I love it when facts fit together perfectly.
She died at the age of 59, back in 1885. This is where I began to do some true poking around of my own. I wondered if there was a familial connection between Nancy Lyon and Lucius Lyon, the namesake of South Lyon.
The connection remains unconfirmed. However, I did find a passage in a genealogical book from 1905 called "Lyon Memorial, Volume I." It goes as follows:
“In 1822, Lucius Lyon came to the territory from Vermont. He was almost certainly of the family of Richard Lyon of Fairfield. Four years later, Timothy Lyon of the same family, number 321 of the foregoing record, came to Plymouth, Michigan, from New York State. Next, about 1830, Samuel Lyon, a descendant of Thomas Lyon of Rye, came from New York to Ann Arbor. Some of his descendants still live in Michigan, at Scio.”
So, there's a little breadcrumb if somebody's hungry for pursuing a local mystery.
In fact, on the topic of mysteries and town namesakes, Scio is a bit of a head-scratcher. There are three possible origins outlined in Nick's book. The Combination Atlas Map of Washtenaw County from 1874 argues that Scio got its name from the Greek island of Chios, spelled C-H-I-O-S, which reportedly was a thriving community of art, knowledge and advancement before being decimated by the Turks in the early 1820s.
Word of this event reached Washtenaw County by way of a published transcription of a speech given by Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Within that transcription, Chios was misspelled as Scio, and thus the pioneers in the area named their village in tribute of the massacred Greek people.
Maybe.
Now, Samuel Beakes, in his work "Past and Present of Washtenaw County," published in 1891, argued that the village was named after Scio, New York, given how many pioneers were coming to Michigan from the East Coast. Lastly, the author of "Michigan Place Names" from 1973 reported that Scio named themselves after the Latin word for "I know." And what's more is the fact that according to Nick's book, Scio's early records were reportedly lost in a fire, so a determined answer has eluded historians for about two centuries now.
Scio, from top to bottom, appears to be quite a mysterious place. Part of that is the village's current state. As I asked Caryl…
Joshua Nieman: Could you tell me as much as you can about what led to the point of it being unrecognizable like this? Like, why didn't people try to maintain this area?
Caryl Burke: Scio Village was in existence for, what, maybe 80, 90 years.
It was founded somewhere around 1830. And by 1910, it was pretty much gone, according to Nick Marsh. But the people were here because it was a nice spot on the river for a mill in the 1800s.
And milling was where it was at. That was where everybody brought their grain that they had raised to get it out of here and make money on it, essentially. And so there was a whole series.
According to Nick's book, there was a whole series of mills along the river right here. It was never prosperous enough to keep people here. And I don't, you know, Nick doesn't speculate why, although he did note that there was a very well-established mill down the river here in Delhi. And another well-established river mill up the river here in Dexter. So it might have just been too much competition. But the fact is that though there were several mills here over that 80 or 90 years, none of them survived.
None of the businesses survived. And so after a while, the people drifted away.
Joshua Nieman: The full history of Scio is immense and full of too many stories to fit into one episode.
Many places were lost during America's massive industrial shift in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Many places fell behind and never recovered. Rarely do you find, however, a ghost town with such character and novelty as Scio Village.
So much so, in fact, you can expect a follow-up episode on Scio Village in February, where we move away from Scio's supposed ties to supernatural darkness and explore its rich history of battling humanity's darkness.
I'm Joshua Nieman, and this has been WEMU's Hidden in Plain Sight. Who knows where we'll shed light next? Thanks for listening.
Special thanks to the EMU Archives Department: Brooke Boyst and Karina Witmer, The Oral History Program: Matt Jones, Olivia Aldanondo, and Katherine Hacanyan, as well as Patrick Rady for contributing your voices.
Music Credits — GrumpyNora (Pixabay)
GrumpyNora. “Wide Open Desert.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/music/blues-wide-open-desert-314124/. Licensed under the Pixabay Content License.
GrumpyNora. “Slidey Dobro.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/music/modern-country-slidey-dobro-615054/. Licensed under the Pixabay Content License.
GrumpyNora. “Kora Kora Kora.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/music/beats-kora-kora-kora-323913/. Licensed under the Pixabay Content License.
GrumpyNora. “Jumbled Old Piano.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/music/small-drama-jumbled-old-piano-558071/. Licensed under the Pixabay Content License.
