Every August, a small city on the Canadian border swells with people who want to talk to the dead. This year they'll gather August 28 and 29 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, for an event called MIPARACON Presents: A Ghostly Great Lakes Weekend — two days of ghost hunts, river cruises, psychic readings, and lectures from some of the biggest names in paranormal television. But the event's low-key billing hides a genuinely interesting backstory: this isn't a new festival. It's a long-running convention that officially died in 2024, only to come back smaller, stranger, and arguably more interesting than before.
To understand why, you have to go back to 2010 or 2011, when a group of investigators from the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society — a real ghost-hunting outfit based in Michigan's U.P. — started a yearly gathering they called MIPARACON, short for Michigan Paranormal Convention. Co-founded by Tim Ellis, host of Creaking Door Paranormal Radio and a paranormal author in his own right, along with fellow investigator Brad Blair, the convention grew steadily for over a decade into what organizers and local press describe as one of the largest paranormal events in the country. It settled into a home at the Kewadin Casino's DreamMakers Theatre in Sault Ste. Marie and became a fixture on the paranormal-media circuit, drawing television names like Chip Coffey, Amy Bruni, Adam Berry, and Jeff Belanger to a town of roughly 13,000 people.
Then, in August 2024, it ended — on purpose. The 14th annual MIPARACON, held August 22-24 of that year and expected to draw close to a thousand attendees, was announced ahead of time as the convention's "grand finale." Ellis and his co-organizers had weighed the financial and logistical strain of running a convention at that scale and decided, in their words, to close the book after 15 years rather than let it fade out. Regional coverage at the time ran under headlines like "MIPARACON is bidding the mortal realm adieu" — the kind of on-brand gallows humor you'd hope a ghost convention's obituary would have.
It didn't stay dead. In 2025, the same organizing team quietly relaunched the event under new branding: "MIPARACON Presents: A Ghostly Great Lakes Weekend." Rather than trying to recreate the full-scale trade-show version of the old convention, the new event is deliberately smaller and more experiential — built around field investigations and site visits rather than a single theater full of vendor tables. The 2026 edition, running this August, is technically only the second Ghostly Great Lakes Weekend, even though some event listings (inheriting the old MIPARACON numbering) label it the "16th annual" — a minor bit of numbering confusion that's really a story about a franchise reinventing itself rather than simply continuing.
What actually happens over the weekend is where it gets fun. Confirmed activities include a celebrity-led paranormal investigation at historic Pullar Stadium, a "Haunted History River Cruise" along the St. Marys River — the strait connecting Lake Superior to Lake Huron that the city is named for — plus live presentations, psychic gallery readings, and meet-and-greets. One of the marquee stops is an overnight investigation aboard the Museum Ship Valley Camp, a retired 550-foot Great Lakes freighter built in 1917 that hauled cargo for nearly fifty years before being permanently docked as a museum in 1966. The Valley Camp's claim to paranormal fame is almost incidental: it now holds recovered wreckage and artifacts from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the freighter immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" after it sank in a Lake Superior storm in 1975. Museum staff have reported flickering lights that reactivate on their own, shadow figures crossing the deck, and phantom coughing near the old coal-furnace room — the kind of secondhand ghost-story ecosystem that makes a static maritime museum into a legitimate investigation site.
This year's confirmed guest list reads like a who's-who of paranormal cable television: Amy Bruni (Travel Channel's Kindred Spirits), Richard Estep (paranormal author and frequent TV investigator), Jeff Belanger (head writer for Ghost Adventures), plus Aaron Sagers and Sarah Lemos, alongside organizers Brad Blair and Tim Ellis and members of the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society itself.
The choice of city isn't incidental either. Sault Ste. Marie bills itself as Michigan's oldest city, and the claim holds up: French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette formally established a mission there on July 20, 1668, at a bend in the St. Marys River that Indigenous Ojibwe people had already been gathering at for over 2,000 years as "Bawating," the Place of the Rapids. That makes the city older than Detroit, older than St. Louis, older than New Orleans — a genuine historical claim, not just marketing copy, and exactly the kind of centuries-deep backdrop a "haunted history" event wants to lean on. The city was later split by the 1797 transfer of the Upper Peninsula from British to American control, leaving a twin Sault Ste. Marie on the Ontario side of the river to this day.
So the pitch for this year's Ghostly Great Lakes Weekend is really two things stacked on top of each other: a scrappy, once-cancelled convention proving there was still an audience for it, staged in a town whose "haunted" branding is backed by 350-plus years of continuously inhabited history and a shipwreck relic sitting in dry dock a few blocks from the river. Whether or not anyone actually catches a ghost on the Valley Camp's deck, that's a more layered story than "quirky festival" gives it credit for.