Anna Rhodes & the Haunting of the Dice Road Cemetery

There seems to be a good number of reported haunting occurrences on Dice Road in Saginaw County; this particular one concerns the cemetery.

Between Fehn and N. Hemlock roads, Dice Road is a 16-mile stretch (from M-30 to N. River Rd) with the cemetery at the halfway mark. What makes this cemetery the topic of conversation is the legend of Anna Rhodes Millerton. Her light blue & pink apparition has been seen wandering the cemetery woods ever since she committed suicide in 1830. She acts like she doesn’t realize she has passed away and is there waiting for her lover who is never coming back.

ANNA’S STORY IN A NUTSHELL:
Anna was only five years old when her father attempted to kill the whole family by burning them alive. While the family was living in Italy at the time, dad set fire to the home, but Anna was the sole survivor. After moving in with her aunt, they came to America and settled in Saginaw where she soon became best friends with an Indian boy named Dark Hawk.

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Years went by, and Anna grew into a pretty young adult. She became infatuated with a local boy named Jonathan Millerton which did not bode well with Dark Hawk. After being best friends since childhood and spending those years as best friends, Dark Hawk assumed when they got older he and Anna would marry. Observing her crush on Millerton, Dark Hawk lashed out in anger. Anna was spending all her free time with Millerton, with none left for Dark Hawk.

His anger was further fueled by the onslaught of more white settlers arriving and pushing the tribes away. On top of that, some of the crueler whites attempted to push out more tribe members, brutally raping and beating the women. In an attempt to reconcile the whites with the Indian tribe, Anna walked through the woods to the tribe, but once there, she discovered the gruesome carnage recently left by the lumbermen.

When she turned 17, Anna married Millerton, but soon he was shipped out onto the Great Lakes to sail for the lumber trade. After he was gone, Dark Hawk took his revenge. He repeatedly sexually assaulted Anna which greatly added to her already-present traumas of her family’s death and her witnessing the brutality caused upon her Indian friends. Her mind couldn’t handle the overload and she committed suicide.

This is NOT a legend. These facts were researched by the Michigan Historical Research Foundation for Paranormal Activity, with findings mixed with entries from Anna's own journal. Anna's spirit is the oldest known ghost that still haunts a part of Michigan.