Explorin’ Da UP, Eh!

Jess

Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is a story-driven podcast uncovering the fascinating history, forgotten stories, natural wonders, and local legends of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Hop in the Jeep with host Jess as we explore everything from abandoned copper mining towns and Lake Superior shipwrecks to deadly blizzards, wilderness survival, unusual wildlife, and the people who shaped the UP. Each episode takes a deep dive into a real story, separating historical fact from folklore while bringing the places and people of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to life. www.explorindaupeh.com

Episodes

  1. Nov 1

    The Kinross Incident (Halloween Special)

    On November 23, 1953, two young Air Force officers took off from Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on what should have been a routine interception mission. Their target? An unidentified object moving across the skies above Lake Superior. As their fighter approached the mysterious object, radar operators watched two blips merge into one. Moments later, the aircraft vanished. Neither the plane nor the men aboard were ever found. For this Halloween special of Explorin' Da UP, Eh!, we're diving into one of the Upper Peninsula's most chilling unsolved mysteries. Who were Felix Moncla Jr. and Robert Wilson? What actually happened that November night? And how did their disappearance become one of America's most enduring UFO legends? From original military investigations and conflicting witness accounts to mechanical failures, government cover-up theories, and possible extraterrestrial encounters, we're exploring the evidence, the speculation, and the secrets that may still lie beneath Lake Superior. Because even if the answer isn't aliens, Michigan's Upper Peninsula has plenty of mysteries left to uncover. 🎃 Happy Halloween! Want to Know More? Explore the historical photographs, original military records, and additional research behind this episode on the website!

    The Kinross Incident (Halloween Special)

  2. Oct 17

    Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Part 1: From Keweenaw Bay to Carlisle

    In 1889, a fourteen-year-old Ojibwe girl named Margaret Davis left her home on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Reservation in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She was sent more than 800 miles away to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. She would never make it home. More than a century later, Margaret's story offers a window into a much larger history: the Ojibwe people of Lake Superior, treaties and threatened removal, Catholic mission schools, and a federal boarding school system designed to separate Native children from their families, languages, and cultures. In Part One of this two-part special, we travel from the shores of Keweenaw Bay to the classrooms and cemetery of Carlisle. Along the way, we examine original student records, survivor testimony, and allegations of abuse that reveal what life inside these institutions could look like, and the families who fought to bring their children home. This episode grew out of my time as a visiting medical student with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. I'm not Native, and this is not my history to tell alone. Throughout the episode, we'll turn to historical documents, Native voices, and the community's own resources to better understand this difficult chapter of Upper Peninsula history. An important update: Since this episode was recorded, new reporting published October 12, 2026, indicates that Margaret Davis's remains have finally been returned home, 134 years after her death. Our companion guide includes this update and additional historical resources. 📖 Want to Know More? Explore historical photographs, original Carlisle records, survivor interviews, treaty documents, and further reading in the companion guide: [Click here!] Content note: This episode discusses forced family separation, child abuse, institutional mistreatment, illness, and death in the Indian boarding school system.

    Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Part 1: From Keweenaw Bay to Carlisle

  3. Sep 7

    The 1966 Blizzard

    A forgotten memorial. A brutal November storm. Two people who came heartbreakingly close to safety. And, hundreds of miles away, a Great Lakes freighter fighting for its life. In this episode of Explorin’ Da UP, Eh!, we follow the deadly 1966 blizzard from the backroads north of Newberry to the freezing waters of Lake Huron. Along the way, we meet Faye and Leslie Purman, explore the physiology of hypothermia, step aboard the Daniel J. Morrell with sole survivor Dennis Hale, and ask an uncomfortable question: how much of survival comes down to preparation, and how much comes down to luck? It is a story about winter in the Upper Peninsula at its most beautiful, most unforgiving, and most dangerous. Want to know more, see photos, or explore the some of the sources used for this episode? Want To Know More Notes 📧 Questions, corrections, or a UP story you think I should explore? explorindaupeh@gmail.com

    The 1966 Blizzard

  4. Aug 21

    Seney: The Town From Hell

    The story goes that if you walked up to the railroad agent and asked for a ticket to hell, he’d hand you one to Seney. Drive through Seney today and that sounds almost ridiculous. It’s a quiet crossroads along M-28. But in the late nineteenth century, trains were pouring lumberjacks, supplies, money, and whiskey into a town built in the middle of wet Upper Peninsula forest. Hotels filled. Saloons multiplied. Men came out of isolated logging camps with months of wages in their pockets, and an entire economy was waiting to help them spend it. In this episode, we follow the people behind that reputation. There’s Phil Grondin, who arrived as a logging-camp cook and watched a muddy railroad stop grow into a boomtown. There’s Dr. Frank Bohn, who came to Seney at only twenty-four years old and spent his first Christmas treating men injured in fights. And there’s the feud between Dan Dunn and the Harcourt family. Two shootings. Two dead men. A manslaughter conviction. Years in the Marquette prison. And eventually, a state review that raised serious questions about whether the second killing had been justified. Then there’s Ram’s Pasture. Shanghaied workers. A secret stockade. Armed guards. Mastiffs supposedly trained to hunt down anyone who escaped. It’s a great story. But is it true? We’ll follow that legend, meet some of Seney’s stranger characters, including the man remembered as the Ogre of Seney, and look at how newspapers helped turn a rough lumber town into something almost mythological. And decades later, a twenty-year-old Ernest Hemingway would step off the train, find the legendary town mostly gone, and turn what remained into one of the most famous landscapes in American literature. Seney is a story about logging, violence, survival, folklore, and what happens when a town’s reputation becomes louder than the people who actually lived there. Want to know more? Explore the historical records, newspaper reports, archival collections, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UiM5giLE9gGpdPuMw07CS5zkL63zt_qK/view?usp=sharing Have a story, correction, family connection, photograph, or piece of UP history I should investigate? Email me at explorindaupeh@gmail.com Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲venmo💲

    Seney: The Town From Hell

  5. Aug 20

    Irish Hollow Cemetery

    A wrong turn can lead to a good story. Sometimes, so can a U-turn. On the way home from the Porcupine Mountains, a small sign outside Rockland caught my attention: Irish Hollow Cemetery. I turned down the dirt road expecting a quick stop. Instead, I found gravestones dating back to the earliest days of the western UP copper boom and evidence of a community I never knew existed. In this episode, we follow those stones into the world that once surrounded them: Irish copper miners crossing an ocean for work, a booming mining settlement that has nearly disappeared into the woods, a long-lost Catholic church, families facing deadly nineteenth-century epidemics, and a massive piece of native copper that took miners more than a year to cut apart. And then there's the riot. An axe. A dead miner. A burning saloon. Men reportedly leaping from the windows and roof. Hundreds of angry Irish miners supposedly preparing to march through the wilderness for revenge. It's a great story. But is it true? Irish Hollow is a story about immigration, mining, disease, folklore, and how an entire community can almost disappear while the people who lived there remain, quite literally, carved in stone. Want to know more? Explore the historical records, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=drive_link Have a story, correction, family connection, or piece of UP history I should investigate? Email me at explorindaupeh@gmail.com Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲Venmo💲

    Irish Hollow Cemetery

  6. Aug 1

    Seney Wildlife Refuge

    It's easy to look at Seney National Wildlife Refuge and assume it has always been this way. Quiet pools. Trumpeter swans. Loons calling across the water. Moose somewhere out in the marsh if you’re lucky enough to spot one. But a little over a century ago, people were trying to make much of this place into farmland. They dug enormous drainage ditches through the wetlands, sold pieces of the swamp to hopeful settlers, and tried to force an Upper Peninsula landscape into becoming something it simply wasn’t very good at being. It didn’t work. In this episode, we follow Seney from one of the great wetlands of the eastern Upper Peninsula, through logging, drainage schemes, failed farms, fire, and eventually one of the largest wildlife restoration projects in Michigan. We’ll meet the Civilian Conservation Corps crews who built the refuge’s famous system of pools and dikes, learn why those pools are more artificial than they look, and meet Betty Losey, a young biologist who spent years studying Seney’s trumpeter swans and became one of the early women doing field research in American wildlife biology. And we’ll look at something even stranger. More than eighty years after people tried to drain Seney’s wetlands, refuge scientists are still working to undo some of those changes. Sometimes restoring a place doesn’t mean building something new. Sometimes it means figuring out how to let the water come back. Want to know more? Explore the historical records, maps, refuge documents, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=sharing Have a story, correction, family connection, photograph, or piece of UP history I should investigate? Email me at explorindaupeh@gmail.com Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲Venmo 💲

    Seney Wildlife Refuge

  7. Aug 1

    Introduction

    Welcome to Explorin’ Da UP, Eh!, a podcast about the true stories, forgotten history, natural wonders, and local legends hiding throughout Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this short introduction, your host Jess explains what inspired the podcast, introduces the Jeep that will carry us along the way, and shares what listeners can expect from future episodes. This is not your typical travel guide. We are skipping the campground reviews and chasing the stories that make the UP feel alive. Hop in, buckle up, and let’s go explorin’ 🥾🌲 Want to support the show? Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: venmo account Listening, sharing the show, and sending in stories or corrections is more than enough support, too!

  • 1 Trailer
    6 Episodes

Trailer

About

Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is a story-driven podcast uncovering the fascinating history, forgotten stories, natural wonders, and local legends of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Hop in the Jeep with host Jess as we explore everything from abandoned copper mining towns and Lake Superior shipwrecks to deadly blizzards, wilderness survival, unusual wildlife, and the people who shaped the UP. Each episode takes a deep dive into a real story, separating historical fact from folklore while bringing the places and people of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to life. www.explorindaupeh.com

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