Dead Malls Season 7 Episode 8 - Lakeshore Mall (WI)

Picture this.
It was a crisp, cool summer morning in August of 2024. My friend and I had both just driven five hours each through the dead night to meet at the now-torn-down Northridge Mall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was nearing demolition, and we hoped we could be some of the last to see it in all its eerie beauty. Just imagine the two of us, at 4 AM, rustling through the bushes as quietly as we could, creeping alongside the abandoned mall. Dodging security, testing doors (unsuccessfully), and whispering about what to do next. In the end, we failed to get inside. As the sun began to rise, I suggested we drive an hour further north to try our luck at another site: the abandoned and never-before-documented (in its abandoned state) Lakeshore Mall — formerly Edgewater Plaza — in Manitowoc. Wisconsin was once full of small malls, most of them dingy and reeking of age. Back then, it seemed like every town over 25,000 residents had at least one. Manitowoc, with only about 35,000 people, somehow had two — and they sat right across the street from each other.
Somehow, Lakeshore hung on until 2018, supported only by a handful of small businesses. It even outlasted Mid-Cities, which sat abandoned for 15 years before being demolished in 2015. That site today? Just a patch of dirt.
When Bon-Ton went bankrupt in 2018, Lakeshore finally went dark. Not with a bang — just a whimper. The mall sat abandoned for years on the north side of town — the second ghost mall to haunt Manitowoc. Some even called it the ghost of retail past itself. Boarded up, forgotten by many… but not by me. By summer 2024, demolition had begun — though we didn’t know it yet. The front doors of the old Prange Way had been ripped right off, giving us easy access. Perfect access. Inside, we found the ghost itself.
And perhaps some of its fragments quite literally spilling into our reality — purging the dank ceilings with stray glimmers of light and strange reflections that didn’t belong. It felt wrong, as if the mall itself were bleeding through time, leaving us stranded in the overlap.
Y O U . . .
Distant clatters echoed down the corridors. Bullet casings littered the shag carpets. It was as if we were attempting to find a crime scene, wandering every dark, rotten back area the old mall still had to offer. At times, we got lost in winding shelving alcoves that felt like something straight out of a horror game… join me today, as we tell the story of Lakeshore Mall, formerly the Edgewater Plaza, and see it in its final state before demolition in August of 2024.

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