The Un-Haunting of the Islands

With lighthouses, hermits, lost sailors, and shipwrecks, the Apostles are a cauldron of potential ghost stories but would undoing them bring us even closer to the real power of this place?

It was a calm August morning in 1925. The waters of Lake Superior were as quiet as a church mouse – still, blue, as calm as something sleeping. The freighter the John Dunne, Jr. carrying 9,000 tons of ore was gliding seamlessly, or so it seemed, in the lullaby waters of the Apostle Islands between Devils Island and Outer Island, downbound from Duluth making just under 10 knots.

What happened next has never been explained. Here’s the way it was reported in by Detroit News reporter Stella M. Champney years after the event:

“… an upheaval from below tossed the 400-foot freighter and the 9,000 tons of ore she was carrying four inches out of the water and left the crew shaken and bewildered. The story was verified for me by H. Otis Smith, chief engineer on the ship that was lifted like a chip by that mysterious subterranean explosion. ‘There was a roar like a clap of THUNDER,’ Smith said, ‘and the ship rose upwards as if the back of some huge monster and then settled down again. The water boiled around the ship in a great white churning billows, then spread out in an ever-widening circle as waves will when a stone is thrown in calm water.

I ran down to the engine room, thinking something had let go. Everything was in order. An oiler came up from below, his face like chalk, ‘What blew up?’ he asked. ‘Did we hit something?’

Men swarmed about. Some of them had been thrown out of their beds by the shock. They ran here and there, trying to discover the cause.’

There was no answer. The sea was like glass a moment before, not a breath of air stirring. It was like a bolt from a clear sky.”

Captain N.B. Roach gathered his crew and warned, “We’ll just be laughed at if we report an earthquake out in Lake Superior.” He urged them to “say nothing about this.”

It was years anyone on the crew leaked the story to the press. Even then, no reasonable explanation for what happened was confirmed.

There is a power in Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands, that much is undeniable. Storm winds howl with the moans of drowning sailors, waves rise and curve like slashing claws, lighthouses blink casting half-seen shadows. A thick steel door creaks closed untouched in a light tower. A camper hears sticks cracking in the darkness behind the tent, and in the morning there are unidentified tracks on the beach.

These islands are ripe for the ghastly pickings of those whose dark thoughts turn to ghost stories this time of year. These wind-swept October days, you don’t have to look far to find the fog of fear. Take for example this spot:

From this one well-trodden spot on Bayfield’s Washington Avenue beach, there are the echoes of two tales worthy of spinning the mist into visions of ghostly forms.

The pilings on the right are the bones of the dock that echoed with the impatient footfalls of Captain John McKay four full days behind on the Manistee downbound for Ontonagon but chased off the lake by a November storm in 1883.

After nearly wearing ruts in the wood slats of the dock, McKay a seasoned lake captain, convinced himself that the storm was letting up and ordered the crew and passengers back aboard for an 8pm departure onThursday evening, November 15th. A handful of passengers balked and stayed behind, safe on shore. The rest, untied the the venerable ship from that old dock and ventured out. If those old pilings could talk, they might speak in the voice of local mariner, John A. Jacobs who would later write:

“I was in Bayfield the night she left on that last fateful trip. I was aboard the Manistee for about an hour, visiting with the crew, as I was acquainted with nearly all of them. I was on the dock when McKay gave a blast of the whistle to let go the lines, and I can see her now backing out from the shelter of that dock and into that fearful storm. The Manistee was no fit boat to be out on Lake Superior in a storm like that, loaded to the guards as she was. The passenger’s cabin was filled with furniture making her top-heavy … I never saw Captain McKay again. The Manistee went to the bottom of Lake Superior with every soul aboard.”

Now turn your head. From that same spot, without even moving your feet, you can go from the wreck of the Manistee to the Christmas Eve tragedy of 1893 that began at the quarry on the southern end of Basswood Island.

During the heyday of brownstone quarrying, over a hundred men worked the rock on Basswood Island earning a dollar a day and usually spending it just as quickly. However Mrs. McCrea, wife of one of the workers living over the winter at the quarry, had saved a few precious dollars for Christmas gifts and set out to walk the three miles of ice across the West Channel to the shops in Bayfield on Christmas Eve 1893.

The trip over was uneventful, if cold. The shops of Bayfield were warm and brightly-lit. With her arms full of colorfully-wrapped packages, Mrs. McCrea began the long hike back, but struggled against a rising wind, blowing snow, and fading light. She became lost in the growing blizzard, wandering nearly a mile off course to finally collapse, exhausted, in the snow.

That is where her husband would find her, hours later after frantically retracing her steps. His wife was cold, clinging to life, unable to talk. And that is where Mrs. McCrea would die, on the ice, on that Christmas Eve, a mile from home, in the arms of her husband surrounded by Christmas gifts never to be opened.

Does the ghost of Captain McKay still walk the Washington Avenue dock on autumn nights or is it just the clicking and clattering of old pilings moving in the waves? Is that the lost voice of Mrs. McCrea calling out to her husband that moans in the Christmas winds or just the hollow throat of a winter’s storm?

And there are dozens more - tales of the Hermit of Hermit Island, of pirate treasure in the caves of Oak Island, of the seven men who perished in the waves of that infamous storm of September 2nd, 1905 on the shores of Sand Island. The Apostles are a veritable witch’s cauldron for the brewing of ghost stories to chill a Halloween night. But does the weaving of the dark threads of those tales say more about the landscape of the human mind than the islands themselves?

When faced with the undeniable and unfathomable power of a place like the Apostle Islands and Lake Superior, the human mind grapples to find a handhold. It is easier to call the unknown sounds and half-seen visions “ghosts” than to admit the unthinkable power of nature, a power so beyond our control that we make up stories to pretend we can wrest even the slightest influence. Ghost stories make the unknown at least a little more knowable, tying the supernatural to our thin grasp of reality with wisps of stories where the haunted walk.

It may be comforting, to some. Who doesn’t love a good ghost story? But I also think such stories robs us of something - the willingness to simply admit that there are things bigger than us, beyond the horizons of our comprehension, and the humbling effect that such an admission would have on us as humans.

Maybe there are “ghosts” in the Islands. Maybe the lake does wail and moan with the voices of the lost. Or maybe it is all just a power beyond comprehension that should fill us all with awe, not fear. Call that power what you will - God or ghosts, the supernatural or simply natural - there is something in these waves and rugged shorelines, something that we cannot, nor ever will be able to, control. We can spin it into ghost stories or acknowledge the power of nature to humble us and thereby make us more human. Or, perhaps, both.

At least one night a year, I love a good ghost story as much as anyone. The rest of the year, I try to see that power not as something to fear but as something to celebrate and perhaps to ponder silently as we pass out candy and tell ghost stories on the shores of the big lake on Halloween night.

Happy Halloween.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless noted)

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