In May of 2022, after a family reunion in Hazelhurst, Wisconsin, I headed north toward the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan planning to sketch some lighthouses. It was late afternoon by the time I got to Marquette on the shores of Lake Superior. The Marquette Harbor Lighthouse was easy to find, but I arrived too late for a tour. I set to sketching and then drove down to the Marquette Breakwater Light.

Marquette Harbor Lighthouse owes its presence to the discovery of iron ore just west of Marquette. In 1853 a stone lighthouse was constructed, but it didn’t weather well and was replaced in 1866 by the present lighthouse. A coal fired steam fog whistle was added in the early 1900s. The Marquette Maritime Museum runs lighthouse tours during the season.

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The present tubular steel Marquette Breakwater Light was put up in 1985. It replaced a series of lights, the first built in 1853, to assist ore boats navigating into Marquette Harbor. The present rubble mound breakwater was completed in 1917. A trestle ore dock still standing in the harbor was built in 1932 for the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railroad. It is a tribute to the early days when Marquette Harbor was alive with ore boats. 

I’d made a reservation to spend the night at Big Bay Point Lighthouse and had planned to drive northwest from Big Bay to Copper Harbor on the Keweenaw Peninsula. However, studying the map I realized there is only one way in and out of Big Bay—a 25-mile dead-end road from Marquette. Just part of the game, lighthouses aren’t always easy to come by.

I drove to Big Bay and filled up with gas at Cram’s General Store. Then I followed Big Bay Road past the Lumberjack Tavern and the Thunder Bay Inn, turned onto Squaw Bay Road, and there was Big Bay Point Lighthouse, a spectacular red brick edifice. The inside even more impressive: public spaces painted or varnished in high gloss, rooms with period decorations and furniture. A great view of Lake Superior from the lantern room where some paint was stored for easy touchup—if you own a lighthouse painting never ends.

The innkeeper, Nick Korstad, was outside doing some landscaping. He’d upgraded me to the ‘Keeper Bergan’ room with a view of the lake.

Big Bay Point Lighthouse is a formidable presence. It was built in 1896 as a two-story, eighteen-room, red brick duplex with an enormous sixteen-foot-square tower on the lakeward side. Four flash panels had revolved around a three wick burner to produce a brilliant flash every twenty seconds. The weights which turned the flash panels were housed in a drop tube running from the lantern room down into the basement and had to be wound up every five hours. Today one half of the duplex is fitted out as a seven room bed and breakfast; the owner occupies the other side.

I checked in, grabbed my folding stool, hiked down the hill, and sketched the stunning building as the dipping sun set it aglow. I walked back up and this time found Nick in the kitchen. “Where’s a good place to eat supper?”

“Thunder Bay Inn isn’t open ‘till later in the week, so the only place is the Lumberjack Tavern. It’s at the corner of Big Bay Road and Dump Road. You can’t miss it. If you get to Cram’s, you’ve gone too far.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Big Bay has a population of 189 and half of them were in the tavern. They all knew each other, of course, and all the female customers seemed to be getting hugs and kisses—I think most wives got left home. My blond waitress, Brenda, grew up in Big Bay but had moved away. Now she was back finding her roots. I asked her, “What’s the meaning of ‘LBJ’ in the tile floor?”

“Lumberjack,” she replied looking at me as if I were from another galaxy—so much for blending.  

I ordered a beer, salad, and a grilled chicken sandwich—which came looking like a thick slice of bologna. Meantime Brenda slapped down a well used three ring binder with the title ‘Anatomy of a Murder.’ “This all happened right here in this place in 1952.” 

I began reading the story and I added my fingerprints to the thousands already on the plastic page protectors.

The story: Charlotte Ann, wife of US Army lieutenant Coleman Peterson, claimed that Lumberjack Tavern owner, Mike Chenoweth, had raped her. Peterson immediately pulled out his service revolver, walked to the bar, found Chenoweth  behind the bar mixing drinks, and shot him dead. 

Coleman was defended by local attorney John Voelker and found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Voelker, who was also an author, went home and spent about six weeks writing the story as a novel using the penname Robert Traver.  Anatomy of a Murder immediately became the number one bestselling book in America. 

What was an army lieutenant doing in Big Bay? Well, in the early 1950s, soldiers were stationed at Big Bay Point Lighthouse and surrounds for antiaircraft artillery training. This was the Cold War—we worried that the Soviet Union might attack us by flying over the pole and across Canada.

I remembered reading Anatomy of a Murder in the late 1950s. My then future wife Bobbi and I saw the movie at the Midway Theater in Rockford, Illinois. Otto Preminger directed the film which starred Jimmy Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, Eve Arden, George C. Scott, Duke Ellington, and Orson Bean. 

The judge was played by Joseph Welsh, an actor with superb facial expression and non verbals. He was also an attorney—I guess in the UP it’s a good idea to have a couple professions. Welsh had represented the Army in the McCarthy hearings and went on to become a Michigan Supreme Court Justice. As I paid the check I commented to Brenda, “You should sell copies of the DVD.”

“Just a minute, there might be one around here. I’ll check and see if I can sell it if there is one.”

For $20 I became the proud owner, drove back to the lighthouse, and watched it in my room. It was even better the second time around. 

In the morning, after a scrumptious breakfast of fruit, yogurt, granola, soft boiled egg and bacon, I motored back to Marquette, then over to Baraga and Sand Point Lighthouse. 

Sand Point Lighthouse is located at a campground on Ojibway land on L’Anse Bay just north of Baraga, Michigan. Work on the lighthouse was completed in 1878. Because the shoreline had eroded, the lighthouse was jacked up in 1897 and moved back 200 feet. Richard Thompson left a career as a barber to become the fourth keeper in 1902. In 1922 the lighthouse was decommissioned and a new light placed on a skeleton frame closer to water’s edge. The ‘Barber of Baraga’ moved on to the Duluth Harbor North Breakwater Lighthouse. Since 1994 the house has been owned by the Ojibway Community and used for office space.

Stannard Rock Lighthouse, ‘the loneliest spot in the United States.’ It should be noted, however, that the lighthouse was staffed only during the shipping season, so keepers got the winter off.

It was named for Captain Charles Stannard who charted it in 1835 while sailing American Fur Company’s ship John Jacob Aster. The rock is actually an underground mountain which extends three feet or so above water level. Located 25 miles from the Keweenaw Peninsula in the middle of Lake Superior, it’s a serious threat to mariners.

Construction of the light began in 1877. It used an underwater crib, a technique used for many lighthouses on the Great Lakes. The crib, a log cabin without a roof, was anchored with stone ballast. Stannard Rock’s 62 foot diameter wrought iron cofferdam was placed inside the protection crib, water was pumped out to expose bedrock, and it was filled with concrete to a height of 23 feet above the lake. 

The 1895 Bete Grise Lighthouse replaced the short lived 1870 light. In turn it was replaced in 1933 by an unattended acetylene light topping a square steel frame tower. It is now believed to be in the hands of a private party.

The 1849 Copper Harbor Range Lighthouse survived a lightning strike in 1868 and lived on to be converted to acetylene in 1919 and electricity in 1937. As of 2006 it was operated by the Michigan Department of History, Arts, and Libraries with museum about lighthouse history.

Eagle Harbor Lighthouse was closed on this cloudy day, and a fence kept me from getting to the water side. So, I sketched from the land side and left off the kitchen—my bad.

The 1850 Eagle Harbor Lighthouse sits about 15 miles west of Copper Harbor on the Keweenaw Peninsula. The tower is painted white on the lakeside to contrast with the dark treed background. Eight lamps with fourteen inch reflectors which produced a fixed white light with a focal plane 47 feet above Lake Superior. In 1871 the lighthouse was replaced and 19 years later a coal fired steam fog signal building was added. The lighthouse was closed in 1982 and taken over by the Keweenaw County Historical Society which staffs a museum during the summer months.

I had a little difficulty finding Sand Hills Lighthouse but I persisted. Goggle Maps wasn’t its normal helpful self. I stopped at a general store for a bite of lunch and some directions, which were cheerfully given. A fence with keep out sign greeted me when I followed the turnoff. I sneaked around the gate and sketched. A lakeside sketch would have been preferable, but I didn’t want to get in trouble. 

Sand Hills Lighthouse was built in 1922 to replace the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse. The steel framed masonry building had three apartments for the keeper and the two assistants. A 70-foot tower formed the keystone in the balanced composition. In the mid 1950s Bill Frabotta bought the lighthouse and remodeled it into a bed and breakfast. Bill’s wife Mary Mathews baked pastries for breakfast and evenings she entertained with renditions on the grand piano. Sand Hills Lighthouse was sold in 2021, and the new owner has closed it down for restoration. 

In Ontonagon, Michigan, Google Maps brought me to a shopping area, but I looked up and there sat Ontonagon Lighthouse just across the river.

The picturesque Ontonagon Lighthouse was first lit in 1853. James Paul, the first settler of Ontonagon, Michigan, opened the Deadfall Saloon at the mouth of the river in 1843. In 1847, prospectors came across the Ontonagon Boulder, a six-ton mass of copper now in the Smithsonian Institution. The discovery of copper launched the Minesota [sic] Mine, the most productive copper mine at that time. The first lighthouse was in replaced in 1866 with the church style lighthouse we see today. By the early 1880s lumber had replaced copper as the major export. Diamond Match Company had two mills in town, but in 1896 both burned to the ground along with everything else in town, except the lighthouse. It was retired in 1964 and is now open for visitors. 

When I got home and started doing some research for this story I made a startling discovery—Big Bay Point Lighthouse is or was haunted. Here’s the story: The first keeper, William Prior, had transferred from Stannard Rock, 25 miles out in the middle of Lake Superior. He was reportedly a difficult man to work with and had issues with several assistant keepers. In 1901, he hired his 18 year old son George, but George fell on the steps of the landing crib and cut his leg to the bone. He died at St Mary’s Hospital in Marquette two months later—gangrene had set in. 

William went into severe depression and his log entries got shorter and shorter. The last read: ‘general work.’ He disappeared the next day reportedly carrying his gun and some strychnine into the woods. 

Months later this was entered into the log: 

Mr Fred Babcock came to the station 12:30 pm. While hunting in the woods one and a half mile south of the station this noon he found a skeleton of a man hanging [from] a tree. We went to the place with him and found that the clothing and everything tally with the former keeper of this station who has been missing for seventeen months.

After it was decommissioned, ownership of the Big Bay Point Lighthouse changed hands several times before Massachusetts native Nick Korstad took it over in 2018. Guests reported seeing an apparition in a US Life Saving Service uniform roaming the premises. There was banging on water pipes, faucets turned on, doors slammed. The ‘Northern Express,’ a weekly UP newspaper, quoted Korstad:

It was haunted when I acquired it. There was an apartment in the basement where the previous owners had left a lot of stuff behind. I heard a lot of commotion downstairs and thought someone was in the basement. When I heard them coming up the stairs—I was in the dining room—I heard them walk into the kitchen. I looked over, and no one was there. I felt it walk up behind me, and then it went out through the front door all at once. Whatever it was, I don’t know…

Further investigation indicated Korstad hasn’t seen, heard, or felt any ghosts since. Was it the ghost of William Prior? Probably. However, there was no haunting going on

when I stayed there, and I guess I ought to know—I’ve lived in a haunted house now for 30 years.

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