Big Bay Point Lighthouse

Keeper William Prior hanged himself in 1901 after his son died. His red-bearded ghost appears in mirrors of the Big Bay lighthouse B&B.

Keeper Harry William Prior's last logbook entry at Big Bay Point Lighthouse, on June 27, 1901, reads simply: "General work." He disappeared into the woods that night with a rope and a bottle of strychnine. Sixteen months later, a deer hunter found his skeleton hanging from a tree limb about half a mile south of the light.

His son George had died two weeks earlier, on June 13, in a Marquette hospital. George had fallen on the steps of the lighthouse's crib and opened his shin down to the bone back in mid-April. The wound went septic. His father carried him to the hospital on April 18 and waited, and then the waiting ended. George was nineteen. Harry had appointed him assistant keeper in 1898 so they could work Lake Superior together.

The son's death in June and the father's disappearance nine days after the funeral are the foundation the Big Bay Point haunting sits on, and all the other accounts lean against them.

The lighthouse was authorized by Congress on February 15, 1893, to plug a 60-mile gap in Lake Superior's navigational lights between Granite Island and the Huron Islands. Harry Prior was its first keeper. He transferred up from a smaller station expecting a career posting, moved his family into the attached dwelling, and by all accounts ran a tidy light.

Today, Big Bay Point is the only operating lighthouse in the United States that runs as a bed and breakfast. Seven guest rooms share the keeper's old quarters. The beacon itself functions as an active aid to navigation. Guests sleep in Prior's old bedroom, climb the same stairs he climbed during his rounds, and sometimes, according to decades of accounts, see him.

The ghost at Big Bay Point has a color: red. Multiple guests, independently, have described glancing at a mirror and seeing a red-haired man standing just behind them, tall, in old keeper's dress. When they turn, there's nothing. Doors bang in the night. Heavy footsteps move along the upstairs hallway at hours when everyone is accounted for in their rooms. A couple of guests have reported waking up to the weight of someone sitting on the edge of the bed, though this is the sort of account innkeepers keep quieter.

Prior was known for his red hair and beard. Witnesses who arrive at the lighthouse knowing nothing about him have described the hair color first, as a curiosity, before innkeepers confirmed what they'd walked into.

The mood at Big Bay Point isn't like other haunted hotels. There's no gleeful horror to it. The story is about a man who lost his only son, logged "General work" the day his grief broke him, and walked into the woods with the tools to end things quietly. The lighthouse he spent nearly a decade of his life tending is now a bed and breakfast, and the beacon he used to light by hand runs on a timer. A guest in the keeper's bedroom once described the feeling as "being in someone's house while they're in the next room, trying not to cry."