In Brief
Big Bay Point Lighthouse near Marquette, Michigan is now a bed and breakfast where guests sleep in the keeper's old quarters. For decades they've reported a tall, red-haired man in old keeper's dress, glimpsed in mirrors, gone the moment they turn around.
The Full Story
Big Bay Point Lighthouse, on the Lake Superior shore near Marquette, Michigan, is now a bed and breakfast, and the guests who sleep in the keeper's old quarters keep meeting the same man. He's tall, red-haired, dressed the way a keeper dressed a century ago, and they only catch him in the mirrors. Look in the glass and he's there behind you. Turn around and he's gone.
They think they know who he is.
Harry William Prior was the first keeper here, transferred up from Stannard Rock, a remote light 25 miles offshore, expecting Big Bay to be a steady family posting. Congress had authorized the lighthouse in 1893 to fill a gap in Lake Superior's chain of lights, and it was lit in October 1896. The keeper's dwelling was an 18-room duplex, built large enough to hold a keeper and an assistant and both their families. By 1900 Prior's son George had been appointed that assistant keeper, so father and son could tend the light together.
It didn't last. In April 1901, George fell on the steps of the landing crib, the timber pier below the station. The leg wound went septic. He was taken to a hospital in Marquette and died there on June 13, a teenager, nineteen by some accounts.
Two weeks later, on June 28, his father walked into the woods south of the light carrying a gun and a bottle of strychnine. He didn't come back. A hunter found his skeleton more than seventeen months later, hanging from a tree about a mile and a half south of the station.
Prior was known for his red hair and beard. In the mirror sightings, the hair is the first thing guests describe, before anyone tells them the story.
The light he once tended by hand runs on its own now, an automated beacon among the brightest on Lake Superior, the keeper era long over. The duplex was converted to an inn in 1986, one of the few surviving lighthouses run as a bed and breakfast, with seven guest rooms today. Guests report banging on the water pipes, faucets left running, doors that slam in the dark. The ghost, they say, is drawn to water, and turns the taps on himself.
An owner from the late 1980s insisted to a reporter that he and his wife "did not invent Pryor's ghost to drum up business." A more recent owner described something else: a presence he felt walk up behind him and then out through the front door, all at once.
Prior's wife and four children left the lighthouse that October, planning to settle in Marquette. The father stayed.
