Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel was built in 1886 over Native American graves. Little Rebecca haunts the fourth floor; a Woman in Black walks a white dog on the porch.

The construction crew digging the foundations of the Grand Hotel in 1886 kept pulling up human remains. They were Native American burials, centuries old, spread through the bluff above the harbor that the hotel's owners had chosen for its view of the Straits of Mackinac. According to the accounts that have come down through island history, not all the remains were moved before the masons poured the footings and started laying the 660-foot front porch that's still the longest in the world. The rest of the bones are still under the dining room.

Whether that disturbed burial ground explains anything specific is a question the hotel's official history carefully declines to engage with. What's not in dispute: the Grand Hotel opened on July 10, 1887, as a summer resort for wealthy Chicago and Detroit families escaping the Midwestern heat. It has hosted presidents, movie stars, and the 1980 filming of Somewhere in Time, the Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour film that turned Mackinac Island into a pilgrimage site for a particular kind of nostalgia. The Musser family has owned it since 1933, and the ghost stories have piled up on their watch.

Little Rebecca is the one people encounter on the fourth floor. She's described as a young girl, pale, quiet, walking the hallway between about 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. and dissolving through the wall at the same spots each time. Guests on the fourth floor who didn't know she existed have reported her anyway, usually by walking out of their room to use the ice machine and coming back white in the face. Rebecca's origin has faded. Island legend says she was a guest at the hotel who fell through a window, though the hotel doesn't confirm it.

The Woman in Black is the fixture of the front porch. She walks a large white dog up and down the planks at an unhurried pace, both of them silhouetted against the Straits in whatever moonlight is available. She's wealthy from her clothes, a Victorian mourning dress head to toe. Guests who've approached to get a closer look have watched her dissolve into nothing, the dog with her. A 1891 register entry often gets invoked as her check-in, but the record is thin.

In the piano room, an elderly gentleman in a top hat smokes a cigar and watches the evening's entertainment from one of the wingback chairs. He looks solid. People have tried to speak to him. He vanishes when anyone gets within a few feet, and the cigar smoke hangs in the air after he's gone.

Only one encounter at the Grand Hotel stands out as actively hostile. A maintenance worker was checking the hotel's theater stage after hours when he saw a shape hovering above the boards, a dark figure with what he described as red eyes. The figure charged at him. He reported being physically knocked to the floor before it was over.

The Musser family doesn't promote any of this. Grand Hotel staff are trained to redirect questions about ghosts to the Mackinac Island ghost tour operators, which the hotel neither endorses nor stops. And yet the stories keep coming in, from guests paying five hundred dollars a night who would rather not admit to seeing a dead girl in the corridor. A thousand-yard porch above a bluff full of moved, partly moved, and un-moved graves is a strange thing to pace in Victorian mourning dress at two in the morning, which is exactly what a guest reported to the front desk in 2019 before refusing to go back upstairs alone.