The Landmark Inn

A distinguished hotel in downtown Marquette, originally built as the Northland Inn in 1930. The hotel has hosted notable guests including Amelia Earhart, Abbott and Costello, and the Grateful Dead.

The Landmark Inn in downtown Marquette was originally built as the Hotel Northland, with construction beginning in 1917 and the building finally opening to the public on January 8, 1930, after thirteen years of work. The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company built the hotel to accommodate the influx of visitors and businessmen drawn to the Marquette area during the mining boom that powered much of America's industrial growth. The hotel hosted notable guests including Amelia Earhart, who stayed in Room 502 in 1932, a room now named in her honor.

The Landmark Inn's most famous haunting involves the Lilac Lady, a figure whose story is rooted in the kind of romantic tragedy that produces the most enduring ghost legends. During the 1930s, when the hotel was still the Northland, a young librarian fell in love with a crewman on one of the Great Lakes ore carriers that docked in Marquette's harbor. The crewman planned to marry her after his final cruise on the lake. But the ship was swept away in a storm, carrying the entire crew to the bottom of Lake Superior. The librarian never recovered from the loss. She died shortly after, some say of a broken heart, and her spirit has haunted the hotel's sixth floor ever since.

The Lilac Lady is associated with a floral scent, a lilac perfume that appears without warning in the sixth-floor hallway and in the room that bears her name. The scent is described as sudden and overwhelming, filling a space for a few moments before vanishing as quickly as it appeared. Since the hotel's renovation and reopening in 1997, the Lilac Room has remained the most paranormally active space in the building. Hotel employees have reported receiving phone calls from the Lilac Room while it was vacant, the phone ringing at the front desk with the room's extension appearing on the display, only for staff to find the room empty and locked when they investigate.

The Landmark Inn has been featured on Michigan's official tourism website as one of the Upper Peninsula's most haunted locations, and Haunted Rooms America has documented the hotel's paranormal history extensively. Travel Marquette includes the inn on its list of haunted places in Marquette County. For guests who request the Lilac Room specifically, the hotel obliges, and many have reported waking in the night to the sweet, impossible scent of flowers blooming in a room where no flowers exist.