Seul Choix Point Lighthouse

Keeper Willie Townshend died here in 1910 and was embalmed in the cellar. The lighthouse has smelled like his cigars ever since.

Keeper Joseph Willie Townshend died in this lighthouse in 1910, and because it was deep winter on the Upper Peninsula, his body couldn't be shipped out for burial. The family embalmed him in the cellar and laid him in state in the downstairs parlor until relatives could make the trip north. He stayed down there, unmoved, for weeks.

Ever since, the place smells like cigar smoke. Townshend loved cigars. His wife had banned them inside the dwelling while he was alive. The smell only started after his death.

That cigar smell is the whole case for the haunting, and it's held up for over a hundred years. Marilyn Fischer, who helped found the Gulliver Historical Society and reopened Seul Choix Point Lighthouse as a museum, says the phantom cigar smoke is what keeps convincing her that Keeper Willie is still in the building. Visitors catch it in the living quarters, in the stairwell, in rooms nobody's been in for hours. There's nothing burning. Nobody's smoking.

The station was established in 1892 with a temporary beacon and the permanent light went into service in 1895, guiding freighters along the north shore of Lake Michigan in Schoolcraft County. Townshend was appointed principal keeper in 1901. He served eight years before he died.

His successor, William W. Blanchard, ran the light from 1910 to 1941 alongside assistants who both happened to also be named William. The staff called themselves the Three Bills. Blanchard's wife Amanda worked as a midwife out of the keeper's dwelling. Amanda's mother, Mary Pebble, died in the lighthouse in February 1919, just after a violent storm. She was being treated for cancer. Paranormal investigator Chad Wilson Tedsen, who's investigated over 350 sites, says Seul Choix is the only lighthouse where he came away with evidence he couldn't explain, and some of what he found points to Blanchard and Pebble, not just Townshend.

The phenomena people report are specific and domestic. A mirror on the second floor that some claim acts as a portal. Dishes in the kitchen rearranged between tours. Dining room settings changed overnight when the museum is locked. A figure in a keeper's uniform looking out the second-floor bedroom window from the lake side. The lighthouse is one of the more thoroughly documented paranormal sites in Michigan, written up by Chad Patrick Wilson Tedsen in a feature-length investigation and covered by local papers every October.

The building itself is two stories of red brick with an attached white tower, about 80 feet tall, automated in 1972 when the Coast Guard ended keeper service. It's now run as a museum by the Gulliver Historical Society, which hosts summer tours and an October ghost tour in the cellar where Townshend was embalmed. On those October tours, most visitors report catching the tobacco smell within a few minutes of walking in.