In Brief
At Seul Choix Point Lighthouse in Gulliver, Michigan, keeper Joseph Townshend died one Upper Peninsula winter in 1910 and was embalmed in the basement. He has never quite left: cigar smoke in the rooms, faces in a mirror, forks turned the way he liked them.
The Full Story
At Seul Choix Point Lighthouse in Gulliver, Michigan, the keeper has been dead since 1910 and still won't leave the table alone. Set the dining room the American way, with the forks tine-side up, and the staff say you'll come back to find them turned over, tine-side down — the British way Captain Joseph Townshend preferred to lay his own.
Townshend kept the light here in the early 1900s, somewhere around 1901 or 1902; the records don't quite agree on the year. They agree on the rest. He smoked cigars, and the story goes his wife forbade him to light one indoors. He doesn't seem to honor that anymore. The pungent smell of cigar smoke drifts through the living quarters where no one is smoking, and people who climb to the upstairs bedroom report hazy faces surfacing in the dresser mirror.
What happened to him is the part that stays. When Townshend died in the dead of an Upper Peninsula winter, the ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave. So, the story goes, they embalmed him in the lighthouse basement and laid him out in state in the downstairs parlor — the same room the museum walks visitors through today — where he stayed for roughly three weeks while relatives traveled north to reach the body.
The brick tower went up in the 1890s, its third-order Fresnel lens lit in 1895, marking the only safe harbor along that stretch of Lake Michigan's north shore. "Seul Choix" is French for "only choice." The light was automated in 1972 and the last keepers moved out, and the Gulliver Historical Society runs the keeper's dwelling as a museum now, open through the warmer months.
Its longtime president, Marilyn Fischer, has written four books on the place and says it holds several spirits — Townshend the one whose biography fits the haunting like a glove. "I believe all the spirits stay because they love their lighthouse so much, they don't want to leave," she says. The Society has collected reports, photographs, and recordings for decades.
Kathleen Tedsen, a paranormal investigator who calls herself a lifelong skeptic, came to test the place and left it differently. "Believe it or not, I am and will always be a skeptic," she said. And then: "It was the most compelling investigation I've done in any lighthouse."
Townshend kept this light in life and seems unwilling to surrender it in death. The forks keep turning over.
