Sherwood Point Lighthouse

The ghost of Minnie Cochems, who served as assistant keeper for thirty years until her death in 1928, washes dishes, makes beds, and laughs on the stairs at this Door County lighthouse. It was the last on the Great Lakes to be automated, and a 1984 photograph by a family descendant appears to show a figure in the window.

A young Coast Guardsman and his wife arrived at Sherwood Point for a vacation, left dirty dishes after dinner, and went to bed. They woke to footsteps on the stairs, a woman laughing, and the unmistakable sound of someone washing their dishes. Nobody else was in the building.

Sherwood Point Lighthouse sits at the entrance to the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal on Green Bay, completed on September 28, 1883, after Congress put up twelve thousand dollars for a navigational aid. A crew of twenty men built the keeper's dwelling with red bricks shipped from Detroit, an unusual choice in a county where cream-colored brick was standard. The original fourth-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in France, threw a fixed white light with alternating red flash visible for fifteen miles. Keeper Henry Stanley lit it for the first time on October 10, 1883.

Stanley's niece Minnie Hesh, a twenty-one-year-old orphan from Brooklyn, arrived in the summer of 1884 after both her parents died. She took to the work immediately, particularly when the lens's clockwork mechanism broke and required manual operation. In August 1889, she married William Cochems, a local whose father Mathias was a prominent Sturgeon Bay businessman. When William's hardware business failed in the Panic of 1893, they moved back to Sherwood Point. William became assistant keeper in May 1895 and head keeper that October after Stanley died. Minnie was officially appointed assistant keeper in 1898, one of the few women to hold the title. She kept the post for thirty years.

On August 17, 1928, Minnie had a heart attack getting out of bed in the upstairs bedroom. She was dead before anyone could help. William built a stone birdbath on the grounds as a memorial and continued tending the light alone until his retirement in 1933, closing out nearly thirty-nine years at a single lighthouse.

The Coast Guard personnel who replaced him noticed things right away. Footsteps going up the stairs when the building was empty. A woman's laugh from somewhere upstairs. Dishes that were left dirty in the sink, washed and put away by morning. Beds left rumpled, found neatly made. In the bedroom where Minnie died, the bed was particularly stubborn about staying messy. People would toss the covers aside in the morning and return to find hospital corners.

In 1984, a year after Sherwood Point became the last lighthouse on the Great Lakes to be automated (ending exactly one hundred years of manned service), Robert Cochems, a family descendant, photographed the building and caught what looks like a human form in one of the windows. The photo got passed around and became one of the more discussed pieces of lighthouse ghost evidence in the region. The Northern Alliance of Paranormal Investigators got permission from the Coast Guard to examine the site, the only paranormal team ever authorized to investigate a Coast Guard property. Their equipment malfunctioned during the visit.

Gayle Soucek covered the haunting in her book Haunted Door County, writing that Minnie's hospitality has persisted for decades after her death. Coast Guard personnel who maintain the property don't seem bothered. Their take is straightforward: it's Minnie, and she's welcoming her guests. The lighthouse opens its grounds during Door County Lighthouse Passport Days in May, June, August, and October. Fireside Chat events include bonfires, s'mores, and ghost stories about the woman who spent thirty years keeping the light and apparently decided the job wasn't finished.