Waugoshance Lighthouse

An offshore lighthouse built in 1851 on a shallow shoal in Lake Michigan near Mackinaw City. The light was decommissioned in 1912 after the construction of the White Shoal Light. The crumbling structure sits in open water accessible only by boat.

Waugoshance Lighthouse stands on a shoal in Lake Michigan near the Straits of Mackinac, accessible only by boat from Wilderness State Park in Emmet County. Built in 1851 as one of the first offshore lighthouses on the Great Lakes, the structure earned the nickname "Wobbleshanks" for the way it swayed in heavy weather. The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1912 when the newer White Shoal Light took over its duties, and Waugoshance was abandoned to the elements, and to whatever else remained inside.

The ghost of Waugoshance is attributed to John Herman, who worked at the lighthouse first as an assistant keeper beginning in 1887 and was promoted to head keeper in 1892. Herman was a lifelong bachelor with two great passions: alcohol and practical jokes. The legend that grew around his death claims that Herman locked an assistant keeper in the lantern room as a prank, and when the assistant finally managed to escape, Herman was nowhere to be found. It was assumed that the keeper, drunk as usual, had fallen into Lake Michigan and drowned. Unexplained events at the lighthouse were forever after attributed to the ghost of John Herman.

Recent historical research, however, has revealed a different story. The forty-one-year-old Herman had been on Mackinac Island in October 1900, under the care of a doctor. He died on October 14, 1900, of a heart attack, not a drunken tumble into the lake. But as is often the case in Michigan lighthouse lore, the legend proved more durable than the facts.

Keepers who served at Waugoshance after Herman's death reported a litany of unexplained phenomena consistent with a prankster ghost. Chairs were kicked out from underneath keepers who dozed off during their watch. Coal buckets filled by themselves. Furniture moved about the rooms as if rearranged by a poltergeist with opinions about interior design. The activity was persistent enough and unsettling enough that it contributed to the general reluctance of keepers to serve at the already-isolated station.

Since its decommissioning in 1912, Waugoshance Lighthouse has been crumbling into Lake Michigan. Efforts to save the structure have been largely abandoned as the lighthouse deteriorates beyond practical repair. The U.S. Navy used it for target practice during World War II, accelerating the decay. Today, the lighthouse is a skeletal ruin rising from the water, its walls collapsing, its lantern room open to the sky. But those who have visited the lighthouse by boat report that the structure does not feel empty. Whether John Herman is still pulling pranks or the lighthouse has absorbed something from the cold waters of the Straits, Waugoshance remains one of Michigan's most inaccessible and most unsettling haunted locations.