Waugoshance Lighthouse

An abandoned Lake Michigan lighthouse, bombed by WWII pilots. Keeper John Herman vanished after a prank in the 1890s. Willie remains.

Keepers at Waugoshance Lighthouse kept quitting. The station, a 76-foot brick tower perched on a submerged shoal in upper Lake Michigan, was one of the worst assignments in the entire U.S. Lighthouse Service by the late nineteenth century. One keeper, John Herman, had a reputation for heavy drinking and practical jokes, and in the 1890s he locked an assistant in the lantern room as a prank. The founding incident of the "Waugoshance Willie" legend follows: Herman, so the account goes, went out to the boathouse, and when the assistant finally got loose, Herman was gone. He was never seen again. Most written accounts of the story name Herman as Willie, though the nickname itself came into use later, applied by keepers who believed the station was occupied by something they couldn't name directly.

The assistant searched the whole station. No body turned up. No boat was missing. Herman had last been seen heading for the boathouse, and after that there's just water. The Lighthouse Service's own records list him as missing, presumed drowned. Subsequent keepers reported chairs moving in the kitchen, doors slamming on calm days, and the iron trap door to the basement opening and closing without a hand on it. They started calling the presence Waugoshance Willie, and by 1910 the station had a reputation among Great Lakes keepers as one you didn't want.

It's hard to overstate how brutal Waugoshance was as a duty station. The lighthouse sits alone, miles from shore, on a reef that disappears in storms. There's no keeper's dwelling on land, no town, no neighbors. Winter service stopped by November because the straits froze, and the men who drew the summer rotation were isolated in a brick cylinder in the middle of an inland sea. The station's original 1851 structure was rebuilt in 1870 with the distinctive barrel-shaped daymark, but the conditions never improved. Keepers resigned. Replacements resigned. By 1910 the service was having trouble staffing it at all.

The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1912 when the White Shoal Light, a newer and more reliable station a few miles north, took over. After that, Waugoshance became Navy property. During World War II, the station was used for live bombing practice: carrier pilots in training ran runs on the tower, and the scars are still visible in the brickwork on the east side. The upper gallery is missing. The lantern is gone. Most of what remains is a fire-damaged shell, standing stubbornly upright on its shoal more than a century after the last keeper left.

Boaters who anchor nearby keep reporting light in the upper windows at night. It's the modern shape of the haunting. There's no source of light in the structure: no wiring, no kerosene, no residents. But fishermen out of Cross Village and Mackinaw City have reported a yellowish glow in one of the upper windows on still summer nights, and the Coast Guard has investigated more than once. A 1990s survey documented the damage from the bombing runs and made no mention of any residual equipment that could produce a reflection. Whichever explanation people reach for, the structure itself isn't supposed to be producing that glow.

The Waugoshance Lighthouse Preservation Society has been trying to stabilize what's left since 2006. The tower is in rough condition, and the society's mission is mostly to keep it from collapsing into the lake before the state decides what to do with it. Volunteers make summer trips out to the shoal to patch brick and clear debris. A few of them have mentioned, off the record, hearing footsteps on the stairs above them while they were working below. One volunteer told Great Lakes Lighthouse magazine in 2014 that he heard a man cough inside the tower, looked up, and found he was alone. He finished the day's work in the boathouse.

Is Waugoshance Willie really John Herman? Probably not in any evidentiary sense. His disappearance is a story that attaches itself to an isolated lighthouse whether or not the specific man walked off the station, and the "keeper drowned, keeper now haunts" template is the most common ghost story template in the Great Lakes. What's different about Waugoshance is the condition of the building. There's no electricity to misfire, no heating system to rattle, no tourists to misremember. It's a half-demolished brick tower in the middle of Lake Michigan with a reputation older than most people alive and a yellow light in an upper window on some nights, which is more than most decommissioned stations ever accumulate.