I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I would be taking a trip up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a long weekend with some friends. Well, that was last weekend, and I loved my time up there. But I have to admit, I also had some “interesting experiences” up there, too. So, today I want to talk about the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
We visited the museum on Friday morning. The sky was robin’s egg blue, and there was a lovely breeze off Lake Superior. The parking lot was FULL, but the crowd moved around easily on the museum’s large campus. I had no idea that there were nine historic structures to visit.
Our first stop (after the Gift Shop) was the Shipwreck Museum, where you can take a self-guided tour of displays about tragic shipwrecks in the area. It’s not a huge space, but all of the walls are filled with displays and artifacts of these tragedies. I walked around some of the displays, but found that after about fifteen minutes, I had to go outside; the sadness in the room was palpable to me.
I remember watching a show called “Haunted Collector,” about a team of paranormal investigators who visit places with paranormal activity and often connect it to objects found there. The star of the show, www.johnzaffis.com, is also the owner of the John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal, where he stores many of the objects he’s collected over the years. In his show, John would demonstrate that objects often have spiritual attachments to them or residues of the dead. I believe the sadness I felt in the Shipwreck Museum was directly attributed to the artifacts rescued from the wreckage.
You’ve probably heard the song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and the well-known line, “Superior, they said, never gives up her dead.” Although it sounds a little creepy, it’s actually true. This is because the bodies of the people who drown in Lake Superior are rarely recovered due to the lake’s extremely cold water and the lack of bacteria to decompose bodies and cause them to float to the top. Instead of decomposing, bodies in Lake Superior can be remarkably well-preserved in the deep, cold water.
So, could those spirits be attached to artifacts because their bodies were never recovered?
I’m not the only one who’s had an experience at the museum. According to Lake Superior Magazine, the Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society has had some encounters of their own. ““I’ve never experienced anything like it before! I felt it walk right past me! I could hear the swooshing of the clothing!”
It was shortly after 2 a.m. when I found Upper Peninsula Paranormal Research Society researcher Jason Fegan standing in front of the main museum building for the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society at Whitefish Point in Michigan.
He wasn’t scared, but clearly, he had encountered “something” beyond his normal understanding.”
So, back to my visit. After the main museum, we decided to visit the keeper’s quarters. When I entered the building, I felt fine. It was an old building with a wooden floor divided into small rooms that housed the kitchen, parlor, office, and other areas now designated for displays. It wasn’t until I entered the small room adjacent to the back staircase that I started feeling “funny.”
I think we’ve talked about this before – people often have physical reactions when they encounter something paranormal. I get very light-headed. I have a friend who gets a tickle in her throat. Anyway, I suddenly felt lightheaded, and I turned to the docent and mentioned that something was strange about this room. She smiled and shrugged. Then my friend mentioned to the docent that she had heard about the ghost of a little girl looking out of one of the windows in the building. The docent replied that it might have been one of the granddaughters of the old keeper who was responsible for restoring part of the museum to its former days.
We thanked the docent and then proceeded up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms. As we walked down the narrow hallways, touring the small bedrooms, my friend mentioned that she hadn’t felt anything downstairs, but now she was. We chatted about the loneliness of being out here on the bay, away from anyone else, and we remarked about the size of the rooms.
We were about to go downstairs when I noticed a guard chain swinging in the last bedroom we’d been in. We hadn’t been near enough to the chain to make it swing, but perhaps my purse caught it when I turned around.
I showed it to my friend, and we watched it for several long moments. Then we realized it wasn’t swinging back and forth; instead, it was as if someone was tugging on the end of it, and it was being pulled.
We both were a little skeptical, so I went back into the room, took hold of the chain, and held it still. Then I carefully released it, so it wouldn’t swing. As soon as I stepped back, the chain was tugged to one side and began moving again.
No other chain on that floor was moving, so we couldn’t blame it on some kind of vibration. We had no explanation.
However, when I started researching the keeper’s house for this Freaky Friday, I realized that we were not alone in experiencing odd things there. This is from the Lake Superior Magazine’s article, “One building left the most impression. All team members working in the keeper’s quarters reported feeling intense apprehension. No one suggested an outright malevolence, but they expressed a definite feeling of something less than welcoming. “It’s really weird because of all the places, that one seemed to be, as far as hearing stuff, getting stuff, it seemed to be the quietest. … (But) the longer you sat there, you just felt like you wanted to get up and leave,” says Tim.
Longtime keeper Robert Carlson was known as a very difficult man to get along with. Could it be his spirit is so unwelcoming to strangers?”
I didn’t feel unwelcome, quite the opposite. I felt a female presence who didn’t seem malevolent at all. But perhaps Robert Carlson was in the lighthouse while I was visiting, and I was interacting with his wife or granddaughter.
If you haven’t been to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, I highly recommend that you put it on your bucket list. I’m sure you’ll have quite a “spirited” visit.
Happy Friday!!!