Searchers discover ‘ghost ship’ that sank in Lake Michigan almost 140 years ago

MADISON, Wis. (AP) – After decades of scouring the bottom of Lake Michigan, searchers have finally found the wreckage of a “ghost ship” that sank during a ferocious storm almost 140 years ago off the Wisconsin coastline.

The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association announced Monday that a team led by researcher Brendon Baillod found the wreck of the F.J. King. Baillod said in an email to The Associated Press that the wreckage was discovered on June 28.

According to the announcement, Baillod’s team found the ship off Bailey’s Harbor, a town of about 280 people on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, an outcropping of land jutting into Lake Michigan that gives the state its distinctive mitten-thumb shape.

The F. J. King was a 144-foot (43.89 meters), three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 in Toledo, Ohio, to transport grain and iron ore. According to the historical society and archaeology association’s announcement, the ship ran into a gale off the Door Peninsula on Sept. 15, 1886, while moving iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago.

Waves estimated at 8 to 10 feet (2.4 to 3 meters) ruptured her seams and after several hours of pumping Captain William Griffin ordered his men into the ship’s yawl boat. The schooner finally sank bow-first around 2 a.m., with the ship’s stern deckhouse blowing away in the storm, sending Griffin’s papers 50 feet into the air. A passing schooner picked up the crew and took them to Bailey’s Harbor.

Searchers have been trying to find the F.J. King since the 1970s but conflicting accounts of the ship’s location when it sank stymied their efforts. Griffin reported that the ship went down about 5 miles (8 kilometers) off Bailey’s Harbor but a lighthouse keeper reported seeing a schooner’s masts breaking the surface closer to shore. Commercial fishermen kept claiming to have brought up pieces of the wreckage in their nets, too. Shipwreck hunters scoured the area but came up empty. Over the years F.J. King developed a reputation among shipwreck hunters as a ghost ship.

Baillod believed that Griffin may not have known where he was in the darkness as the ship went down. He drew a 2-square-mile (5.17 square-kilometer) grid around the location the lighthouse keeper gave and proceeded to search it. Side-scan sonar uncovered an object measuring about 140 feet (42.6 meters) long less than half a mile (0.8 kilometers) from the lighthouse keeper’s location. It turned out to be the F.J. King.

“A few of us had to pinch each other,” Baillod said in the announcement. “After all the previous searches, we couldn’t believe we had actually found it, and so quickly.”

He said the hull appears to be intact, surprising searchers who expected to find it in pieces due to the weight of the iron ore the schooner was carrying.

The Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association has now discovered five wrecks in the last three years. Earlier in 2025, the group found the steamer L.W. Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as well as tugboat John Evenson and schooner Margaret A. Muir off Algoma, Wisconsin. Baillod discovered the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.

The Great Lakes are home to anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library. Shipwreck hunters have been searching the lakes with more urgency in recent years out of concerns that invasive quagga mussels are slowly destroying wrecks. Photos of the F.J. King site show the wreckage is covered with them.

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This story has been updated to correct spelling of ‘Brendon’ in summary and 2nd graf and that searchers used side-scan sonar, not side-scan radar.