Big Bay Point Light

Big Bay Point Light has stood on a bluff over Lake Superior, about 25 miles northwest of Marquette, since its third-order Fresnel lens was first lit on 20 October 1896. It was built to close an unlit gap where, in the Light-House Board's words, a number of vessels had been wrecked. Its ghost story belongs to the first head keeper — and unusually, the tragedy behind it is documented in the station's own logbook rather than in folklore. William H. Prior, whom the Marquette Mining Journal called Harry, watched his son and assistant keeper George E. Prior die on 13 June 1901 of an injury from a fall on the station's landing crib. On 28 June he walked into the woods with his gun and a supply of strychnine. Searches found nothing. Seventeen months later a hunter reported a skeleton hanging from a tree a mile and a half south of the light, and the log recorded that the clothing tallied with the missing keeper. Footsteps and a presence have been attributed to Prior since the building became a bed and breakfast in 1986 — though the lighthouse's own website, then and now, never mentions him.

Big Bay Point Light exists because of a gap in the dark. In its report recommending the station, the United States Light-House Board pointed out that the point sat midway between Granite Island and the Huron Islands, fifteen to eighteen miles from each, that the two existing lights were invisible from one another, and that the stretch between them was unlit. Every passenger and package steamer running the south shore of Lake Superior between Duluth, Buffalo and Chicago had to change course off the point. The Board added the sentence that settled the argument: quite a number of vessels had in past years been wrecked on Big Bay Point. Congress authorised the light and fog signal on 15 February 1893 and appropriated $25,000 for it on 18 August 1894. A parcel on the headland was bought in 1895, and construction began in May 1896 with a landing crib and a barn — the barn housed the work crew and the supplies. What went up over the following five months was not a tower with a cottage attached but a two-storey, eighteen-room red brick duplex, a square brick tower rising from its lakeward face. One half of the house was for the head keeper and his family, the other for the assistant and his. On 20 October 1896 the third-order Fresnel lens, made in Paris by Henry-Lepaute, went into service, its bull's-eye panels turning on a weight that had to be wound every five hours; a ten-inch steam whistle in the fog signal building started the same day. The first head keeper was William H. Prior, transferred in from Stannard Rock, the notorious crib light twenty-five miles out in the lake. He reached Big Bay at half past ten on the night of 15 August 1896 and, as the service required, kept the station log. That log is why this place has a story at all. Prior wrote in it as a man, not a clerk. On 18 November 1897, back from walking the thirty-odd miles to Marquette to bury his only sister, he recorded of his assistant: "I can not see that the assistant has done any work around the station since I left. He has not the energy to carry him down the hill and if I speak to him about it he makes no answer, but goes on just as if he did not hear me." Twelve days later the man was transferred to Granite Island. The next assistant was no better. In the spring of 1898 that assistant, George Beamer, left for the Spanish-American War, and his wife Jennie was appointed acting assistant keeper from 12 May to 26 August 1898 — the only woman known to have served at Big Bay, and one of the Michigan keepers' wives catalogued by Patricia Majher in her history of women in the U.S. Lighthouse Service. In November 1898 Prior hired his own son as a labourer. George E. Prior took the oath of office as assistant keeper on 18 January 1900, and for the first time the keeper had help he trusted. It lasted fifteen months. On 16 April 1901 Prior wrote that George was "very lame today" and that he would take him to Marquette; on 18 April, that his son would have to stay in hospital, "having been hurt by falling on steps on crib". George died on 13 June 1901, and the log entry is the father's: "Keeper summoned to Marquette to bury his son who died this morning." The last entry in what appears to be Prior's handwriting is dated 27 June 1901 and reads, in full, "general work". The next day he walked into the woods carrying his gun and a quantity of strychnine. A long search found nothing. On 22 October 1901 the new keeper, James Bergan, recorded that Mrs Prior and her four children — the youngest three, the eldest fifteen — had left on a launch to live in Marquette. Then, on 14 November 1902, Bergan wrote that a man named Fred Babcock had come to the station at half past twelve: while hunting a mile and a half south of the light he had found the skeleton of a man hanging in a tree, and the clothing tallied with the former keeper, missing seventeen months. The Mining Journal of Marquette carried the notice under the headline "HIS BODY FOUND", calling him Harry W. Prior and describing the find as a gruesome one. The station kept working long after him. The illuminant was changed to incandescent oil vapour in 1913, the steam whistles gave way to a diaphone in 1928, and in 1941 the light was automated and the last keeper left. In 1951 and 1952 the buildings were leased to the U.S. Army, which quartered National Guard and regular troops there in two-week rotations for anti-aircraft gunnery practice on the cliff. On 31 July 1952 an Army lieutenant, Coleman A. Peterson, shot and killed Maurice "Mike" Chenoweth at the Lumberjack Tavern in the village of Big Bay. His defence lawyer was the Marquette attorney John D. Voelker, who turned the case into the novel Anatomy of a Murder under the name Robert Traver; Otto Preminger filmed it in 1959 in Big Bay, Marquette, Ishpeming and Michigamme, using the real tavern. Both standard histories of the light — Terry Pepper's and Kraig Anderson's — state that Peterson was one of the soldiers billeted at the lighthouse. Decommissioned and stripped, the property was sold by sealed bid in 1961 to a Chicago plastic surgeon, Jon Pick, for $40,000; it passed to Dan Hitchens in 1979, and in 1986 Norman "Buck" Gotschall opened it as a bed and breakfast. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 (reference 88001837). Three preservationists from the Chicago area — John Gale and Linda and Jeff Gamble — bought it in March 1992, and Nick Korstad, who had previously restored Borden Flats Lighthouse in Massachusetts, took over on 11 May 2018.

Big Bay Point Light Station is private property and a working inn, and since 2023 it has not been open to casual visitors at all. The owner states that insurance conditions no longer allow public access to the grounds except for guests of the inn or people who have booked a tour, and asks people not to drive up the private lane outside tour times. The address is 4674 County Road KCB, Big Bay, Michigan 49808. From Marquette, take County Road 550 north for about 25 miles to the village of Big Bay, then follow the lighthouse signs roughly four miles east; the last stretch is a private subdivision road. There is no public transport and no visitor centre. There are two legitimate ways in. Guided tours run by appointment from June to September, cost $10 per person, last about twenty-five minutes, are capped at five people at a time, take you through the keepers' house to the lantern area, and are for ages ten and over. Otherwise you stay: the inn has seven guest rooms, all with private bathrooms, named for keepers and station staff — Bergan, McDonald, Dufrain, Beamer, Temple, Fleury and Brown, of which the Dufrain room is currently marked as retired from service. Several have gas fireplaces and lake views, breakfast is included, there are no televisions or telephones in the rooms, and wifi is available. Guests are given access to climb the tower. Checked on 11 August 2026, the inn advertises itself as open for the 2026 season from 8 May to 5 November. Reservations are taken only through its own website; enquiries go to [email protected] or by text message to 906-236-4322, answered 10:00–17:00 Eastern. Do not use the older telephone number and "#3 Lighthouse Road" address still circulating in guidebooks and lighthouse directories. Two practical points. The tower is not a monument: Big Bay Point Light is an active federal aid to navigation, listed by the U.S. Coast Guard as Light List number 14705, flashing white every five seconds, and the beacon is monitored accordingly. And the setting is genuinely remote — Big Bay is a village of a few hundred people, the nearest hospital and full range of services are in Marquette, and Lake Superior weather on an exposed bluff is not a formality. Anyone in the area for the history rather than the ghost should know that the Lumberjack Tavern, where the 1952 killing behind Anatomy of a Murder took place, is still open in the village.