LOAD OF OLD SHIP

‘Ghost Ship’ Discovered in Lake Michigan After 140 Years

Efforts to find the mystery schooner began in the 1970s.

The wreck of a mysterious ghost ship lost under 10-foot waves in Lake Michigan has been found after half a century of searching. The F.J. King sank in 1886 off the coast of Bailey’s Harbor, Wisconsin, laden with iron ore, but conflicting reports from its captain and a watching lighthouse keeper have scuppered search efforts since the 1970s. Fishermen claimed to have netted parts of the wreck, but hunters still came up empty; it became a ghost. The case was cracked when a team of researchers, led by Brendon Baillod, from the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association and the Wisconsin Historical Society, located it on June 28, according to the Associated Press. Captained by William Griffin, the triple-masted King had been transporting ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago when it was lost off the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. Griffin and crew made it off the 144-foot schooner and were picked up by a passing vessel, but while he thought they were around five miles off the coast, the lighthouse keeper thought they were far closer. Baillod and the team set up a two-mile grid around the area identified by the keeper, using side-scan sonar. They picked it up so quickly that “A few of us had to pinch each other,” Baillod said in an announcement Monday. “After all the previous searches, we couldn’t believe we had actually found it, and so quickly.”