Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  Allyn sat at the old man’s bedside. He knew not what to say or even where to begin. But he had to know. He asked the priest to translate his words.

  “Will you now tell the truth? Are you Stephen Strand or Jacques Beaumont?” Allyn asked the dying man.

  The priest translated: “In the presence of the Almighty and by the sign of the Cross, I swear . . .” but that was all. Strand/Beaumont sank back against his pillows and was dead.

  The tale that Harper Allyn heard on that island in Goguac Lake remained forever in dispute.

  Was this man Harper Allyn knew on Goguac Lake simply an imposter, claiming one of the most fanciful cases of possession in history? Or had he, for most of his life, lived as two men, inhabiting the body of one, the soul and mind of another?

  If there was an answer, it went with him to the grave.

  The Schooner Erie Board of Trade

  Saginaw

  It should not be surprising that the legends and lore surrounding lost ships and shipwrecks of the Great Lakes are legion. There is something about a modern lake freighter or nineteenth-century cargo schooner simply disappearing beneath the waves with all hands on board that excites and terrifies us at the same time. The first ship lost on the Great Lakes is an example. The French explorer Robert de la La Salle’s barque, the Griffon, disappeared (in a storm, Father Hennepin wrote) during its return to Fort Niagara on Lake Huron after leaving Washington Island, off Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, on September 18, 1679. The rough-hewn ship was loaded with six hundred tons of furs. La Salle himself watched the ship leave port after deciding to set out with some of his men to explore lands to the south. There is no conclusive evidence that the ship’s wreckage has been found.

  Often the stories go beyond the ordinary and claims are made that particular ships, like the lost Griffon or the yawl Western Reserve in the story “Man on the Beach,” have become ghost ships.

  There is even a Lake Michigan Triangle (Ludington Michigan to Benton Harbor, then across the Lake to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and back to Ludington) in which ships and planes are alleged to have vanished without a trace, much like its namesake in Bermuda, even though there is scant evidence to support the claims.

  But sometimes the stories are not about an entire ship and crew condemned to sail as a Flying Dutchman for all eternity but rather a supernatural event on board that gives it notoriety.

  Such is the case with a nineteenth-century three-masted barque that’s named The Erie Board of Trade, though study has cast doubt that a ship with that specific name ever sailed the Great Lakes.

  The ghost story connected to the Board of Trade has murky origins at best. A lengthy account was published in the August 20, 1883, edition of the New York Sun and then reprinted in newspapers all around the Great Lakes in the months that followed.

  Whatever the case, the story is reputed to have been first told on a moonlit night in Saginaw, Michigan, in much the same way as it was later reported first in the New York Sun and then in the Saginaw Courier, from which this version is derived.

  What makes it intriguing—irrespective of how much of it is true or not—is that the storyteller clearly had sailed on Great Lake schooners and knew what he was talking about. Perhaps he changed the name of the ship in the telling, but it is not hard to imagine that he went through exactly what he says he did.

  A crew of Great Lakes sailors was sitting around a ship chandler’s shop along the lower part of Saginaw’s South Street, not far from the Saginaw River. They had been exchanging ghost stories all evening and one man had just finished telling his own.

  “Hah,” snorted the chandler whose nautical supply shop it was.

  “You’re a sorry dog. You were drunk, and the spirits you’d taken made you see other spirits!”

  Everyone laughed except for one man, the oldest sailor in the bunch. He had been listening in silence. Presently he tamped out his pipe and threw one leg over the anchor stock he was sitting on.

  “Well, I saw a ghost once,” he began, refilling his pipe bowl. “I saw it as plain as ever. The captain of the schooner I was on and the man in the waist both saw it too. And there wasn’t a drop of liquor on board.”

  His audience quieted; they knew this old man always spoke the truth.

  “It was a little over ten years ago. I was before the mast then. It was the opening of the season, and I was in Chicago. I heard at the boardinghouse that some men were wanted on a three-masted schooner called the Erie Board of Trade. The boys gave her a pretty hard name, but they said the grub was good and that the old man paid top wages every time, so I went down and asked him if he’d got all the hands aboard. He looked at me a minute, and asked me where my dunnage was. When I told him, he said I should get it on board right away.

  “The Board of Trade was as handsome a craft as ever floated on the lakes. As I came down the dock with my bag under my arm, I had to stop and have a look at her. The old captain saw me. He was proud of her, and I thought afterward that he rather took a fancy to me because I couldn’t help showing I liked her looks.

  “I was in her two round trips. The last trip up was the last on the lakes. Not but what times were pretty good up there. We were getting two fifty a day for the first trip out and another two bucks the last. We messed with the old man, and, with fresh meat and vegetables and coffee and milk, it was first-cabin passage all around. But the old man made it hot for most of us. There wasn’t any watch below in the day and we were kept painting her on the down trip and scrubbing the paint off again on the passage up.

  “The first trip around to Chicago, every man but me got his dunnage onto the dock as soon as he was paid off. When I got my money I asked the old man if he’d want anyone to help with the lines when the schooner was towed from the coal yard to the elevator. He said he reckoned he could keep me if I wanted to stay, so I signed articles for the next trip there.

  “When we were getting the wheat into her at the elevator, we got the crew aboard. One of them was a red-haired Scotsman. The captain took a dislike to him from the first. I don’t know why. It was a tough time for Scotty all the way down. We were in Buffalo just twelve hours, and then we cleared for Cleveland to take on soft coal for Milwaukee. The tug gave us a short pull outside the breakwater, and we had no more than got the canvas up before the wind died out completely. We dropped anchor for the current, settling to the Niagara River, was carrying us down to Black Rock at three knots.

  “When we’d got things shipshape about docks, the old man called Scotty and two others aft and told them to scrape down the topmasts. Then he handed the bosun’s chair to them. Scotty gave the chair a look and then turned around, and touching his forehead respectfully, said, ‘If you please, sir, the rope’s been chafed off, and I’ll bend on a bit of ratlin’ stuff.’ The captain was mighty touchy because the jug had left him so, and he just jumped up and down and swore. He told Scotty that, by God, he’d better get up there damn fast or he’d see to it that he never worked on the lakes again.

  “Scotty climbed the main rigging pretty quick. He got the halyards bent on the chair and sung out to hoist away. I and a youngster, the captain’s nephew, were standing by. We handled that rope carefully, for I’d seen how tender the chair was. When we’d got him up, the young fellow took a turn around the pin, and I looked aloft to see what Scotty was doing. As I did so he reached for his knife with one hand and put out the other for the backstay.

  “Just then the chair gave way. He fell all bunched up till he struck the crosstrees, and then he spread out and fell flat on the deck, just forward of the cabin, on the starboard side. I was kneeling beside him in a minute, and so was the old man.

  “I was feeling pretty well choked up to see a shipmate killed for he wasn’t breathin’. I said to the captain this is pretty bad business, sir; this man’s been murdered. Just then, why, Scotty opened his eyes and looked at us. In a whisper, he cursed the captain and his wife and children, and the ship and her owners. While he was still talking, the blood bubbled over h
is lips, and his head lurched over to one side. He was dead then a’ course.”

  The old sailor brushed at his eyes.

  “It was three days before the schooner got to Cleveland. Some of the boys were for leaving her there, but most of us stayed because wages were down again. Going through the rivers, there were four other schooners in the tow. We were next to the tug. Just at the big end below Port Huron a squall struck us. It was too much for the tug, and some lubber cast off the towline without singing out first.

  “We dropped our bower as quick as we could, but it was not before we drifted astern, carrying away the headgear of the schooner next to us and smashing our own dinghy. We were a shaky lot going up Lake Huron and no lifeboat under the stern.

  “There was a fair easterly wind on the lake, and as we got out of the river in the morning we were standing across Saginaw Bay during the first watch that night. I had the second trick at the wheel. The stars were shining bright and clear and not a cloud was in sight. Ever’ stitch of canvas was set and drawing, though the booms sagged and creaked as the vessel rolled lazily in the varying breeze.

  “I had just sung out to the mate to strike eight bells when the captain climbed up the companionway and out on deck. He stepped over to the starboard rail and had a look around, then the lookout began striking the bell. The last stroke of the bell seemed to die away with a swish.

  “A bit of spray or something struck me in the face. I wiped it away, and then I saw something rise up slowly across the mainsail from the starboard side of the deck forward of the cabin. It was white and all bunched up.

  “I glanced at the captain and saw he was staring at it too.

  “It hovered straight up and then struck the crosstrees. There it spread out and rolled over toward us.

  “It was Scotty, nah, his ghost that is.

  “His lips were working just as they were when he cursed the captain. As he straightened out, he seemed to stretch himself until he grasped the maintop mast with one hand and the mizzen with the other. Both were carried away like pipe stems.

  “The next I knew the square sail yard was hanging in two pieces, the top hamper was swinging, and the booms were jibing over.

  “The old man fell in a dead faint on the quarterdeck, and the man in the waist dived down from the forecastle so fast that he knocked over the last man of the other watch. If it had not been for the watch coming on deck just then, she’d have rolled altogether. They got the head sails over and I put the wheel up without knowing what I was doing. In a minute it seemed we were laying our course again.”

  The old sailor stopped, took a deep breath, and looked around.

  “Well, I see some of you don’t believe me. Can’t say I blame you but you can verify it all for yourself. On the next voyage the schooner was sunk. The insurance companies didn’t want to pay on the ground the captain scuttled her. During the trial the whole story was told under oath . . . Scotty’s deaths, the loss of her top masts under a clear sky . . . all of it.”

  And with that the old man relit his pipe.

  Although this story or a close variant is sometimes included whenever Great Lakes ghost stories are discussed, the fundamental question remains: Is it true?

  Could be. Or at least parts of it.

  Those familiar with this story and with sailing ships point to the technical knowledge of barque (three masted) schooners displayed by the old man as evidence he had served aboard a ship like that or knew his way around one.

  Now what makes the story plausible is that while Great Lakes historians have no proof of a ship named the Erie Board of Trade on the Great Lakes, there was a schooner with a rather similar name—the Chicago Board of Trade—during the years in which the story is set. Further, events in the ghost story and what befell the Chicago Board of Trade are similar in some details.

  This Chicago Board of Trade was launched at Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1863, making it about ten years old at the time of the old sailor’s events. She carried grain and other cargo on Lakes Huron and Erie, same as the Erie. Her home port was Bay City, Michigan.

  In July 1874 the schooner then under the command of Captain Thomas Fountain was bound for Buffalo, New York, with 28,500 bushels of shelled corn when it struck bottom and scraped over rocks on the lower reaches of the Detroit River, near Malden. The ship continued on for some time with all crew manning the pumps. The crew discovered three feet of water below and could not pump it out fast enough. All hands took to the lifeboats. The ship sank bow first in ten fathoms (sixty feet) of water some twenty-five miles distant from Cleveland.

  All the crew and Captain Fountain made it to Fairport, Ohio, a Lake Erie harbor settlement. The schooner itself was a “total loss—$19,000 for the hull and $42,000 for the cargo of wheat.”

  But suspicions arose that the schooner had been scuttled. Within a month, a Buffalo, New York, business newspaper was reporting the ship “went down under rather peculiar circumstances.” The ship’s insurers contracted with a salvage company to raise the hull and tow it to Buffalo to launch an investigation. The raising apparently had to wait until the following spring. By March 16, 1875, the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper was reporting that the Board of Trade had been “scuttled and sunk intentionally” to obtain the insurance.

  It was not until August 1875 that divers and two tugs raised the schooner’s hull and took it to dry dock. Attention turned immediately to “holes in the water closet pipe” as an initial cause of its sinking. Accident or deliberate damage? The question remained open until it was reporred that Captain Fountain “had run away.” At that point it seemed, as one newspaper reported, “the statement that the vessel was sunk by foul play has some confirmation.”

  A trial was apparently held, as was done in the ghost story, but unfortunately a transcript of the proceedings has not surfaced to show if the death of a crewman occurred prior to the ship’s sinking.

  But unlike the ghost story, the Chicago Board of Trade had a second life. The hull was bought for $700 by Henry A. Hawgood, a shipowner in Cleveland, who “took her up the lake and rebuilt her.” The ship was listed as a Great Lakes merchant vessel as late as 1884.

  The trail of a Great Lakes ship with the name of Board of Trade seems to end there, at least for for the time being. We are left to wonder if the old sailor perhaps changed the ship’s name in his telling and added a few fictional details to make it a more chilling yarn. Is there a red-haired Scotsman who figures prominently in the trial testimony? The answer to that might depend on whether you believe in ghosts or not . . .

  Man on the Beach

  Deer Park

  Captain Truedell was a dreamer. Throughout his decadeslong career in the old Great Lakes Life-Saving Service, including twenty years commanding the station at Grand Marais, Michigan, the captain always dreamed of the important things in his life before they happened. His mother had the gift of prescience and passed it on to him.

  The most chilling example of the captain’s strange ability to see into the future occurred during his second year in the Life-Saving Service, while he was stationed at Deer Park, Michigan. Once a busy lumber port, Deer Park was little more than a ghost town by 1892.

  Truedell usually slept from eight in the evening until shortly before he was called for his watch at midnight. On the night of April 30, 1892, however, Truedell had a particularly fitful sleep. In fact, a dream was playing and replaying and so lifelike that when he eventually awoke he was soaked with perspiration.

  In the dream, Truedell was standing on the beach near the station as a storm rose across the lake. Out of the mist walked a man, well dressed and obviously cultivated. As the stranger passed Truedell, he reached out, as if to shake the captain’s hand.

  Truedell grasped his hand, cold and wet to the touch. The stranger then turned to look directly into Truedell’s face and walked into the surf, vanishing under the turbulent waters.

  His watch that night was quiet and uneventful. Although a gale continued to blow in from the northwest, the men
at the Life-Saving Station had received no distress signals.

  At breakfast the next morning, the men joked about Truedell’s dream, claiming that his quiet duty was evidence that this time his precognition was wrong.

  But early in the afternoon, a soaking-wet, dazed sailor straggled into the station. His ship had gone down in the gale, and only he survived as far as he knew. His name was Harry Stewart, the wheelman.

  His ship, the Western Reserve, belonged to a millionaire, Peter Minch. At that time it was the biggest ship on the lakes, a sturdy three hundred feet long. Minch was so confident of the Western Reserve that he took his family aboard for a pleasure trip from the Soo Locks to Two Harbors, Minnesota, where the ship was to take on a load of iron ore.

  When the storm had hit, however, Minch ordered Stewart to continue sailing around Whitefish Point and Point Iroquois against the captain’s advice. The pounding gale buckled the decks; the ship snapped in two, sending the crew, Minch, and his family into a steel lifeboat and smaller, wooden yawl. The lifeboat sank, but its occupants were able to scramble aboard the yawl.

  Early on the morning of May 1, the yawl capsized in the surf, fifteen miles west of Deer Point. Only wheelman Harry Stewart lived.

  True to Captain Truedell’s dream, the Western Reserve had sunk at about nine o’clock the previous evening, just at the time the captain was beginning to “see” the disaster in his sleep.

  After listening to Stewart’s story, Captain Truedell was assigned to patrol the beach in a westerly direction, searching for any other possible survivors. He soon found the body of a well-dressed man lying face down in the sand. Truedell hesitated a moment before he rolled the body over. The man’s hand—wet and cold—brushed against his own.

  Could it be?

  He looked at the dead man’s face to be certain.

  It was.

  Redemption

  Detroit

  An old woman named Marie Louise Kennette lived alone in a little house on the river road to Springwells. She was rude, unkempt, and loved only her money and a violin, a family heirloom. A shoemaker by trade, she was so miserly that she spent her evenings wandering the streets so she would not have to spend money on heating or lighting her home and often begged food from neighbors so as not to fritter away her hoarded sums on groceries.