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Historic haunted places in Mackinac Island, MI. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
3 listings shown.
MICHIGAN / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Guests and staff at this island inn describe a young girl with very long hair, seen by day and by night, whose identity nobody knows. Piano music is heard in the common rooms when …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
MICHIGAN / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Costumed interpreters at the 1780 fort have reported musket fire and shouting inside the walls when no demonstration is underway. Others describe small children, linked to typhoid …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
MICHIGAN / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The resort's ghost, Harvey, is said to have been a heartbroken young man who died at the foot of a cliff, but he is remembered as a prankster. Carpenters found swept-up sawdust sca…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Mackinac Island's ghost lore sits on a long, layered, documented past, summarised in the accounts collected. The island tourism account collected in search frames the Haunts of Mackinac tour against that history directly: in a place such as Mackinac Island with so much history, there is no shortage of stories to share. The haunted-history accounts collected in search fill in the sequence they work from: a sacred burial ground for Anishinaabe people, then a fort for British soldiers during the Revolution, a fort for American soldiers until the War of 1812 — when it was recaptured by the British — and a number of battles, with the United States maintaining a garrison through the end of the 19th century before Mackinac became a resort full time. Fort Mackinac, founded by the British in 1780 during the American Revolution on the carriage-tour account collected in search, still stands above the harbour with restored original buildings.
The island's two great hotels are both documented landmarks of that resort era. The Grand Hotel, at 286 Grand Avenue on its own site, opened in 1887 — the wandering Michigan account collected in search dates its opening to visitors in 1887 and notes several U.S. presidents have stayed there and movies have been filmed there, and the hotel's own collected pages carry its historic timeline and its address and phone numbers (reservations 1-800-33GRAND, hotel information 1-906-847-3331) without publishing any ghost lore of its own in the material collected here. Mission Point Resort, at One Lake Shore Drive on its listing, has a more institutional past: its buildings transformed into Mackinac College in 1966 and then became a religious retreat and educational institution in 1970, before transitioning into a vacation resort in 1972 and being renamed Mission Point Resort in 1987 — on the Wikipedia account collected in search — and some Mission Point properties, including its theater and sound stage, served as filming locations for the 1980 film Somewhere in Time. The resort is open May through October with 239 guest rooms, on the hotel-industry account collected in search.
The island's modern ghost-tour era has a named founder. Todd Clements has compiled many of the island's stories in his book "Haunts of Mackinac," on the island tourism account, and he owns the Haunts of Mackinac ghost tour company, on the podcast account collected in search.
This section is folklore — reported by the tour founder's book as summarised by the island tourism account, and by the secondary accounts listed below, and never asserted as fact here.
The island tourism account summarises Clements's book directly. It tells of a mother seen weeping over the late 19th-century graves of her two young children buried in Mackinac Island's Post Cemetery. It speaks of a presence on the Rifle Range Trail that just may be the ghost of the first person executed on Mackinac Island. It reports that several places to stay on the island have reported hauntings of one kind or another, from footsteps in the halls to furniture moving around. And it tells of the oldest building in Michigan, which now houses the Kids' Quarters at Fort Mackinac, where the toys are always put away neatly at night yet staff sometimes arrive in the morning to find them out of place as if played with. All of those are the book's tales as the tourism account retells them — folklore, labelled as such.
At the Grand Hotel, legend says the haunting began with the building itself. The wandering Michigan account reports that construction workers excavating the hotel came across many human remains, and that the Grand Hotel was built on a burial site; the postcard-history account collected in search tells the same construction story in legend form — workmen found bones when they dug the foundation — and adds the hotel's reported figures: an "evil entity" in the form of a black mass with red eyes said to have shown itself to a maintenance man behind the hotel's theater stage and knocked him off his feet, a man wearing a top hat said to play the piano at three in the morning, and women in Victorian gowns frequently seen in the upstairs halls. The wandering Michigan account names a further reported figure, a little girl named Rebecca believed to have died at the hotel, and notes plainly that the Grand Hotel does not permit formal paranormal investigations.
At Mission Point, the enduring legend is Harvey.
Hountix lists 3 places in Mackinac Island, MI. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
Mission Point Resort's haunting is the island's most televised, and its documented past is the frame the legend hangs on. The resort, at One Lake Shore Drive on its listing with phone +19068473000, occupies a site whose buildings became Mackinac College in 1966, then a religious retreat and educational institution in 1970, then a vacation resort from 1972, renamed Mission Point Resort in 1987 — on the Wikipedia account collected in search — with its theater, sound stage and a classroom used as filming locations for the 1980 film Somewhere in Time, and the resort featured on the Syfy series Ghost Hunters in the sixth episode of season seven, originally airing March 30, 2011, on the same account. The lore therefore comes from the secondary accounts, and its centre is Harvey, told in full in The legend above with its conflicting versions left unresolved: a Mackinac College student of the late 1960s, in local legend, whose spirit is said to haunt the theater and surrounding buildings, with cold spots, whispers and a young man in outdated clothing reported. The paranormal-travel account adds the resort's wider reported phenomena in its own terms: lights flickering and televisions turning on by themselves in the Main Lodge, a sensed presence at the foot of the bed, EVP sessions in the old theater yielding unexplained voices, and a heavy, watchful feeling on the wooded paths behind the resort. Practical facts are the resort's own in the collected accounts: open May through October, 239 guest rooms and family suites, on 18 acres on the island's sunrise side.
*Website: https://www.missionpoint.com/*