Obscure Occurrences : The Mysteries of the Lake Michigan Triangle

 Anchored by Manitowoc, Ludington and Benton Harbor, the Lake Michigan triangle had been plagued by unexplained phenomena. Frightening legends related to the region date all the way back to the late 17th century when a French vessel disappeared with the tide before never being seen again.

The Disappearance of Le Griffon

 The French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle started working on a massive ship designed for animal fur hauling and decided to name it Le Griffon. In August of 1679, the ship set sail, travelling from Niagara to Michilimackinac. Some historians say that the ship had larger ambitions, to discover a Northwest passage to China and Japan. Unfortunately, Le Griffon vanished while passing through the Lake Michigan Triangle. La Salle had already departed for the mainland and his remaining six crew members met the same fate as his ship.

 In 2001, a researcher named Steve Libert found what he claimed to be Le Griffon's bow spirit at the bottom of Lake Michigan. While Libert's findings have yet to be verified, the spar did include sculptures of griffins. Sadly, the rest of the ship has never been recovered. 

The Fate of PS Lady Elgin

 Two centuries later, the deadliest open water sinking on the Great Lakes would bring disrepute to the Lake Michigan Triangle. In the early hours of the 8th of September, 1860, PS Lady Elgin, a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamship, collided with Augusta, a much smaller schooner which was loaded down with lumber and headed for Chicago. Strangely, the Augusta continued on for Chicago like nothing happened, as the Lady Elgin swallowed more and more water. Hundreds of sleeping passengers, who had been partying all night, received a rude awakening when the ship's crew began their evacuation efforts. 

(Source: Chicago History Today)

 Allegedly, shipmates did everything possible to cover the hole, including trying to plug it with mattresses, but nothing worked. The lake seemed determined to swallow the ship. Three hundred people perished as a result of the crash, including the Lady Elgin's captain, Jack Wilson, who spent his final hours saving as many passengers as possible.

The Fate of Thomas Hume and Rouse Simmons

 Built in 1870, Thomas Hume, a 132-foot-long, three-masted schooner, was part of a fleet of ships that belonged to lumber baron and Charles Hackley, when it disappeared within the Lake Michigan Triangle in 1891. Sailing alongside one of its sister ships, the Rouse Simmons, the Thomas Hume embarked from Muskegon to Chicago with a large shipment of lumber. Soon after delivering the wood, both ships turned around to venture back toward Muskegon. As ominous storm clouds gathered in the distance, the crew of the Rouse Simmons decided to turn back and stay in Chicago until the weather improved, but those of the Thomas Hume kept traversing toward home. Unbeknownst to them, they would never be seen again. 

 When the Rouse Simmons returned to Muskegon two days later, there was no sign of its sister ship. Hackley announced a 300-dollar reward for information on the Hume's whereabouts, but it went unclaimed. Despite multiple search operations, the ship and its seven crew members were nowhere to be found. 

 Fast forward to 2005, when professional recovery diver Taras Lysenko found the intact remains of the Thomas Hume in the southeastern portion of Lake Michigan. Since then, shipwreck experts have shared their theories about what likely happened to the ship. A prevailing theory is that the storm produced turbulent seas, which caused the vessel to sink.

 Even though it had avoided wreckage in 1891, the Rouse Simmons later succumbed to the Lake Michigan Triangle on November 22, 1912. The ship, and its 16 crew members, including Captain Herman Schuenemann, decided to sail from Thompson, Michigan to Chicago, to deliver a load of at least 5,000 Christmas trees. Unfortunately, the boat never made it. 

 On November 23, the ship was seen flying a distress flag in clear conditions, but when a rescue boat finally arrived at the location, there was no sign of the Rouse Simmons anywhere. Wreckage from the ship, including Christmas trees and Captain Schuenemann's wallet, washed ashore in the following decades. But it wasn't until October 1971 that the Rouse Simmons was finally found by Gordon Kent Bellrichard, a scuba diver, off the coast of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Despite performing a thorough examination of the wreckage, the experts were not able to come to a conclusive theory explaining the ship's sinkage.

The Disappearance of Rosabelle's Crew

 Constructed in the 1860s, Rosabelle was a two-masted schooner which was used to transfer goods between Benton Harbour and Milwaukee. Her crew of eleven sailors had spent most of their working lives travelling back and forth along the same route but would make their final journey in the winter of 1921. 

 On the morning of October 31st, she was found floating upside down by a steamer approaching Milwaukee. When the vessel was recovered and subsequently inspected by the coast guard, it was found that there was no trace of the captain or his crew. It was initially suggested she may have been involved in a collision with a larger ship, but none had been reported in the vicinity at the time. Furthermore, there was no damage found anywhere on her hull to support this theory. Another proposal is that she may have sprung a leak and eventually capsized. Again, a close inspection of her exterior was carried out and it was found to be in pristine condition, with no apparent flaws or leaks. The loss of Rosabelle's crew remains one of the region's most enduring mysteries

The Disappearance of McFarland's Captain

 George R. Donner, captain of the coal-powered vessel McFarland, vanished from his cabin on the 29th of April, 1937. Days earlier, the McFarland had picked up a shipment of coal from Erie, Pennsylvania. The ship had no problems traversing the Great Lakes on its return voyage until it arrived in the triangle. There was a significant number of ice floes on the water at the time, and the crew were taking extra care to avoid a potential collision. 

 Donner had spent several hours on the ship's bridge, refusing to rest until he was confident that any possible danger had passed. After successfully guiding his ship through rough, icy waters Captain Donner retired to his quarters late on April 28th. Early on April 29th, when the McFarland's first mate knocked on Captain Donner's door as they approached Port Washington, there was no answer. As the door to the captain's quarters was locked, the crew searched the galley for their skipper. But no sign of him was found. 

 This prompted the men to break down Captain Donner's door, believing he'd fallen into a deep sleep, but instead of discovering their captain inside the crew found nothing but an empty cabin. The captain’s bed was still made, showing no sign he had slept in it, and his pipe lay on a table nearby. With no other doors to access the room, it seemingly appeared as if the captain had faded out of existence. Captain Donner was never found and the case remains as much of an enigma as it was in 1937.

The Disappearance of Northwest Airlines Flight 2501

 In 1950, while flying over the Lake Michigan Triangle, Northwest Airlines Flight 2501 vanished forever, its passengers never to be recovered. Flying from New York City to Seattle, the plane had reached the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan, just after midnight on June 24th. The plane's captain, Robert C. Lind, requested clearance from air traffic control to descend to 2,500 feet in order to avoid a lightning storm brewing over the Great Lake. Captain Lind's request was denied and a short time later, the plane vanished.

(Source: Flickr)

 Lind, two crew members, and 55 passengers disappeared along with it. At the time the plane went missing, a local, on the ground, told reporters he saw a terrific flash out in the lake. This strange light was seen by plenty of others. These ghostly sights and sounds have led to speculations that something supernatural, even extra-terrestrial, caused the plane to go missing. 

 The worst commercial aeroplane disaster of its time, the disappearance of Flight 2501 remains mired in mystery. The only clues ever recorded were some bits of debris and scattered remains that washed ashore. Subsequent searches have failed to recover the aircraft. For a time, Clive Cussler funded an annual quest to retrieve Northwest Flight 2501 from its watery grave, but the search team returned to shore empty-handed every year.

The Enigmatic Tale of Steve Kubacki

 In February 1978, Steve Kubacki was reported missing during a cross-country skiing expedition. As authorities swept the area for signs of Kubacki, they discovered a set of footprints that led right to the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and then ended abruptly. After Kubacki's skis and backpack were recovered nearby, everyone assumed he'd fallen through the surface ice on the lake and met his demise, even though the ice and snow over Lake Michigan were especially thick that winter. 

 But in a shocking twist, Kubacki woke up in a grassy field 15 months later, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 700 miles east of where he disappeared. He had no memory of where he'd been for over a year or how he had managed to end up so far away from home. His last memory was of reaching Lake Michigan. Kubacki refused to discuss his situation after his initial rescue, and to this day remains silent about the event.

Extra-terrestrial Involvement?

 Michigan experiences an abnormally high number of UFO sightings compared to other states. According to WOOD TV, based out of West Michigan, police have been fielding complaints about UFOs over the Lake Michigan Triangle since 1913. In 1919, The New York Times reported on two colossal balls of fire seen falling into the Great Lake. The Sausalito News, in California, noted that the impact was heard as far away as Indiana. The New York Times called the objects meteors. But other eyewitnesses claim they were metaphysical forces wreaking havoc. 

 On March 8, 1994, hundreds of Michigan residents along Lake Michigan reported seeing disk-like objects hovering over them, some with flashing lights. Among the witnesses was a local National Weather Service radar operator who told police, "I've never seen anything like this, not even when I'm doing storms. These aren't storms.” That being said, some believe that the phenomena might be caused by visitors beneath the lake rather than above.

 Archaeology Professor Mark Holley and his colleague Brian discovered a circular stone arrangement in 40 feet of water while using sonar technology to search for shipwrecks in the Lake Michigan Triangle in 2007. Along the periphery of the rocks, Holley and Abbott also found a boulder marked with a prehistoric carving of the long-extinct mastodon, suggesting that the formation could be several thousand years old. 

 Some think the Stonehenge-like arrangement served a ceremonial purpose, while others believe it was built to dam up the lake in order to make fishing easier. In order to respect Indigenous groups, whose ancestors may have erected Lake Michigan's underwater Stonehenge, the exact location of the structures is being kept secret. The inability to explain how these stones came to be placed on the lake bed has attracted all manner of unfounded explanations.

A Rational Explanation

 A more rational explanation can be found in an unusual weather phenomenon, which has been observed at certain locations throughout the region. A microburst is a sudden and localized weather front, where precipitation and wind can affect a location as small as a mile in diameter. With the intense winds in these areas passing 100 miles per hour, significant damage is caused to anything caught in the chaos. Due to the speed with which a microburst can manifest and end and the small area affected by it, it is probable that they occur more regularly than we are aware of. Any ship or plane caught in the storm would almost certainly be lost, with either little or no evidence left of its passing or the remains being moved to a different and unrelated area as the storm travels.

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