By ABC News
Copyright abc
After decades of scouring the bottom of Lake Michigan, searchers have finally found the wreckage of a “ghost ship” that sank during a ferocious storm almost 140 years ago off the Wisconsin coastline.
The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association announced on Monday local time that a team led by researcher Brendon Baillod found the wreck of the F J King.
Mr Baillod said in an email to The Associated Press that the wreckage was discovered on June 28.
According to the announcement, Mr Baillod’s team found the ship off Baileys Harbor — a town of about 280 people on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula — an outcropping of land extending out into Lake Michigan that gives the state its distinctive mitten-thumb shape.
The F J King was a 43.89 metre, three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 in Toledo, Ohio, to transport grain and iron ore.
According to the historical society and archaeology association’s announcement, the ship ran into a gale off the Door Peninsula on September 15, 1886, while moving iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago.
Waves estimated at between 2.4m and 3m ruptured its seams and after several hours of pumping Captain William Griffin ordered his men into the ship’s yawl boat.
The schooner finally sank bow-first around 2am, with the ship’s stern deckhouse blowing away in the storm, sending Mr Griffin’s papers more than 15m into the air.
A passing schooner picked up the crew and took them to Baileys Harbor.
Searchers have been trying to find the F J King since the 1970s, but conflicting accounts of the ship’s location when it sank hindered their efforts.
Mr Griffin reported that the ship went down about 8 kilometres off Baileys Harbor but a lighthouse keeper reported seeing a schooner’s masts breaking the surface closer to shore.
Commercial fishermen also kept claiming to have brought up pieces of the wreckage in their nets. Shipwreck hunters scoured the area but came up empty.
Over the years F J King developed a reputation among shipwreck hunters as a ghost ship.
Mr Baillod believed Mr Griffin may not have known where he was in the darkness as the ship went down. He drew a 5.17 square-kilometre grid around the location the lighthouse keeper gave and proceeded to search it.
Side-scan sonar uncovered an object measuring about 42.6m long, less than a kilometre from the lighthouse keeper’s location. It turned out to be the F J King.
“A few of us had to pinch each other,” Mr Baillod said.
“After all the previous searches, we couldn’t believe we had actually found it, and so quickly.”
He said the hull appeared intact, surprising searchers who expected to find it in pieces due to the weight of the iron ore the schooner was carrying.
The Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association has discovered five wrecks in the last three years.
Earlier in 2025, the group found the steamer L W Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as well as tugboat John Evenson and schooner Margaret A Muir off Algoma, Wisconsin.
Mr Baillod discovered the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.
The Great Lakes are home to 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library.
Shipwreck hunters have been searching the lakes with more urgency in recent years out of concerns that invasive quagga mussels are slowly destroying wrecks.
Photos of the F J King site show the wreckage was covered with them.
