140-year-old 'ghost ship' schooner F.J. King located in Lake Michigan

A team led by researcher Brandon Baillod found the wreck of the cargo schooner F.J. King in Lake Michigan, ending a 140-year search for the vessel that sank off Wisconsin during a violent storm in 1886, the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association said.

Baillod’s team detected the remains on June 28 after concentrating on a two-square-mile search area informed by a 19th-century lighthouse keeper’s account. The side-scan sonar return showed a large, roughly 140-foot-long object about half a mile from the keeper’s reported sighting; divers and investigators later confirmed it was the long-lost F.J. King.

The F.J. King was a 144-foot, three-masted cargo schooner built in Toledo, Ohio, in 1867. On Sept. 15, 1886, the vessel was carrying iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago when a gale struck, producing reported waves as high as 10 feet that ruptured the ship’s seams. Despite the crew’s efforts to pump out water, the schooner sank at about 2 a.m. Captain William Griffin and his crew were rescued by another passing schooner and brought ashore at Bailey’s Harbor, a small community on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula.

Contemporary accounts described the stern deckhouse being blown away and Griffin’s papers sent flying some 50 feet. Conflicting reports of the ship’s final location and the limits of earlier search technology left the F.J. King a so-called “ghost ship” for more than a century, with searchers since the 1970s coming up empty.

Baillod said he had long suspected Griffin may have been disoriented in the storm when reporting the wreck’s location and that focusing on the lighthouse keeper’s observation narrowed the search area effectively. "A few of us had to pinch each other," Baillod said in the announcement announcing the find, noting that previous efforts had repeatedly failed to locate the wreck.

Divers and members of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association reported that the hull appears largely intact, a surprising condition given the heavy load of iron ore the schooner had been carrying when it foundered. Freshwater conditions in the Great Lakes—colder temperatures and lower levels of shipworm activity than in saltwater—often slow the biological and chemical processes that break down wooden ship hulls, aiding preservation of submerged cultural resources.

The Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, which partnered on the search, has located several other historic wrecks in the region in recent years. Earlier in 2025, the group reported finds that included the steamer L.W. Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh and two vessels, the tug John Evenson and the schooner Margaret A. Muir, off Algoma. Baillod also discovered the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.

Officials with the Wisconsin Historical Society and the underwater archaeology association confirmed the discovery but provided limited detail about immediate next steps for documentation, preservation or public access. The organizations said the find adds to the documented maritime heritage of the Great Lakes and provides an opportunity for further study of 19th-century commercial shipping, construction methods for wooden schooners and the conditions that influence shipwreck preservation in freshwater environments.

Underwater archaeological investigations typically follow protocols intended to record and protect cultural sites, combining sonar, remote-operated vehicles, diver surveys and archival research to tie wrecks to historical records. The F.J. King’s identification relied on correlating the sonar and diver observations with historical descriptions of the vessel, its dimensions and the known circumstances of its sinking.

The discovery underscores both the challenges and the advances in Great Lakes maritime archaeology, where improved sonar technology, targeted archival research and coordinated volunteer and institutional searches have in recent years led to a string of identifications of long-missing ships. The F.J. King adds to a growing catalog of well-preserved wrecks that inform historians and scientists about regional commerce, shipbuilding and storm impacts on navigation during the late 19th century.

Researchers said the wreck will remain of interest to maritime historians and archaeologists studying the dynamics of ship loss in the Great Lakes, and that additional analysis of the site may clarify details of the sinking and the vessel’s final condition on the lake bottom.