After decades of searching, underwater archaeologists have finally discovered the wreck of the schooner FJ King, a "ghost ship" that sank in Lake Michigan during a fierce storm nearly 140 years ago, according to The New York Post. The find was made on June 28, 2025, off Bailey's Harbour, a small community on Wisconsin's Door Peninsula.
The FJ King was a 144-foot, three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 in Toledo, Ohio. On September 15, 1886, while carrying iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago, it encountered a severe gale. Waves of 8 to 10 feet breached its seams; despite hours spent pumping out water, the vessel sank around 2 am. Captain William Griffin and his crew survived, rescued by another passing schooner, but the ship's location remained a mystery, as per the news article.
Researcher Brendon Baillod, working with the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, focused on a two-square-mile area indicated by a lighthouse keeper's eyewitness report. Using side-scan sonar, his team located the wreck about half a mile from that point. Surprisingly, the hull remains largely intact, though covered with quagga mussels and marine life.
"A few of us had to pinch each other," Baillod said in the announcement. "After all the previous searches, we couldn't believe we had actually found it, and so quickly."
He said the hull appears to be 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 Archaeology Association has discovered five wrecks in the last three years.
Earlier in 2025, the group found the steamer LW Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as well as the tugboat John Evenson and schooner Margaret A. Muir off Algoma, Wisconsin. Baillod discovered the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.
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