The Mysterious North Shore by William Mayo

Author:William Mayo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ghost, spirit, specter, phantom, wraith, apparition, haunted, scary, horror, north shore, Minnesota, MN, short story, ghostly tale, nonfiction, true, campfire, terror, fear, fright, possessed, cursed, eerie, poltergeist, paranormal, supernatural, occult, psychic, history
Publisher: Adventure Publications
Published: 2012-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

RING OF HOPE

Those grand fresh-water seas of ours...

Are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts.

As direful as any that lash the salted wave;

they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight

of land, however inland, they have drowned full

many a midnight ship with all its

shrieking crew.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

On December 6, 1927, the 250-foot freighter Kamloops was making her last voyage of the season. As she steamed up the lake from the Soo Locks of Michigan toward Fort William, Ontario, no one could have known it was to be her last voyage ever.

She was much like her hard-working sister vessels that tramped the ocean and was built to carry cargo of every description except for coal and ore. After three years as a package freighter, often carrying passengers, the Kamloops now followed the Canadian steamer Quedoc. This trip was made many times by both boats, and was all in a day’s work.

There was nothing unusual about that day’s passage, except that Captain Bill Brian, master of the Kamloops, had already waited three days in the face of a northerly gale. The storm had finally abated, but Captain Brian couldn’t have guessed that the worst was yet to come.

By the time the sun set on the two ships and their crews, winds were blowing at near hurricane force and the thermometer stood at thirty degrees below zero. The nineteen men and two women aboard the Kamloops found themselves in the most dangerous of waters. To make matters worse, they were approaching Isle Royale. Even in the calmest of seas, Isle Royale’s many reefs and rocks posed a formidable challenge. Captain Brian was a seasoned navigator, yet in those mounting conditions, his years of experience and familiarity with the sea’s hidden dangers did him little good. Up ahead lay timeless rocks, mightier than steel, waiting beneath the waves.

That night the Kamloops’ powerful steam engine was like a clock, with every piston stroke ticking through the eleventh hour and toward a place called Twelve O’clock Point, a place that would come to be well known in the maritime history of the Great Lakes. You must understand, dear reader, that on this particular night in December of 1927 the Great Lake would not only flex her muscle, she would become pitiless in her rage. William Rattigan paints a painfully accurate picture of a Superior storm in his book, Great Lakes: Shipwrecks and Survivals.

“Storms exploding across hundreds of miles of open water pile up mountainous seas that strike swifter and more often than the deadliest waves on any ocean.”

With the Quedoc in the lead, the two ships kept each other in sight as they struggled through the near-blinding winter storm. As the Quedoc attempted to “thread the needle,” passing between the northeast tip of Isle Royale and Passage Island, she suddenly veered to avoid a mass of rock that had appeared in the dense night. Sounding her warning whistle, as though in final salute, the Quedoc lost sight of the Kamloops in the thickening storm.

What happened to the Kamloops after losing visual contact with the Quedoc is something of a mystery.

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