This Shipwreck Eluded Searchers for 139 Years. A Group of Historians and Citizen Scientists Found It in Two Hours

The 144-foot-long “F.J. King,” which sank in Lake Michigan in 1886, was known as a “ghost ship” that nobody could locate

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

September 22, 2025

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On September 15, 1886, the F.J. King was transporting a load of iron ore across Lake Michigan when the ship encountered a storm and started leaking. The crew tried to pump out the water, but the three-masted schooner eventually became so flooded that Captain William Griffin ordered everyone to abandon ship. 

They clambered onto the ship’s yawl boat and headed for shore, where they were later picked up by a nearby schooner, La Petite. In the early morning hours, they watched the F.J. King sink bow-first beneath the waves.

For decades, shipwreck hunters searched for the vessel without success. The F.J. King proved so elusive she even earned a reputation as a “ghost ship,” according to a statement from the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.

Now, however, 139 years later, the long-lost vessel has finally been located. The ship is resting on the lake bed off the coast of Baileys Harbor, a small town on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula.

“The hull is remarkably intact,” says Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, in the statement. “We expected her to be in pieces due to the weight of the iron ore cargo, but her hull looks to be in one piece.”

Baillod led the efforts to find the F.J. King along with his longtime research partner Bob Jaeck. They decided to invite 20 citizen scientists and community historians along for the search, to share in the excitement of looking for a missing wreck.

“We thought, ‘What a fun search,’” Baillod tells the Washington Post’s Grace Moon. “We’re not going to probably find it, but every rock you run over, it’ll get your pulse going, you know.”

But they did find it. The group was just two hours into the trip when an unusual shape appeared on the sidescan sonar system. Measurements confirmed it was the F.J. King. They next deployed remotely-operated underwater vehicles to capture photos and videos of the wreck—the first time anyone had seen it in more than a century.

Key to their success was Baillod’s extensive research on the F.J. King. He reviewed hundreds of historic documents about the ship and its sinking, including two important records. One was the report the captain filed about the wreck, in which he explained that the ship sank roughly five miles from shore in 150-foot-deep water. The other was a report from William Sanderson, the keeper of the nearby Cana Island Lighthouse, who saw the masts of a schooner breaking the surface closer to the shore.

“We reasoned that the captain may not have known where he was in the 2 a.m. darkness, but the lighthouse keeper’s course and distance to the masts were probably accurate,” says Baillod in the statement.

He created a two-square-mile search grid around the location reported by Sanderson. In the end, the F.J. King was resting on the lake floor less than half a mile from where Sanderson said he had spotted it.

Baillod and his fellow searchers reported the discovery to the Wisconsin Historical Society, which sent divers to document the wreck and create a 3D model of it. In the future, officials hope to nominate the site for inclusion on state and national registers of historic places. At that point, they plan to share the F.J. King’s exact location with the public.

“We found a piece of history that has been written about and forgotten,” says Kevin Cullen, director of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Caitlin Looby. “And now it can come back to life.”

The F.J. King is just one of the many shipwrecks Baillod and other members of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association have discovered in the Great Lakes. Earlier this year, the team found ​​the L.W. Crane, a steamer ship that caught fire and sank in Wisconsin’s Fox River in 1880.

Last year, they found the 129-year-old wreck of the John Evenson five miles off Algoma, Wisconsin, submerged 42 feet deep. They also located the Margaret A. Muir, a 130-foot schooner that sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan in 1893 with the captain’s “intelligent and faithful” dog onboard. And in 2023, Baillod found the schooner Trinidad ten miles off the coast of Algoma.

Sarah Kuta | Read More

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.