Walk through the old keeper’s quarters at Seul Choix Point Lighthouse, out on a lonely point on the U.P.’s Lake Michigan shore, and every so often you will catch it. Cigar smoke. Rich and unmistakable, drifting through rooms where no one is smoking and, often, where no one else is standing at all. Staff smell it. Visitors smell it. It has been happening for decades. And the man most people believe is responsible has been dead since 1910.
His name was Captain Joseph Willie Townsend, an Englishman from Bristol who took over as head keeper in 1902. He was, by every account, a devoted cigar smoker. The story goes that his wife could not stand the smell and forbade him from lighting up inside the house. When he died in the lighthouse in 1910, it was the dead of a U.P. winter, and the ground was frozen too solid to dig a grave. So his body was embalmed in the cold cellar and kept there for weeks until his family could make the long trip north to bury him. Ever since, the lore says, the Captain has been smoking his cigars anywhere he pleases, because the one person who ever told him not to is no longer around to stop him.
The only choice on a killer coast
The lighthouse earns its odd name from the French. Seul Choix means the only choice, and that is exactly what this little harbor was: the single safe place to shelter along a hundred-mile stretch of shoreline that wrecked ships for generations. Congress approved a light here in 1886, but building anything on that remote a point took time, and the beam did not shine until 1895. For decades it was the only thing standing between sailors and the rocks. It is still an active light today, one of the last on this part of the lake, kept up now by the Gulliver Historical Society.
What people report
The cigar smoke is only the beginning. Set a table in the keeper’s quarters and leave the room, and people say you will come back to find the forks turned tines-down, the way Townsend liked them, the whole setting flipped from the way it was left. Volunteers have found a crescent-shaped dent in a made bed, as though someone just sat down. Visitors have described a man watching them from a window halfway up the tower when no one was up there. There is a mirror on the second floor that people refuse to look at too long. None of it is the kind of thing you can prove. But Kat Tedsen, a paranormal investigator who has worked more than 350 sites around Michigan, has said Seul Choix is the only lighthouse where she found something she genuinely could not explain.
Go see for yourself
You do not have to believe any of it to appreciate the place. Seul Choix Point sits near Gulliver, just south of US-2 and east of Manistique, and it is open to visitors from Memorial Day through the middle of October. You can tour the keeper’s quarters, climb the 79-foot tower for the view out over Lake Michigan, wander the little museum, and walk the quiet public beach. The historical society runs the whole thing on donations, so your visit helps keep the light on. Whether you leave a believer is between you and whatever you smell in the hallway.
Every old lighthouse on the Great Lakes has its stories. This one just happens to have a keeper who, more than a century after his death, still will not put out his cigar.
Sources, credits, and reporting details
Sources & accountability
How this story was reported
Legacy source review pending. This published article has not yet passed Yooper’s current source-readiness gate.
Editorial methodNot yet classified
Image provenanceAI imagery status not yet declared
Accountable reviewerNot yet assigned
Last verifiedNot yet recorded
Sources: Gulliver Historical Society; Pure Michigan; Great Lakes Echo / Michigan State University; Haunted Travels of Michigan.
Direct links, claim-level support, dates, credits, and editorial accountability may still be incomplete.