Grand Hotel

An iconic Victorian resort hotel that opened in 1887, featuring the world's longest front porch at 660 feet. The hotel has hosted five US presidents and was the filming location for the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time.

The Grand Hotel opened on Mackinac Island in 1887, its 660-foot front porch stretching across the bluff as the longest in the world. But the ground beneath the hotel held secrets that predated the building by centuries. During construction, workers unearthed human skeletons from the foundation, remains of the Native American burials that had consecrated the island for generations. By some accounts, not all of the remains were recovered before construction continued on top of them. Paranormal researchers have pointed to this disturbance of sacred ground as the foundation, in more ways than one, of the Grand Hotel's haunted reputation.

The hotel's most frequently reported ghost is Little Rebecca, a child who passed away on the grounds under circumstances that have been lost to history. Rebecca's spirit haunts the fourth floor, where she has been spotted floating and walking through the hallways before disappearing into solid walls. Her presence is described as melancholy rather than frightening, a small girl who seems to be searching for something or someone she cannot find.

After dark, when the Grand Hotel's famous porch empties of its daytime visitors, a different kind of guest takes over. A woman in black has been seen walking a large white dog up and down the 660-foot porch, her figure visible against the moonlit Straits of Mackinac. She walks with the unhurried pace of someone who has all the time in the world, and both she and the dog vanish when approached.

In the hotel's bar and piano room, an elderly man in a top hat has been observed smoking a cigar and watching the evening's entertainment. Those who see him describe him as solid-looking and unremarkable until he simply ceases to exist when someone walks toward him. The cigar smoke, however, lingers.

Perhaps the most unsettling report involves a dark entity with glowing red eyes that was encountered by a maintenance worker near the hotel's theater stage. The shadowy shape was hovering above the stage when the worker noticed it. Before he could react, the entity rushed toward him with enough force to knock him to the ground.

The Grand Hotel's management does not endorse or promote any type of paranormal activity or ghost stories, maintaining a position of polite silence on the subject. But travelers and patrons continue to report their own encounters within the hotel, and the combination of disturbed Native American burial grounds, over 135 years of continuous operation, and Mackinac Island's own dense concentration of historical trauma has made the Grand Hotel one of Michigan's most persistently haunted buildings.