Honolulu House

An exotic 1860 mansion built by former US Consul to Hawaii Abner Pratt in a tropical architectural style inspired by Hawaiian royal palaces. The house features Italianate, Gothic Revival, and Polynesian design elements. Now operated as a museum.

The Honolulu House is one of the most architecturally unusual buildings in the Midwest, a tropical fantasy constructed in 1860 by Judge Abner Pratt in the small Michigan town of Marshall. Pratt had served as a chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court before President James Buchanan appointed him United States Consul to the Sandwich Islands, with headquarters in Honolulu, a post he held from 1857 to 1859. Pratt fell deeply in love with the Hawaiian climate and architecture during his time in the islands, and when he returned to Marshall, he built a house that attempted to recreate the tropical atmosphere of Honolulu in southern Michigan.

The result was extraordinary. The Honolulu House features broad verandas, a raised central tower inspired by the Hawaiian Royal Palace, ornamental pagoda-style elements, and tropical interior murals depicting lush island scenes. It was a house built on longing, a man's attempt to hold onto a place and a feeling that could not survive Michigan winters. That longing may have been Pratt's undoing. According to local accounts, Pratt insisted on living as though he were still in the tropics, keeping windows open and refusing to adequately heat the house even during Michigan's brutal winters. He contracted pneumonia and died in 1860, the same year the house was completed. Like the Felts at Felt Mansion, Pratt barely lived in the creation that had consumed his imagination.

The house passed through several owners before the Marshall Historical Society obtained it in the 1960s and undertook a restoration to its 1880s elegance. The Honolulu House now operates as a museum, and it has been featured on Marshall's October ghost tours as part of a city that has been called one of the most haunted small towns in Michigan.

The Haunted Mitten Podcast devoted an episode to Marshall titled "The Entire City of Marshall is Ghosts," and the Honolulu House was discussed as one of the city's most atmospherically unsettling locations. Visitors to the museum have reported a pervasive feeling of being watched throughout the house, cold drafts that move through rooms without corresponding to open windows or the building's ventilation, and an atmosphere that several visitors have described as profoundly sad, as though the house itself is mourning the tropical paradise it was built to remember. Whether Judge Pratt remains in the house he killed himself trying to enjoy, or whether the building has simply absorbed the longing that inspired its creation, the Honolulu House stands as one of Michigan's most unusual and most emotionally charged haunted locations.