Mission House

A mission school built in 1825 to educate Native American and Metis children. Over 500 children attended the boarding school, with at least 16 documented deaths, mostly due to illness.

The Mission House on Mackinac Island was built in 1825 by Presbyterian missionaries William and Amanda Ferry as a boarding school for Native American and Metis children. Under the era's assimilationist philosophy, often expressed in the brutal motto "Kill the Indian, save the man," the school separated children from their families and communities, forcing them to adopt European customs, language, and religion. Over the school's twelve years of operation, more than five hundred Native American and Metis children passed through its doors.

At least sixteen of those children died while attending the school, most from illnesses like tuberculosis that spread rapidly in the close quarters. Some accounts say the sick children were quarantined in the cellar as they wasted away from disease. Their small bodies were buried on the island, far from their families and ancestral lands. When the mission closed in 1837, the building was abandoned, though it would be reused over the following decades as a hotel, dormitory, and conference center.

It is these children who are believed to haunt the Mission House today. The paranormal activity reported in the building is remarkably consistent across different eras and different occupants. The sounds of children laughing echo through the first and second floors after dark. Small footsteps are heard running through hallways when no children are present. Objects move during the night, particularly on the second floor. Residents and guests have reported being awakened by the sensation of a ghost bumping into their bed, and alarm clocks have been knocked over by unseen hands.

The most poignant reports describe the sounds of children playing: a ball being tossed back and forth in the hallway, the scuffle of small feet on wooden floors, and whispered conversations in languages that witnesses cannot identify. Some believe the children are speaking in their original Native languages, the ones the missionaries tried to eradicate, languages that have survived in death even if they were suppressed in life.

In the late 1970s, the building was purchased by the Mackinac Island State Park Commission and converted to living quarters for seasonal employees. Moon Mausoleum has documented the Mission House haunting extensively, and Northern Michigan magazine has featured accounts from former ghost-tour guides who describe the building as one of the most emotionally intense locations on an island already saturated with the supernatural. The Mission House stands as a reminder that some of Mackinac Island's ghosts are not soldiers or hotel guests, but children who were taken from their homes and never returned.