Post Cemetery

A small military cemetery on Mackinac Island containing the graves of soldiers and family members from Fort Mackinac's active years. The cemetery holds burials from the late 18th through 19th centuries.

Fort Mackinac Post Cemetery is located half a mile north of the fort, near Skull Cave, a natural cavern that served as a burial site for Native Americans long before European contact. The cemetery is the oldest on Mackinac Island, established in the early 1800s to inter British and American soldiers killed during the War of 1812. After the wars, civilians and veterans of the American Civil War were also laid to rest here. The earliest interments likely date to the mid-1820s.

Of the 108 souls buried beneath the ground at Post Cemetery, only thirty-nine are identified with headstones. The remaining sixty-nine graves are unmarked, their occupants forgotten, victims of the military's poor record-keeping during the island's early years. This anonymity, this erasure of identity, gives the cemetery its particular character among Mackinac Island's many haunted locations. The dead here are not famous. They are not named in historical accounts or commemorated in monuments. They are simply gone, their stories lost to time.

The book "Haunts of Mackinac" documents the cemetery's most persistent haunting: a mother seen weeping over the late nineteenth-century graves of her two young children. Her figure appears at night, bent over the small headstones in an attitude of grief that witnesses describe as devastating in its intensity. Whether she is the spirit of a woman who lost her children on the isolated island or a manifestation of the collective mourning that has accumulated in this place over two centuries is unknown.

Separately, the historic cemetery is said to be haunted by the spirit of an unidentified woman who is seen and heard weeping over the grave of a fallen soldier. Her sobs carry across the quiet cemetery at night, audible to visitors on the nearby trails. Evidence of paranormal activity has been captured at the Post Cemetery during investigations, and the location is a featured stop on the Mackinac Island Ghost Tour.

The cemetery's proximity to Skull Cave adds another layer to its already dense supernatural atmosphere. The cave was used by Native Americans for burial rituals, and the area around it was considered sacred ground long before the military claimed it for its own dead. The combination of indigenous burial traditions, War of 1812 combat deaths, unmarked graves, and nearly two centuries of accumulated grief makes Post Cemetery one of the most quietly powerful haunted locations on an island that has been called the most haunted place in Michigan.