The Ghost of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald (1975)

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours…”

— Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

The wind howled like an old spirit that night — November 10, 1975 — when the SS Edmund Fitzgerald vanished beneath the iron-grey waters of Lake Superior. Twenty-nine souls went down with her, their names now etched into the lake’s dark memory.

No distress call. No beacon. Only silence — as if the lake itself had swallowed every trace of breath and sound.

The Iron Queen of the Inland Seas

When she first glided from the River Rouge shipyards in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was no mere freighter. At 729 feet, she was a floating cathedral of steel — the longest vessel ever to traverse the Great Lakes. Her deck lights shimmered across the black expanse like a procession of candles upon an altar. They called her The Pride of the American Flag — elegant, invincible, unstoppable.

For seventeen years she ferried her cargo of iron ore through Superior’s frigid expanse — through fog, sleet, and tempests. Her captain, Ernest McSorley, was a man of calm command, whose word on the water carried the weight of iron itself. Yet even he once said of the lake, “She is the Lady, and the Lady is not kind.”

The Witch Storm of November

On the morning of November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald departed from Superior, Wisconsin, her hull laden with 26,000 tons of taconite pellets — iron destined for Detroit’s mills. By dusk, the barometer had plummeted. A “Witch of November” had awakened — a storm that roared like something ancient and alive.

Winds screamed at nearly ninety miles per hour. Waves rose thirty feet high and struck the ship broadside, shattering her radar and crushing her hatches. Captain McSorley’s voice came across the radio, weary but steady:

“We are holding our own.”

Minutes later — nothing. The ship slipped from radar as though she had simply dissolved into the dark. The lake grew silent once more, as if satisfied.

The Bones Beneath the Ice

When searchers arrived, they found no survivors. Only twisted steel, broken lifeboats, and oil spreading like ink across the water. The Fitzgerald had snapped in two and plunged to the bottom, resting in 530 feet of freezing blackness — seventeen miles from the safety of Whitefish Bay.

Divers who have seen her describe an eerie stillness below. The hull lies split and silent, her name still legible, her bell once tolling in the cold. No one truly knows what caused her to break — theories speak of rogue waves, structural failure, or the wrath of the lake itself.

But the sailors who cross Superior still speak of that night with reverence, as though whispering near a grave.

The Legend That Never Sank

The story of the Fitzgerald might have joined the countless forgotten wrecks beneath Superior’s skin — but the lake kept whispering her name. In 1976, Gordon Lightfoot’s elegy gave her a heartbeat again, a dirge that lingers like fog over water.

Each November 10, at Whitefish Point, the ship’s bell is raised and rung — twenty-nine times — for every man lost. The sound carries over the lake, low and mournful, as if calling to the restless ghosts below.

And so, The Iron Queen endures, her spirit still navigating the depths. Superior, they say, never gives up her dead. And perhaps she never will.

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SS Edmund Fitzgerald

Presque Isle Lighthouse