Mystery Shipwreck Reappears Near Lake Michigan Shoreline

"It can be there for a day or a week and then be gone. It is still a mystery."

A shipwreck without a place in our history books.

It has been hiding just under the waves of the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The outline of a wooden ship has appeared on the bottom of Lake Michigan.

It has no name and no one knows how it got there.

The mysterious shipwreck is just off the shoreline in the Nordhouse Dunes National Wilderness Area north of Ludington.

9&10's Cody Boyer and photojournalist Melvin Kimbrough went looking for the shipwreck today to find out what is known about it.

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The shipwreck is a mystery that has rangers wondering: how did it get there?

It's not a new discovery but it is more visible than it has been in years.

"It is still a mystery."

Huron-Manistee National Forest District Ranger Jim Thompson says the latest shipwreck to be found in Lake Michigan is unique.

It has no name and is unrecorded in history books.

"We don't know when it happened, what the name of the ship is, if there is anything associated with it," Thompson says. "it just showed up along the shoreline."

We set off on our own to find it.

It's a nearly four mile hike to the lake, then even further down the beach.

Once you get to the shoreline, you have to look close.

"You can see bits and pieces of it," Thompson says. "Once you stop and look at it, you can make the outline of the ship and you can understand. It's like, 'Wow.'"

Thompson says the ship could have been hidden there for centuries.

"It's very neat from a historical standpoint that something occurred who knows how many years ago," Thompson says. "It could be 100 years, 200 years ago."

He says the ship may not have been recorded for several reasons, none of which are known yet.

"To our knowledge, we haven't done a ton of research into it but we don't know basically any specifics of it," Thompson says. "It's not a massive ship. I think the larger ships especially if there was something associated with fatalities, they become more researched."

With hundreds of shipwrecks in the lake, they could reappear at any time but with the way the sand moves under the water, just like this piece of wood…it can go underneath the sand very quickly any day.

"It can be there for a day or a week and then be gone. You don't see it," Thompson says.

The sands are slowly covering the ship again…for now.

"It would be nice to be able to dig into it to be able to find out what the circumstances were around why that ship went down," Thompson says.

All shipwrecks, including this one, are protected by the National Historical Preservation Act.

So while it's cool to go hunting for it, you can look, but don't touch.