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Le Griffon—Michigan’s Original Ghost Ship
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69 Le Griffon— Michigan’s Original Ghost Ship He was an old, old man by the time he told the story in November 1950. But the memory was vivid— a cold, hard recollection he couldn’t shake. The man’s name was Clinton Corby,and he described a day in 1935 when he was on Lake Michigan ,serving on a large freighter that shipped iron ore.Her name was the Lucille. It’s not known what job Corby had, for he’s gone now, but he was just one of a ship full of men who saw what he saw,knew what he knew: they saw a ghost ship on that lake, and they knew which ship it was, because people had seen it before, many times— for hundreds of years. The ship’s name was Le Griffon, a French name that reflected her era. She was built by French explorers way back in 1679— long before Michigan was Michigan and America was America.Through the years, people have called her by more American, modern versions of her original name. The most common is the Griffin. Another name some call her is the Griffith. That’s what Corby called her. “I saw the Griffith once,” the crusty old Corby said in a raspy tone on that day in 1950.“It were a foggy night.The watch sounded 70 Le Griffon— Michigan’s Original Ghost Ship that a ship were approaching on the port side.”According to Corby, the captain of the ship he was on sounded his ship’s bell to hail the oncoming vessel. “But there were no answer from the other ship,” Corby reported. “The men were scared and we all ran out to see what was wrong.We saw an old ship with sails and all.” The looming ship drifted closer, closer, until she bore down so close that it seemed she was set to collide with the Lucille on purpose .The men shouted in fear, until, at the very last moment, the mysterious ship veered off, missing the Lucille by ten feet.And then the ghost ship vanished. “She were the Griffith, all right,” Corby said. He had known of her for many years.“The Griffith were the first ship to float on the Great Lakes,”he recalled.“She were about 50 ton.”The Griffith never returned from her maiden voyage, but Corby maintained,“She still sails on Lake Michigan and Huron.A gale blows her along at a good clip, about 50 knots. Us American [sailors] always argue with the Canadians.They says the Griffith is a Canadian ship and we claims it were American.They says it were on the lakes before there were America, we says it became American when we did.” Corby had some of it right and some of it wrong. But the mystery he shared remains unsolved, and the ghost ship lives on, seen often just by sailors, like all the other ghost ships on the Great Lakes. How many are there? Well, it could be hundreds, maybe thousands , who knows. Ghost ships don’t exactly give up their names as they melt into the horizon. But they testify to one great truth about the Great Lakes:they can be ferocious,worse than the Atlantic,especially when the autumn gales blow. Every Great Lakes sailor knows that November is shipwreck season on the lakes,and cautious sailors stay in port. Some of the worst shipwrecks of modern times have come in November— those of the Carl D. Bradley and the Edmund Fitzgerald. These were huge freighters to us, but the Great Lakes, which are as big as the entire state of Texas, dwarf them, and when they get angry,they eat ships like candy.These causalities never make port again, and people figure they sunk. But sometimes, when there are no traces left of them, their fate becomes speculation, assumption , legend.And some of them come back as ghosts. Or so it is said by those who claim to see them. Le Griffon was hardly the only one. [18.116.239.195] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:55 GMT) Le Griffon— Michigan’s Original Ghost Ship 71 For instance, in 1949, a man named Joseph Tebodo told a story his grandfather had told him. “Our ship was nearing Milwaukee during the winter, or rather late fall,at which times the Lakes put on their greatest display of fury, when one of those storms broke.Through the gale we saw...