Grand Hotel (Mackinac Island)

The Grand Hotel was built in ninety-three days by a railroad consortium that needed somewhere for its passengers to go. The Michigan Central, the Grand Rapids & Indiana, and the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Company formed the hotel company and raised the five-story wooden palace on the bluff in 1887 — 388 rooms behind a 660-foot porch that became, instantly, the longest front porch in the world and Mackinac Island's meeting place, promenade, and 'Flirtation Walk.'

The porch collected the century — Edison demonstrated the phonograph there; presidents, lumber barons, and the Potter Palmers and Marshall Fields of Chicago summered under it. The island's ban on cars, kept since 1898, made the hotel's world complete: arrival by steamer, carriage to the door, the whole season on the porch. Somewhere in Time filmed its fantasy here in 1980 and the fans still return annually.

The ghost story is one the hotel won't discuss — the Woman in Black who walks the porch after dark with a white dog, dissolving when approached, and the legend that the 1887 crews dug into a burial ground and poured footings over bones too many to move. No record confirms it at the Grand; the island does hold unmarked Chippewa graves, proven by a 2011 downtown dig, and the hotel reportedly bars paranormal investigators. The most photographed hotel in Michigan keeps the one file it won't open.

Grand Hotel is the archive's long-porch file — the 1887 railroad-built summer palace with the world's longest porch, car-free island intact, and a Woman in Black the management declines to discuss.