Harvey and the Haunted Mission Point Resort, Mackinac Island

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 11, 2026 · How we verify

On the southeastern shoreline of Mackinac Island, where the Straits of Mackinac divide Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas, a sprawling summer resort hotel sits on a point of land that shares its name. The haunted Mission Point Resort is a comparatively young building with an unusually tangled past: it began as the headquarters of an international moral reform movement, spent four years as a college, and only became a hotel in the 1970s. The ghost most often named here, a student called Harvey, belongs to the college years, and his story is told far more often than it is documented.

Mission Point at a Glance

• Where: The southeastern shoreline of Mackinac Island, in the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas
• Origins: The earliest buildings grew out of Moral Re-Armament concepts developed in the 1950s
• Became a college: 1966, as Mackinac College
• Became a hotel: Converted to a vacation resort property in 1972, renamed Mission Point Resort in 1987
• On screen: A filming location for Somewhere in Time (1980) and for an episode of Ghost Hunters that aired on March 30, 2011
• Access: An operating seasonal resort hotel. Rooms can be booked.

From Moral Re-Armament to Mackinac College

The resort’s oldest structures did not start life as a hotel. They originated from Moral Re-Armament concepts discussed between Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams and Dr. Frank Buchman in the 1950s, a movement built around ideas of global unity and personal reform rather than around tourism. That intent shaped the architecture: a large theater, a sound stage, classrooms, dormitory space, the apparatus of a conference center rather than a resort.

In 1966 the buildings became Mackinac College. The school was short lived. By 1970 the property had shifted again, into use as a religious retreat and educational institution, and in 1972 it transitioned into a vacation resort property. The Mission Point Resort name was not applied until 1987. More recent accounts of the property’s ownership credit the Ware family, who acquired it in 2014, with the extensive renovations that produced the hotel guests see today.

Longer versions of the story circulate on the island, pushing the site’s history back into the nineteenth century and earlier, with claims of a vineyard and of military use. Those claims are repeated in tourist literature rather than supported by the documented record, and the verifiable sequence of this property begins with the 1950s buildings.

Harvey, the Student Said to Have Stayed

The name attached to almost every strange report here is Harvey, described as a student from the Mackinac College era whose death in the 1960s followed a heartbreak. No public record has been produced to confirm that such a student existed, which puts Harvey in the same category as most resident ghosts: a name that arrived with the story rather than from a death certificate.

What is beyond dispute is that the college really did operate on this site for those few years, and that the buildings guests now sleep in once housed classrooms, a theater and an infirmary. The legend grew in rooms that genuinely served those purposes, which is part of why it has held on.

What Guests and Staff Report

These are reported experiences, not verified events, and the resort has made no claim that any of them are supernatural in origin.

• Sightings of a male figure in and around the theater, the single most frequently named location
• Cold drafts in rooms with no open windows
• Small objects moving or turning up out of place
• Unexplained sounds after dark in corridors and guest rooms
• Sudden chills in the area that served as the college infirmary
• Flickering lights and props shifting position during theater productions

Several of these have ordinary explanations available to anyone looking for them. A large seasonal building on an exposed shoreline in the Straits moves air in ways that produce cold spots, and a working theater is full of people handling props and lighting. That does not make the accounts dishonest. It does mean they are testimony rather than evidence.

The Theater: Christopher Reeve, Then Ghost Hunters

The room at the center of the ghost stories has a second claim to fame. The theater, the sound stage and one of the classrooms served as filming locations for the 1980 film Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, which remains an annual pilgrimage subject for fans of the picture on Mackinac Island.

The resort’s paranormal reputation reached a national audience when it appeared on the Syfy series Ghost Hunters in the sixth episode of season seven, titled “Frozen in Fear,” which originally aired on March 30, 2011. The episode’s title was earned honestly enough: filming wrapped on the last available day of ferry transportation to the island, with winter ice closing the Straits behind the crew. Television investigations prove nothing either way, but the episode is a large part of why the Harvey story travels beyond the island.

Staying at Mission Point Resort

Unlike many locations in this guide, there is nothing to sneak around here. Mission Point is a working summer resort hotel on the island’s southeastern shore, and the way to experience it is to book a room during the operating season. Mackinac Island is reached by ferry, and as the Ghost Hunters crew discovered, that service does not run year round: winter ice in the Straits ends the season, and the resort’s calendar follows it.

Guests curious about the ghost stories should set expectations accordingly. The staff are hospitality workers, not tour guides to the afterlife, and the theater is a functioning venue with its own schedule. The strongest reason to come is the property itself: a lakeside point with long water views, grounds to walk, and a building whose odd, institutional bones still show through the renovations if you know what you are looking at.

Address: 6633 Main Street

Sources

• New owners of Mission Point Resort have family ties to Mackinac Island
• History of Mission Point Resort
• 'Somewhere in Time' actress Jane Seymour surprises fans on Mackinac Island
• Ghost Hunters: Season 7, Episode 6
• GeoHack – Mission Point Resort
• Wikipedia: Mission Point Resort