Did Everyone Die on Skull Island?

The first time I tried to get onto Skull Island, the gate was locked.

I had arranged to meet Henry Johnson, the commercial realtor handling the property, the previous Wednesday. We both showed up expecting to get inside and instead found ourselves standing outside a locked gate trying to figure out where the keys had gone.

Johnson, who is in his 90s and still works in commercial real estate, was understanding about my request to access the property and helped work through the logistics.

We eventually got it sorted out. At about 1 p.m. the following Tuesday, someone met me and unlocked the gate. I arrived shortly afterward, parked outside, walked through the gate, and finally found myself on Skull Island.

The name makes the property sound considerably more exotic than its real-estate listing does.

Skull Island is the kind of name that belongs on a pirate map, not something along the Saginaw River south of downtown Bay City. There are no palm trees, no buried treasure, and, as far as anyone can prove, King Kong has never lived there.

It turns out, the story attached to the name is much darker.

Skull Island is currently being marketed as roughly 53 acres of industrial land at 400 41st St., with Saginaw River frontage, a ship slip, a turning basin for large watercraft and the James Clements Airport immediately beside it.

Bay City also uses access farther back on the property for brush disposal, which helps explain why the gate serves more than just the parcel itself. In other words, the place attached to one of Bay County’s strangest legends is still part of a working modern landscape even while much of its interior feels almost forgotten.

Once I moved beyond the gate, however, the language of commercial real estate faded quickly. I followed what looked like an old road or access path toward the back of the property, where an old 5-miles-per-hour sign was nearly swallowed by vegetation.

The farther I went, the less the place resembled a 53-acre industrial parcel and more like somewhere Bay City had simply stopped touching.

The path eventually opened into a clearing. A ladder-style tree stand was fixed against one of the trees there, though nothing indicated how recently anyone had used it. From that clearing, I cut away from the old road and worked my way through the vegetation toward the turning basin and the portion historically associated with Skull Island.

Massive trees rose above the undergrowth, including two that were the largest I can remember seeing in Michigan outside Isle Royale. Old glass bottles, rusting cans, and pieces of building material appeared beneath the leaves, while a few crude wooden shelters sat empty.

There were signs everywhere that people had passed through Skull Island before, but very little suggesting anyone had been there lately. A discarded glucose meter rested among sticks and broken material on the forest floor.

At another spot, I came across a pile of retail tags that appeared to have been torn from merchandise. Near the water, an aging sign warned boaters not to anchor or dredge because a gas pipeline crossed beneath them, a reminder that however wild the interior had become, Skull Island was never entirely separated from the industrial landscape surrounding it.

It was remarkably quiet. Birds moved through the canopy and squirrels occasionally disturbed the brush, but I saw little other wildlife. Every few seconds there would be some small noise from the woods, often nothing more than another leaf working its way through the branches before landing somewhere nearby.

Spend an hour and a half somewhere that quiet and you begin to realize just how many leaves actually fall in an hour. Through gaps in the growth, the old industrial world still appeared from time to time. I could see the ship slip and turning basin, along with remnants of the old Alkali plant, but the farther I moved into the property, the more those structures began to feel like interruptions in a landscape that had spent decades growing over them.

Local historians have said for generations that human bones are buried somewhere beneath all of that vegetation, old debris, industrial fill, and accumulated layers of human use.

Histories of the Saginaw Valley have a tradition that the Sauk once occupied the region before being attacked and driven westward by a coalition of other Native nations, usually identified in later accounts as Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi and their allies.

One of the earliest detailed written versions appeared in the 1866 book Indian and Pioneer History of the Saginaw Valley. The account was attributed to early settler William McCormick, who said he had heard the story in 1834 from an elderly Ojibwe man named Puttaguasamine and later encountered similar traditions from other Native sources.

According to the story McCormick preserved, fighting took place throughout the Saginaw River system as allied forces attacked the Sauk from different directions. Survivors eventually retreated to an island where they believed the surrounding water would protect them because their pursuers lacked canoes. Then the temperature dropped, the water froze strongly enough for their enemies to cross, and another massacre followed.

McCormick wrote that nearly everyone on the island was killed and said the place later became known as Skull Island because settlers continued finding human skulls there. It is an unforgettable story, and the fact that it appeared in print as early as 1866 means it cannot simply be dismissed as a 20th-century ghost tale invented for tourism.

At the same time, what survives is not Puttaguasamine speaking directly to us. It is Puttaguasamine’s story as remembered, translated, interpreted, and ultimately written down by McCormick more than three decades after the conversation supposedly took place.

By 1918, when George Ernest Butterfield published “Bay County, Past and Present,” the Skull Island tradition had accumulated additional detail while remaining surprisingly unsettled. Butterfield openly acknowledged that there were several versions of what happened.

In one, the Sauk had won a battle and gone to Skull Island to celebrate, eventually falling asleep after a feast and dance while their enemies quietly approached. In another, the Sauk had already been defeated near the mouth of the river and retreated to the island as a last defensive position, only to have a cold night freeze the water and give their attackers a bridge.

After presenting these competing accounts, Butterfield made a leap that reveals much about the way Skull Island history was assembled. Whichever version was correct, he argued, the many skulls reportedly found there made it evident that a great battle had taken place.

The reasoning is understandable, especially for a writer working within the historical assumptions of 1918, but it is also the central problem with the story.

Human remains, assuming settlers really encountered them in the numbers claimed, could demonstrate that people had been buried or died there. They could not, by themselves, tell us who those people were, when they died, whether they died by warfare or disease, or whether they all belonged to the same event.

But the 1918 history is especially valuable because it also gives a surprisingly precise description of Skull Island’s geography. In a footnote on printed page 30, Butterfield wrote that Skull Island was not actually located in the main Saginaw River channel but at the mouth of Squaconning Creek, just south of Bay City.

He said the island had once been separated from the mainland by a narrow, shallow channel along its west side, but that the channel had already disappeared by 1918, making Skull Island part of the mainland. The same footnote mentions Stone Island a short distance away and another place called Calf Island farther south, a local name that has not followed into modern maps.

That description explains why finding Skull Island today can be strangely unsatisfying. There is no bridge to cross and no moment when you have reached an island. The modern property carrying the Skull Island name is vastly larger than the roughly two-acre landform described in older accounts, and more than a century of dredging, industrial development, filling, and shoreline alteration have further complicated the landscape. A person can walk straight through what was once an island without knowing when they have crossed the shoreline that originally defined it.

The water I encountered while working my way through the property was not some forgotten remnant of that western channel. It was the turning basin, an obvious product of the industrial history that later reshaped this section of the riverfront. Reeds and brush now crowd portions of its edge, but the basin itself remains a substantial feature of the property.

What I could not find by simply walking the land was anything that clearly announced where the old shallow channel once separated Skull Island from the mainland. If any trace of it remains in the modern topography, identifying it would require more than standing in the woods and guessing where water used to run.

The Saginaw Valley’s archaeological record is much older and more complicated than the Skull Island legend alone. Human communities occupied the valley for thousands of years before Bay City existed, leaving behind village sites, tools, pottery, hearths, food remains, storage pits, and burial sites across the region.

Human remains encountered near the Saginaw River therefore cannot automatically be assigned to one named nation, one century or one battle without evidence connecting them to that particular event.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, archaeologists such as Harlan I. Smith were trying to separate physical evidence from the assumptions that had accumulated around it.

By then, however, much of the valley had already been transformed. Settlers and amateur collectors disturbed burial sites and removed objects, while lumbering, dredging, and industrial development altered riverbanks and lowlands that might have preserved more useful archaeological context.

Even the supposed connection between the Sauk and the name Saginaw is less settled than older histories suggested. Writers such as Butterfield confidently repeated an Ojibwe expression rendered as “O-Sauk-e-non,” interpreted as the land of the Sauk.

Other linguistic interpretations instead connect Saginaw to words describing a place where water flows out, which would make sense for a river system emptying into Saginaw Bay. The disagreement does not prove that the Sauk were absent from the valley, but it does show how easily one historical interpretation can start to become unquestionable.

For generations, native oral accounts were frequently treated as unreliable, while settler memories were printed as fact with far less scrutiny. Much of what survives about early Native history in the Saginaw Valley exists precisely because Indigenous people shared stories with traders, missionaries, and settlers who later wrote them down. Puttaguasamine may have been preserving the memory of a real conflict.

There is another strange layer to the legend. Butterfield’s 1918 history claimed that after the Sauk had supposedly been driven from the valley, occasional sightings of Sauk warriors returning to their former territory were interpreted by some Chippewa residents as the spirits of those who had been killed.

From there, the story grew into the idea of the Saginaw Valley as a “Haunted Valley,” where fear of the dead supposedly discouraged Native settlement for a period of time. Butterfield went even further, claiming that other Native groups sometimes exploited the superstition by frightening camps and taking whatever had been left behind.

Deep inside the property, the old historical arguments felt strangely distant. There was no battlefield marker, no cemetery sign, and nothing identifying the place where Sauk warriors supposedly made their last stand. Instead there was one giant dead tree that had split open into a hollow shell.

The city remains close enough to see and hear, but parts of Skull Island feel removed from it. I expected the place to feel like an abandoned industrial property with trees growing through it and some areas did. Farther back though, the relationship seemed reversed. Industry felt temporary, while the vegetation consuming it felt older and considerably less concerned with whatever people had intended for the land.

For a place with such a violent name and such a dramatic legend, Skull Island felt surprisingly ordinary: A squirrel moved through the branches. Leaves kept falling. Bottles and cans disappeared beneath plants. All on ground where generations of writers had traditionally placed one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Saginaw Valley.

What we can say is that Skull Island is real, and that behind a locked gate south of Bay City, beyond the industrial ruins, there remains a patch of land carrying a name that has survived generations of physical change.

By the time I worked my way back toward the gate, the vegetation had left me covered from head to toe in burrs.

I hadn’t found skulls or anything that could settle a story people have told over the ages. What I found was quieter than that: old evidence of people scattered throughout the property, nobody around, and a landscape that remembers being used without explaining what happened on it.

And every few seconds, another leaf fell.