Is the most macabre fact about Lake Superior fiction?

I recently made my first trip to a Great Lake, Lake Michigan. Me and the kids went in the water and enjoyed the sun (Dad to lots of sun, to be fair).

The water was cool, but not too cold. It was calm, but far from quiet. The beach was busy, but not too crowded. It was really just right.

So why am I talking about Lake Michigan in an article that has Lake Superior in the title? Well, it seems that Lake Michigan is just right, but Lake Superior is just wrong.

Well, I have a penchant for dark aesthetics and all things creepy. Morbid jokes don’t faze me, and my taste in music can downright scare some people. But Lake Superior has one damn awesome alleged fact that even gives me a little goosebumps.

I saw this Facebook post and said out loud, “This just can’t be true.” Call me skeptical, but this is a Facebook post, a meme, really. Not exactly the most trustworthy source of information.

The meme has been making the rounds in numerous Facebook groups in Michigan and makes the claim that the waters of Lake Superior:

“is so cold that a body would never rise to the surface because the water is never warm enough to grow the bacteria needed to make a body rise to the surface.”

The word “never” could carry a lot of weight here. Besides, it sounds completely made up to someone who is not from this area.

So I tapped into the old Google machine to see if that was true, and it turns out that Lake Superior does not, in fact, “give up dead.” However, that’s not a completely blanket statement.

I followed TruthOrFiction.com’s research and consulted many sources to find out if Lake Superior actually prevents bodies from floating ashore.

It is true that the normal bacteria that decompose dead bodies and produce gases that cause bloat and buoyancy are inactive in Lake Superior because the lake’s temperature is between 0 and 13 degrees Celsius year-round. However, this is not the only exception on the other side of the lake.

Although there were about 350 sea monsters in Lake Superior and an estimated 10,000 fatalities, there aren’t 10,000 or even close to that many bodies lying on its bottom (although as far as I know, there isn’t even a rough estimate on the Internet of how many people might be down there).

The first point of the whole idea is often the existence of “Old Whitey”, a preserved body deep in the lake, the captain of the SS Kamloopswhich sank off Isle Royale in December 1927, killing all on board.

Of course, “Old Whitey” is the only one of the 13 crew members who is down there.

Here is a closer picture of “Old Whitey” in the SS Kamloops
by u/unknown_rider06 in Submechanophobia

Other highlighted examples were the Edmund Fitzgerald And SS Hudson helped to develop a perhaps better understanding of what really happens to the people who die in the lake. In the case of the Fitzgerald all 29 on board are on the sunken freighter. There were about 25 people on board the Hudson, but some, although the exact number is unknown, were washed ashore from the ship in life preservers.

The Hudson sank in September, but the water was still far too cold for survival.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that those who did not go down with these ships and remained on the surface found the shore.

Yet the fact seems to remain… If she is attached to a sunken ship or completely submerged, Lake Superior will not release her dead. However, anyone with a life preserver or other method of swamping to shore will remain afloat. It sounds obvious, but the simple thing is that a simple drowning near shore may not have the same effect as a drowning further out in the water.

I highly recommend you read the article on this topic on TruthOrFiction.com. It is very detailed and also covers some other possible myths surrounding the largest lake in the world.

Michigan’s Most Haunted Body of Water: Lake Superior