Beautiful and deadly, the Lake Erie islands off the coast of Ohio have
seen their fair share of disasters. The Victory Hotel on South Bass
Island at Put-in-Bay was once the largest hotel in the nation. But the
grand residence was reduced to ashes after a spark quickly became a
raging, uncontrollable inferno. Reports of smallpox on Pelee Island
resulted in mass hysteria and the quarantine of an entire island. At the
Toledo Harbor Lighthouse, one light keeper was frozen in for days with
his deceased colleague until he could make a desperate escape. Wendy
Koile chronicles the fiercest calamities to shatter the tranquility of
these solitary shores.