Pilot Island in Washington, Wisconsin

Perched on a mere three and a half acres where Green Bay meets Lake Michigan, Pilot Island guards a passage so treacherous that sailors nicknamed it Death's Door. Atlas Obscura reports that the lighthouse built there in 1858 came with a foghorn so powerful it reportedly curdled milk and rattled china from cabinets, while the isolation of the post drove more than one keeper to despair. In a single grim stretch in the early 1890s, three ships wrecked on the island's shoals within about a year of each other, and their remains still rest stacked together just off the coast today. The island now serves as a wildlife refuge, but those sunken hulls remain a quiet warning to anyone who underestimates the strait.

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