The immensely popular William A. Irvin Haunted Ship will go on hiatus for the 2018 season due to the ongoing slip and seawall project that is currently impacting access to the boat as well as traffic around Harbor Drive this construction season. Work got underway this spring, bringing much of Harbor Drive down to one lane and forcing the William A. Irvin, which serves as a floating museum during the warmer weather months, to be closed.

William A. Irvin Museum Director Steve Rankila told the Duluth News Tribune that they had hoped to get the ship open to the public for the end of the 2018 season, including for the Haunted Ship, however the current pace of the construction project has eliminated that possibility. Delays in the slip project have extended the timeframe, leading to the decision to ultimately cancel the 2018 Haunted Ship.

The Irvin will need to be moved out of the slip it calls home in September to allow crews to commence a cleanup project to handle contaminants at the bottom of the slip that include lead and industrial compounds that have settled over the years. An initial plan to move the Irvin to the harborside seawall near its current location has been scrapped due to expenses necessary to make the ship publicly accessible and usable in a new location and concerns over the ship being more directly exposed to strong winds and larger waves.

Instead of being moved to the harborside seawall, the Irvin will be moved to Fraser Shipyards in Superior during the cleanup project. This project is expected to extend through much of this fall.

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