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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.

June 28, 1924, dawned hot and sunny, with fluffy white clouds hovering over a blue and inviting Lake Erie. For two Ohio communities, Lorain and Sandusky, the day ended in unimaginable disaster. In the late afternoon, the blue sky turned dark, and the wispy white puffs morphed into a mass of black thunderclouds as a monster formed on the lake. An F4 tornado, unexpected and not understood, was born from a thunderstorm on the now turbulent waters of Lake Erie. It charged ashore, smashing into Sandusky, retreated again to the lake and then headed east before turning abruptly south to make landfall in Lorain. Before the massive funnel lifted, it would destroy a city, create death records still unbroken and change the lives of thousands of people.