Fairport Harbor Lighthouse

The lighthouse itself is the second on the site. The first tower, built in 1825, was found to rest on a foundation only two feet deep; by 1868 the United States Lighthouse Board judged both tower and dwelling in hazardous condition, and on March 3, 1869, Congress appropriated $30,000 for replacements. A temporary light went up that December, construction began April 4, 1870 — this time on piles driven eleven feet down — and the new sixty-foot tower was first lit August 11, 1871. Its spiral stair runs sixty-nine steps to the platform.

The station kept the Grand River mouth until 1925, when the West Breakwater Light took over and the old tower was decommissioned. Demolition was expected; a letter-writing campaign by village residents stopped it — the historical society claims it as the first lighthouse in America saved from the wrecking ball. The village took ownership in 1945 and founded the marine museum, still volunteer-run; the National Register listing followed in 1971.

The legend attaches to the first keeper of the 1871 house, Captain Joseph Babcock, a Civil War veteran who moved his family in that year — two of his children were born at the station. The story goes that after the Babcocks' son Robbie died of smallpox, Mrs. Babcock fell ill and took to her bed, and the captain brought her cats for company. Her favorite was a stray gray cat who became her constant companion — until one day he disappeared, and no search ever found him. Mrs. Babcock died not long after.

The curator who lived upstairs in the keeper's house from 1987 to 1991 reported a gray puff cat appearing out of nowhere and dashing through rooms — sojourning, the accounts specify, in the same room where Mrs. Babcock had slept. Visitors filed similar sightings in the years that followed.

After the mummy surfaced, the paranormal groups arrived in the ordinary way — EMF meters, night-vision, the cable-television circuit; the Ghost Cat has been examined in two local and five national segments, including Animal Planet's The Haunted. Investigators claim to have recorded voices in the house, one of which the lore attributes to Robbie Babcock, the smallpox dead son, and shadowy images of a feline moving where no cat should be.

The archive files the case as the collection's most elegant small haunting: an apparition reported for a decade, then a body found in the walls that fits the description. Whether the basement cat is Sentinel, or whether a century of strays simply produced one mummy and one legend in the same building, is left where the museum leaves it — on display, in a box, for the schoolchildren to decide.