The archive holds 49 lighthouse dossiers across 19 states and territories, and they share a resident. Other haunted buildings file ghosts who died in the parlor or the ward; the light stations file keepers — men and women whose job was to not leave, and whom the reports say never quite did. It is the most internally consistent shelf in the maritime records: the ghost is almost always the person whose whole life was the building.
The watch that didn’t end
The cleanest file is Old Presque Isle. The 1840 Lake Huron tower was replaced in 1870 and its lamp permanently disconnected in 1979. Caretaker George Parris — fifteen years of tours, stories and harmless tricks on visitors — died in January 1992. Within months the dead tower's light was seen burning again: by his widow Lorraine driving home, and reportedly by the Coast Guard and the Air National Guard. It has never been explained. The file calls it what it is — a dead lighthouse whose lamp kept lighting.
Pensacola holds the archive's woman-keeper file. Michaela Ingraham took over the lamps in 1840 when her husband died, ran the light for fifteen years while raising three children in the keeper's house, and kept it until her own death in 1855 — the only woman ever to keep the station. The lore layered on later is uglier: a keeper's wife said to have been murdered in the quarters, bloodstains that reportedly reappear after cleaning. The record confirms the widow's watch; the stains are filed as legend.
Seguin Island goes back to Washington — the president approved the light in 1795 after Georgetown merchants petitioned that vessels and persons might be preserved from immature deaths. First keeper John Polereczky, a Hungarian-born count who fought in the Revolution, died on the island penniless in 1804; the Old Captain seen on the tower stairs is attached to him in lore. The signature story — the keeper who axed his wife's piano, then her, then himself — is filed by the station's own caretakers as legend, documentation never surfaced. What is documented: the 1857 tower, the first-order Fresnel lens still turning, and fog roughly a third of the year.
What the towers documented
At St. Augustine the haunting rests on a coroner's record. In July 1873, a supply cart carrying construction superintendent Hezekiah Pittee's daughters — Mary, Eliza and Carrie, plus a friend the records mostly failed to name — rolled into Salt Run and drowned all four girls; keeper Joseph Andreu had already fallen sixty feet to his death whitewashing the old tower in 1859. The laughter and running footsteps reported in the 219-step tower are attributed to the girls; the cigar-smelling Man in Blue on the stairs is attributed to a keeper still making rounds. The museum files it openly — the Dark of the Moon tour is a flagship program.
Point Lookout is the arithmetic file. First keeper James Davis lit the lamp on September 20, 1830 and was dead by December 3 — seventy-four days; his daughter Ann kept the light seventeen years after him. Then the war: Hammond Hospital in 1862, and after Gettysburg the Union's largest POW camp — more than 50,000 Confederates through the point, nearly 4,000 dead of exposure, disease and starvation. The file's most telling detail is a date: the haunting reports begin only after 1966, when the light was automated and the keepers left. The preservation society itself asks, dryly, who issued the most-haunted-in-America classification.
Tillamook Rock earned its legend before it earned its light. Weeks before the first illumination in January 1881, the construction crew reported voices out of the storm and a ship's running light impossibly close — the barque Lupatia, inbound from Japan, whose dead joined the file. Surveyor John Trewavas had already been swept off the rock in 1879; storms threw basalt through the foghorn roof for seventy-six years. The keepers named it Terrible Tilly. The file notes the honest arithmetic: in all that service, only one person was ever killed on the rock itself.
What the file cannot say
St. Simons is the shortest honest summary on the shelf: the 1872 tower where a keeper was shot — Frederick Osborne, killed after a dispute with his assistant, whose widow reportedly called out years later that the light still worked — and where footsteps are still reported on the stairs. And Heceta Head is the strangest: a ghost named Rue whose name a Ouija board produced, built backward onto a 1975 newspaper headline — a workman who saw a gray-haired woman reflected in an attic window and declined to finish the job. The beam is documented; the headline is documented; Rue is what the house does with both.
Why the keeper is always the ghost, the record cannot answer — whether it is the shape of the job, the isolation that was genuinely lethal, or simply that a lighthouse is a building designed around one person's vigil. What the archive can keep separate is the split it always keeps: the falls, drownings and shootings are documented; the footsteps, the relit lamp and the cigar smoke are reported. Both are filed. Neither is asserted.