The Haunted Light
at Newport by the SeaBy Lischen M. Miller
(Reprinted from Pacific Monthly, Vol. II, 1899)
Situated at Yaquina, on the coast of Oregon, is an old, deserted
lighthouse. It stands upon a promontory that juts out dividing the bay
from the ocean, and is exposed to every wind that blows. Its
weather-beaten walls are wrapped in mystery. Of an afternoon when the
fog comes drifting in from the sea and completely envelopes the
lighthouse, and then stops in its course as if its object had been
attained, it is the loneliest place in the world. At such times those
who chance to be in the vicinity hear a moaning sound like the cry of
one in pain, and sometimes a frenzied call for help pierces the
deathlike stillness of the waning day. Far out at sea, ships passing
in the night are often guided in their course by a light that gleams
from the lantern tower where no lamp is every trimmed.
In the days when Newport was but a handful of cabins, roughly built,
and flanked by an Indian camp, across the bar there sailed a sloop,
grotesquely rigged and without a name. The arrival of a vessel was a
rare event, and by the time the stranger had dropped anchor abreast
the village the whole population were gathered on the strip of sandy
beach to welcome her. She was manned by a swarthy crew, and her
skipper was a beetle-browed ruffian with a scar across his cheek from
mouth to ear. A boat was lowered, and in it a man about 40 years of
age, accompanied by a young girl, were rowed ashore. The man was tall
and dark, and his manner and speech indicated gentle breeding. He
explained that the sloop's water casks were empty, and was directed to
the spring that poured down the face of the
yellow sandstone cliff a
few yards up the beach. Issuing instructions in some heathenish
unfamiliar tongue to the boatmen, he devoted himself to asking and
answering questions. The sloop was bound down the coast to Coos Bay.
She had encountered rough weather off the Columbia river bar, and had
been driven far out of her course. To the young lady, his daughter,
the voyage proved most trying. She was not a good sailor. If,
therefore, accommodations could be secured, he wished to leave her
ashore until the return of the sloop a fortnight later.
The landlady of the "-------" had a room to spare, and by the time the
water casks were filled, arrangements had been completed which
resulted in the transfer of the fair traveler's luggage from the sloop
to the "hotel." The father bade his daughter
an affectionate adieu,
and was rowed back to the vessel, which at once weighed anchor and
sailed away in the golden dusk of the summer evening.
Muriel, that was the name she gave, Muriel Trevenard, was a
delicate-looking, fair-haired girl still in her teens, very sweet and
sunny-tempered. She seemed to take kindly to her new environment,
accepting its rude inconveniences as a matter of course, though all
her own belongings testified to the fact that she was accustomed to
the refinements and even luxuries of civilization. She spent many
hours each day idling with a sketch block and pencil in that grassy
hollow in the hill, seaward from the town, or strolled upon the beach
or over the wind-swept uplands. The fortnight lengthened to a month
and yet no sign of the sloop, or any sail rose
above the horizon to
southward.
"You've no cause to worry," said the landlady. "Your father's safe
enough. No rough weather since he sailed, and as for time--- a ship's
time is as uncertain as a woman's temper, I've heard my own father
say."
"Oh I am not anxious," replied Muriel, "not in the least."
It was in August that a party of pleasure-seekers came over the Coast
Range and pitched their tents in the grassy hollow. They were a merry
company, and they were not long in discovering Muriel.
"Such a pretty girl,"exclaimed Cora May, who was herself so fair that
she could afford to be generous. "I am sure she does not belong to
anyone about here. We must coax her to come to our camp."
But the girl needed little coaxing. She found these light-hearted
young people a pleasant interruption,
and she was enthusiastically
welcomed by all, young and old alike. She joined them in their
ceaseless excursions, and made one of the group that gathered nightly
around the camp fire. There was one, a rather serious-minded youth,
who speedily constituted himself her cavalier. He was always at hand
to help her into the boat, to bait her hook when they went fishing,
and to carry her shawl, or book or sketch block, and she accepted
these attentions as she seemed to accept all else, naturally and
sweetly.
The Cape Foulweather light had just been completed, and the house upon
the bluff above Newport was deserted. Some member of the camping party
proposed one Sunday afternoon that they pay it a visit.
"We have seen everything else there is to see," remarked Cora May.
"It is just an ordinary
house with a lantern on top," objected Muriel.
"You can get a good view of it from the bay. Besides it is probably
locked up."
"Somebody has the key. We can soon find out who," said Harold Welch.
"And we haven't anything else to do,"
Accordingly they set out in a body to find the key. It was in the
possession of the landlady's husband who had been appointed to look
after the premises. He said he had not been up there lately, and
seemed surprised after a mild fashion that anyone should feel an
interest in an empty house, but he directed them how to reach it.
"You go up that trail to the top of the hill and you'll strike the
road, but you won't find anything worth seeing after you get there. It
ain't anywhere like the new light."
With much merry talk and laughter they climbed the hill
and found the
road, a smooth and narrow avenue overshadowed by dark young pines,
winding along the hill-top to the rear of the house.
It stood in a small enclosure bare of vegetation. The sand was piled
in little wind-swept heaps against the board fence. There was a walk
paved with brick, leading from the gate around to the front where two
or three steps went up to a square porch with seats on either side.
Harold Welch unlocked the door, and they went into the empty hall that
echoed dismally to the sound of human voices. Rooms opened from this
hallway on either hand and in the L at the back were the kitchen,
storerooms and pantry, a door that gave egress to a narrow veranda,
and another shutting off the cellar. At the rear of the hall the
stairs led up to the second floor which was
divided like the first
into plain, square rooms. But the stairway went on, winding up to a
small landing where a window looked out to northward, and from which a
little room, evidently a linen closet, opened opposite the window.
There was nothing extraordinary about this closet at the first glance.
It was well furnished with shelves and drawers, and its only
unoccupied wall space was finished with a simple wainscoting.
"Why," cried one, as they crowded the landing and overflowed into the
closet, "this house seems to be falling to pieces." He pulled at a
section of the wainscote and it came away in his hand. "Hello! what's
this? Iron walls?"
"It's hollow," said another, tapping the smooth black surface
disclosed by the removal of the panel.
"So it is," cried the first speaker. "I wonder
what's behind it? Why
it opens!" It was a heavy piece of sheet iron about three feet square.
He moved it to one side, set it against the wall, and peered into the
aperture.
"How mysterious!" exclaimed Muriel, leaning forward to look into the
dark closet, whose height and depth exactly corresponded to the
dimensions of the panel. It went straight back some six or eight feet
and then dropped abruptly into what seemed a soundless well. One, more
curious than the rest, crawled in and threw down lighted bits of
paper.
"It goes to the bottom of the sea," he declared, as he backed out and
brushed the dust from his clothes. "Who knows what it is, or why it
was built?"
"Smugglers," suggested somebody and they all laughed, though there was
nothing particularly humorous in the remark. But they
were strangely
nervous and excited. There was something uncanny in the atmosphere of
this deserted dwelling that oppressed them with an unaccountable sense
of dread. They hurried out leaving the dark closet open, and climbed
up into the lantern tower where no lamp has been lighted these many
years.
The afternoon, which had been flooded with sunshine, was waning in a
mist that swept in from the sea and muffled the world in dull grey.
"Let us go home," cried Cora May. "If it were clear we might see
almost to China from this tower, but the fog makes me lonesome."
So they clambered down the iron ladder and descending the stairs,
passed out through the lower hall into the grey fog. Harold Welch
stopped to lock the door, and Muriel waited for him at the foot of the
steps. The lock was rusty,
and he had trouble with the key. By the
time he joined her, the rest of the party had disappeared around the
house.
"You are kind to wait for me," said he, as they caught step on the
brick pavement and moved forward. But Muriel laid her hand upon his
arm.
"I must go back," she said. "I--- I--- dropped my handkerchief in---
the--- hall upstairs, I must go back and get it."
They remounted the steps, and Welch unlocked the door and let her pass
in. But when he would have followed, she stopped him imperiously.
"I am going alone," she said. "You are not to wait. Lock the door and
go on. I will come out through the kitchen." He objected, but she was
obstinate, and, perhaps because her lightest wish was beginning to be
his law of life, he reluctantly obeyed her. Again the key hung in the
lock. This time it took him several minutes to release it. When he
reached the rear of the house Muriel was nowhere to be seen. He called
her two or three times and waited, but, receiving no reply, concluded
that she had hurried out and rejoined the rest whose voices came back
to him from the avenue of pines. She had been nervous and irritable
all the afternoon, so unlike herself that he had wondered more than
once if she were il, or weary of his close attendance. It occurred to
him now that possibly she had taken his means to rid herself of his
company. He hurried on, for it was growing cold and the fog was
thickening to a rain. He had just caught up with the stragglers of the
party, and they were beginning to chafe him at being alone, when the
sombre stillness of the darkening day was
rent by a shriek so wild and
weird that they who heard it felt the blood freeze suddenly in their
veins. They shrank involuntarily closer and looked at each other with
blanched cheeks and startled eyes. Before anyone found voice it came
again. This time it was a cry for help, thrice repeated in quick
succession.
"Muriel! Where is Muriel?" demanded Welch, his heart leaping in sudden
fear.
"Why you ought to know," cried Cora May. "We left her with you."
They hurried toward the deserted house.
"She went back to get her handkerchief," explained Welch. "She told me
not to wait, and I locked the door and came on."
"Locked her in that horrid place! Why did you do it?" exclaimed Cora,
indignantly.
"She said she would come out by way of the kitchen," replied he.
"She could not. The door is
locked, and the key is broken off in the
lock," said another. "I noticed it when we were rummaging around in
there."
They began to call encouragingly, "Muriel, we are coming. Don't be
afraid." But they got no reply.
"Oh let us hurry," urged Cora, "perhaps she has fainted with fright."
In a very few minutes they were pouring into the house and looking and
calling through the lower rooms. Then up stairs, and there, upon the
floor in the upper chamber, where the grey light came in through the
uncurtained windows, they found a pool of warm, red blood. There were
blood drops in the hall and on the stairs that led up to the landing ,
and in the linen closet they picked up a blood-stained handkerchief.
But there was nothing else. The iron door had been replaced, and the
panel in the wainscote
closed, and try as they might, they could not
open it. They were confronted by an apparent tragedy, appalled by a
fearful mystery, and they could do nothing, nothing. They returned to
the village and gave the alarm, and re-enforced, came back and renewed
the hopeless search with lanterns. They ransacked the house again and
again from tower to cellar. They scoured the hills in the vain
delusion that she might have escaped from the house and wandered off
in the fog. But they found nothing, nor ever did, save the blood drops
on the stairs and the little handkerchief.
"It will be a dreadful blow to her father," remarked the landlady of
the "------," "I don't want to be the on to break it to him." And she
had her wish , for the sloop nor any of its crew ever again sailed
into Yaquina Bay.
As time went by, the story was forgotten by all but
those who joined in that weary search for the missing girl. But to
this day it is said the blood-stains are dark upon the floor in that
upper chamber. And one there was who carried the little handkerchief
next to his heart till the hour of his own tragic death.
(The end.)
November 8, 1998
Lighthouse shrouded in mysteryBy The Associated Press
NEWPORT - In the blackness of a stormy night a hundred years ago, a group of teen-agers crept into the pitch-black hallways of a musty, abandoned lighthouse outside the city.
One of them never came out.
When the young woman's friends went back in the dark lighthouse to search for her, they found only her bloody handkerchief at the bottom of the third-floor stairs.
Years
later, people still notice a mysterious light in the upstairs window of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. They've heard cries and moans coming from the lighthouse while walking nearby, and drops of blood are still at the bottom of the staircase to the third floor.
Walt Muse oversees the lighthouse for the state parks department. He has heard it all.
``When there are storms in the evenings, people will come by and say they saw lights on in the lighthouse, and I say `Guess what? There aren't any,' '' he said.
The Yaquina Bay Lighthouse was built in 1871 and is one of only four combination keeper's quarters and light towers built in Oregon. It's the only one still standing.
The lighthouse was only used for three years, until the Yaquina Head lighthouse was built.
The lighthouse is also Newport's oldest building.
A local volunteer group has raised and spent $250,000 to restore the lighthouse, and its beacon was re-lit in 1996.
There's not a shred of evidence to support the spooky tale of the young woman who disappeared in the lighthouse, Muse said.
But since that stormy evening in the late 1800s, the tale of the ghost of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse has brought the curious, albeit nervous, to the historic lighthouse on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
The beacon atop the building and an outside alarm system are the only things run by electricity at the lighthouse. Yet passersby continue to report the single light in the third-floor window.
Muse was surprised late one recent evening when he too witnessed the light.
He tried moving from side to side to see if the light was a simply a star reflecting in the window. It
wasn't. After several moments of intense observation, he said the tiny light in the upstairs room must be caused by light escaping from the beacon above.
At night, the lighthouse sits in total darkness surrounded by trees that cut an eerie profile against the coastal sky. The sound of the waves crashing on the shoreline and the smell of sea salt are the only reminders that the ocean is a few hundred feet below.
Visitors who tour the lighthouse can see the chute behind the third-floor closet where the girl may have disappeared, and the blood stains remain at the base of the stairs.
The basement floor is covered with bricks said to be salvaged from a sunken ship.
``I'm really surprised how many people walk in and say, `Is this the one? Is this the lighthouse that's haunted?' '' Muse said.
He often stands by
as tourists file through the building. He says many say they ``feel something'' within its walls.
``People have sent pictures they took while touring the lighthouse,'' he said. ``They show something passing in front of the camera, like an apparition.''
Copyright 1998 The Register-Guard
at Newport by the Sea
By Lischen M. Miller
(Reprinted from Pacific Monthly, Vol. II, 1899)
Situated at Yaquina, on the coast of Oregon, is an old, deserted
lighthouse. It stands upon a promontory that juts out dividing the bay
from the ocean, and is exposed to every wind that blows. Its
weather-beaten walls are wrapped in mystery. Of an afternoon when the
fog comes drifting in from the sea and completely envelopes the
lighthouse, and then stops in its course as if its object had been
attained, it is the loneliest place in the world. At such times those
who chance to be in the vicinity hear a moaning sound like the cry of
one in pain, and sometimes a frenzied call for help pierces the
deathlike stillness of the waning day. Far out at sea, ships passing
in the night are often guided in their course by a light that gleams
from the lantern tower where no lamp is every trimmed.
In the days when Newport was but a handful of cabins, roughly built,
and flanked by an Indian camp, across the bar there sailed a sloop,
grotesquely rigged and without a name. The arrival of a vessel was a
rare event, and by the time the stranger had dropped anchor abreast
the village the whole population were gathered on the strip of sandy
beach to welcome her. She was manned by a swarthy crew, and her
skipper was a beetle-browed ruffian with a scar across his cheek from
mouth to ear. A boat was lowered, and in it a man about 40 years of
age, accompanied by a young girl, were rowed ashore. The man was tall
and dark, and his manner and speech indicated gentle breeding. He
explained that the sloop's water casks were empty, and was directed to
the spring that poured down the face of the
yellow sandstone cliff a
few yards up the beach. Issuing instructions in some heathenish
unfamiliar tongue to the boatmen, he devoted himself to asking and
answering questions. The sloop was bound down the coast to Coos Bay.
She had encountered rough weather off the Columbia river bar, and had
been driven far out of her course. To the young lady, his daughter,
the voyage proved most trying. She was not a good sailor. If,
therefore, accommodations could be secured, he wished to leave her
ashore until the return of the sloop a fortnight later.
The landlady of the "-------" had a room to spare, and by the time the
water casks were filled, arrangements had been completed which
resulted in the transfer of the fair traveler's luggage from the sloop
to the "hotel." The father bade his daughter
an affectionate adieu,
and was rowed back to the vessel, which at once weighed anchor and
sailed away in the golden dusk of the summer evening.
Muriel, that was the name she gave, Muriel Trevenard, was a
delicate-looking, fair-haired girl still in her teens, very sweet and
sunny-tempered. She seemed to take kindly to her new environment,
accepting its rude inconveniences as a matter of course, though all
her own belongings testified to the fact that she was accustomed to
the refinements and even luxuries of civilization. She spent many
hours each day idling with a sketch block and pencil in that grassy
hollow in the hill, seaward from the town, or strolled upon the beach
or over the wind-swept uplands. The fortnight lengthened to a month
and yet no sign of the sloop, or any sail rose
above the horizon to
southward.
"You've no cause to worry," said the landlady. "Your father's safe
enough. No rough weather since he sailed, and as for time--- a ship's
time is as uncertain as a woman's temper, I've heard my own father
say."
"Oh I am not anxious," replied Muriel, "not in the least."
It was in August that a party of pleasure-seekers came over the Coast
Range and pitched their tents in the grassy hollow. They were a merry
company, and they were not long in discovering Muriel.
"Such a pretty girl,"exclaimed Cora May, who was herself so fair that
she could afford to be generous. "I am sure she does not belong to
anyone about here. We must coax her to come to our camp."
But the girl needed little coaxing. She found these light-hearted
young people a pleasant interruption,
and she was enthusiastically
welcomed by all, young and old alike. She joined them in their
ceaseless excursions, and made one of the group that gathered nightly
around the camp fire. There was one, a rather serious-minded youth,
who speedily constituted himself her cavalier. He was always at hand
to help her into the boat, to bait her hook when they went fishing,
and to carry her shawl, or book or sketch block, and she accepted
these attentions as she seemed to accept all else, naturally and
sweetly.
The Cape Foulweather light had just been completed, and the house upon
the bluff above Newport was deserted. Some member of the camping party
proposed one Sunday afternoon that they pay it a visit.
"We have seen everything else there is to see," remarked Cora May.
"It is just an ordinary
house with a lantern on top," objected Muriel.
"You can get a good view of it from the bay. Besides it is probably
locked up."
"Somebody has the key. We can soon find out who," said Harold Welch.
"And we haven't anything else to do,"
Accordingly they set out in a body to find the key. It was in the
possession of the landlady's husband who had been appointed to look
after the premises. He said he had not been up there lately, and
seemed surprised after a mild fashion that anyone should feel an
interest in an empty house, but he directed them how to reach it.
"You go up that trail to the top of the hill and you'll strike the
road, but you won't find anything worth seeing after you get there. It
ain't anywhere like the new light."
With much merry talk and laughter they climbed the hill
and found the
road, a smooth and narrow avenue overshadowed by dark young pines,
winding along the hill-top to the rear of the house.
It stood in a small enclosure bare of vegetation. The sand was piled
in little wind-swept heaps against the board fence. There was a walk
paved with brick, leading from the gate around to the front where two
or three steps went up to a square porch with seats on either side.
Harold Welch unlocked the door, and they went into the empty hall that
echoed dismally to the sound of human voices. Rooms opened from this
hallway on either hand and in the L at the back were the kitchen,
storerooms and pantry, a door that gave egress to a narrow veranda,
and another shutting off the cellar. At the rear of the hall the
stairs led up to the second floor which was
divided like the first
into plain, square rooms. But the stairway went on, winding up to a
small landing where a window looked out to northward, and from which a
little room, evidently a linen closet, opened opposite the window.
There was nothing extraordinary about this closet at the first glance.
It was well furnished with shelves and drawers, and its only
unoccupied wall space was finished with a simple wainscoting.
"Why," cried one, as they crowded the landing and overflowed into the
closet, "this house seems to be falling to pieces." He pulled at a
section of the wainscote and it came away in his hand. "Hello! what's
this? Iron walls?"
"It's hollow," said another, tapping the smooth black surface
disclosed by the removal of the panel.
"So it is," cried the first speaker. "I wonder
what's behind it? Why
it opens!" It was a heavy piece of sheet iron about three feet square.
He moved it to one side, set it against the wall, and peered into the
aperture.
"How mysterious!" exclaimed Muriel, leaning forward to look into the
dark closet, whose height and depth exactly corresponded to the
dimensions of the panel. It went straight back some six or eight feet
and then dropped abruptly into what seemed a soundless well. One, more
curious than the rest, crawled in and threw down lighted bits of
paper.
"It goes to the bottom of the sea," he declared, as he backed out and
brushed the dust from his clothes. "Who knows what it is, or why it
was built?"
"Smugglers," suggested somebody and they all laughed, though there was
nothing particularly humorous in the remark. But they
were strangely
nervous and excited. There was something uncanny in the atmosphere of
this deserted dwelling that oppressed them with an unaccountable sense
of dread. They hurried out leaving the dark closet open, and climbed
up into the lantern tower where no lamp has been lighted these many
years.
The afternoon, which had been flooded with sunshine, was waning in a
mist that swept in from the sea and muffled the world in dull grey.
"Let us go home," cried Cora May. "If it were clear we might see
almost to China from this tower, but the fog makes me lonesome."
So they clambered down the iron ladder and descending the stairs,
passed out through the lower hall into the grey fog. Harold Welch
stopped to lock the door, and Muriel waited for him at the foot of the
steps. The lock was rusty,
and he had trouble with the key. By the
time he joined her, the rest of the party had disappeared around the
house.
"You are kind to wait for me," said he, as they caught step on the
brick pavement and moved forward. But Muriel laid her hand upon his
arm.
"I must go back," she said. "I--- I--- dropped my handkerchief in---
the--- hall upstairs, I must go back and get it."
They remounted the steps, and Welch unlocked the door and let her pass
in. But when he would have followed, she stopped him imperiously.
"I am going alone," she said. "You are not to wait. Lock the door and
go on. I will come out through the kitchen." He objected, but she was
obstinate, and, perhaps because her lightest wish was beginning to be
his law of life, he reluctantly obeyed her. Again the key hung in the
lock. This time it took him several minutes to release it. When he
reached the rear of the house Muriel was nowhere to be seen. He called
her two or three times and waited, but, receiving no reply, concluded
that she had hurried out and rejoined the rest whose voices came back
to him from the avenue of pines. She had been nervous and irritable
all the afternoon, so unlike herself that he had wondered more than
once if she were il, or weary of his close attendance. It occurred to
him now that possibly she had taken his means to rid herself of his
company. He hurried on, for it was growing cold and the fog was
thickening to a rain. He had just caught up with the stragglers of the
party, and they were beginning to chafe him at being alone, when the
sombre stillness of the darkening day was
rent by a shriek so wild and
weird that they who heard it felt the blood freeze suddenly in their
veins. They shrank involuntarily closer and looked at each other with
blanched cheeks and startled eyes. Before anyone found voice it came
again. This time it was a cry for help, thrice repeated in quick
succession.
"Muriel! Where is Muriel?" demanded Welch, his heart leaping in sudden
fear.
"Why you ought to know," cried Cora May. "We left her with you."
They hurried toward the deserted house.
"She went back to get her handkerchief," explained Welch. "She told me
not to wait, and I locked the door and came on."
"Locked her in that horrid place! Why did you do it?" exclaimed Cora,
indignantly.
"She said she would come out by way of the kitchen," replied he.
"She could not. The door is
locked, and the key is broken off in the
lock," said another. "I noticed it when we were rummaging around in
there."
They began to call encouragingly, "Muriel, we are coming. Don't be
afraid." But they got no reply.
"Oh let us hurry," urged Cora, "perhaps she has fainted with fright."
In a very few minutes they were pouring into the house and looking and
calling through the lower rooms. Then up stairs, and there, upon the
floor in the upper chamber, where the grey light came in through the
uncurtained windows, they found a pool of warm, red blood. There were
blood drops in the hall and on the stairs that led up to the landing ,
and in the linen closet they picked up a blood-stained handkerchief.
But there was nothing else. The iron door had been replaced, and the
panel in the wainscote
closed, and try as they might, they could not
open it. They were confronted by an apparent tragedy, appalled by a
fearful mystery, and they could do nothing, nothing. They returned to
the village and gave the alarm, and re-enforced, came back and renewed
the hopeless search with lanterns. They ransacked the house again and
again from tower to cellar. They scoured the hills in the vain
delusion that she might have escaped from the house and wandered off
in the fog. But they found nothing, nor ever did, save the blood drops
on the stairs and the little handkerchief.
"It will be a dreadful blow to her father," remarked the landlady of
the "------," "I don't want to be the on to break it to him." And she
had her wish , for the sloop nor any of its crew ever again sailed
into Yaquina Bay.
As time went by, the story was forgotten by all but
those who joined in that weary search for the missing girl. But to
this day it is said the blood-stains are dark upon the floor in that
upper chamber. And one there was who carried the little handkerchief
next to his heart till the hour of his own tragic death.
(The end.)
November 8, 1998
Lighthouse shrouded in mystery By The Associated Press NEWPORT - In the blackness of a stormy night a hundred years ago, a group of teen-agers crept into the pitch-black hallways of a musty, abandoned lighthouse outside the city. One of them never came out. When the young woman's friends went back in the dark lighthouse to search for her, they found only her bloody handkerchief at the bottom of the third-floor stairs. Years
later, people still notice a mysterious light in the upstairs window of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. They've heard cries and moans coming from the lighthouse while walking nearby, and drops of blood are still at the bottom of the staircase to the third floor. Walt Muse oversees the lighthouse for the state parks department. He has heard it all. ``When there are storms in the evenings, people will come by and say they saw lights on in the lighthouse, and I say `Guess what? There aren't any,' '' he said. The Yaquina Bay Lighthouse was built in 1871 and is one of only four combination keeper's quarters and light towers built in Oregon. It's the only one still standing. The lighthouse was only used for three years, until the Yaquina Head lighthouse was built. The lighthouse is also Newport's oldest building.
A local volunteer group has raised and spent $250,000 to restore the lighthouse, and its beacon was re-lit in 1996. There's not a shred of evidence to support the spooky tale of the young woman who disappeared in the lighthouse, Muse said. But since that stormy evening in the late 1800s, the tale of the ghost of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse has brought the curious, albeit nervous, to the historic lighthouse on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The beacon atop the building and an outside alarm system are the only things run by electricity at the lighthouse. Yet passersby continue to report the single light in the third-floor window. Muse was surprised late one recent evening when he too witnessed the light. He tried moving from side to side to see if the light was a simply a star reflecting in the window. It
wasn't. After several moments of intense observation, he said the tiny light in the upstairs room must be caused by light escaping from the beacon above. At night, the lighthouse sits in total darkness surrounded by trees that cut an eerie profile against the coastal sky. The sound of the waves crashing on the shoreline and the smell of sea salt are the only reminders that the ocean is a few hundred feet below. Visitors who tour the lighthouse can see the chute behind the third-floor closet where the girl may have disappeared, and the blood stains remain at the base of the stairs. The basement floor is covered with bricks said to be salvaged from a sunken ship. ``I'm really surprised how many people walk in and say, `Is this the one? Is this the lighthouse that's haunted?' '' Muse said. He often stands by
as tourists file through the building. He says many say they ``feel something'' within its walls. ``People have sent pictures they took while touring the lighthouse,'' he said. ``They show something passing in front of the camera, like an apparition.'' Copyright 1998 The Register-Guard
Other Lighthouse-related Links:
IPL Exhibit: Lighthouses:
A Photographic Journey
WWW Virtual Library:
The World's Lighthouses, Lightships & Lifesaving Stations
Email:
annebonny@geocities.com
The rotating lighthouses (icons and bars) are courtesy of The Lighthouse Homepage.
Living in Oregon as I do, I have a partiality toward Oregon's attributes, especially the rugged coastline. I have visited several of Oregon's lighthouses, including Yaquina Bay (where I acquired the pamphlet which contained the above story), Yaquina Head, Cape Meares, Heceta Head, and many times I've driven past Cleft-in-the-Rock Light, south of Yachats, the only privately owned lighthouse recognized as a navigational light by the U. S. Coast Guard, owned by Mr. James A. Gibbs, my favorite author. I plan to have more information--- and photos--- of these lighthouses included on this page soon.
Come again soon!
