HAUNTED LIGHTHOUSES OF THE MOUNT DESERT ISLAND REGION.
There is just one lighthouse on Mount Desert Island and it’s a beacon for tourists and photographers. It hangs on an edge of a granite cliff above the Atlantic Ocean, squat and black capped. It is romantic and adorable all at once.
But its history, like the history of any structure that lasts more than a decade or two, isn’t all sunshine and roses, poems and paintings.
Even when it was being built, though, the lighthouse lured in death. During its construction, one worker went missing. All that his coworkers found? An axe covered in blood—not just the blade. That would be normal. The handle was covered in blood too.
The story goes a coworker killed him and hid his body in the lighthouse walls.
Since then, lighthouse keepers and their families died while living there. A heart attack took some. Typhoid fever took others. Accidents happened. Some claim that those accidents were the result of the worker’s vengeance.
According to stories, that worker is not the only spirit still lingering at the Bass Head lighthouse. People swear they’ve seen a woman in the rocking chair at the house where the lighthouse keeper lived. There are other stories of a man who turns into a deer and then into a man. Usually, he’s seen sitting on a stump that is surrounded by snow. The thing is? In deer form and as a human, he never leaves any tracks.
Across the water on Swan’s Island (home to about 350 year round), the Burnt Coat Harbor Light on Hockamock Head edges into the bay.
“For centuries, natives and settlers have described a frightening occurrence in which faces are illuminated by impossibly bright fires along the road to Hockamock Head,” Taryn Plumb writes in Haunted Maine Lighthouses.
And the harbor?
It’s now called Ghost Hollow. That’s because there are three ghosts who allegedly jaunt around the aria. There’s a woman who comes when the tide is low. She walks the mud flats while wearing a red dress. She carries something in her arms. Another ghostly young woman calls out to a man. She is never seen. Only her voice is heard.
Plumb tells the story that the woman and her husband were just newlyweds when they headed out in a rowboat. They were to picnic on another little island close by. But a storm blew into the harbor. The fog blinded them. They could not make their way and drowned. Some say a passing boat hit their skiff. The callings of the ghosts are the echoes of her last warnings.
And that third ghost? Well, it’s actually two ghosts. Young adults who were in love headed out one night for a rendezvous though their parents did not approve of their match. They died somehow and yet, you can see them, year after year, when the moon is high and the tide is low. They walk holding hands. Together.
There are sites all over the internet with post after post about supposedly haunted light houses and harbors. There’s something about the backdrop of the sea and that often isolated nature of a lighthouse that brings the imagination to something a bit sad, blood curling, or macabre. We humans—living ones—are creatures of connection and community, after all. The solitary confinement of a lighthouse keeper’s existence may have been enough to keep a few restless spirits longing for connections with the living long after they are done living themselves.