Point Lookout Lighthouse

Point Lookout is the low, sandy tip of Maryland’s western shore, where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. Congress funded a lighthouse there in 1828, and contractor John Donahoo built a modest story-and-a-half keeper’s house with a lantern on its roof, first lit on 20 September 1830. Its first keeper, James Davis, died that December, and his daughter Ann Davis took over, keeping the light until 1847 – one of a number of women who served as keepers on the Chesapeake. The house was raised to two storeys in 1883, divided into a duplex for two keepers’ families in 1927, and served until the light was deactivated in 1966.

During the Civil War the point was transformed. The Union built Hammond General Hospital there in 1862, and after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 it opened a prisoner-of-war camp, Camp Hoffman, on 40 acres behind a 15-foot stockade. Designed for 10,000 men, it held 20,000 or more at its peak; about 50,000 Confederate prisoners passed through between 1863 and 1865. Prisoners lived in overcrowded tents with poor water and sanitation, exposed to bay winters, and nearly 4,000 died, mostly of disease. Many of the guards were soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. The prisoners who died now lie in a mass grave in the Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery, marked by a monument bearing their names.

That history underlies the lighthouse’s reputation as one of the most haunted in America. The stories gathered pace in the 1970s, when the state leased the building and park staff lived in it: Superintendent Gerald Sword moved into the north side in 1973, and later resident Laura Berg recorded heavy footsteps in the hallway and a smell of decay in the guest room in the winter of 1979–80. On 14 January 1980 the parapsychologist Hans Holzer brought a team of psychics, one of whom sensed that someone had suffered in the guest room, and in February 1980 the Maryland Committee for Psychical Research held a séance there. Sword himself noted that there was no evidence for the psychics’ claim that prisoners had been held in the house. The state returned the building to the Navy that June, and it stood fenced and empty for a quarter of a century, which only fed the legend.

Maryland acquired the lighthouse in a 2006 land swap, and the Point Lookout Lighthouse Preservation Society formed the same year. After restoration, it opened as a seasonal museum on 15 May 2025, while the state park’s Civil War Museum and the reconstructed Fort Lincoln earthworks tell the story of the camp.

Former resident Laura Berg described heavy, booted footsteps in the hallway and a smell of decay in the guest room in 1979–80. Volunteers’ accounts collected by the preservation society describe a crowd of men’s voices in an empty living room, sped-up voices heard upstairs during a 2000 ghost walk, a nailed-shut basement door whose knob rattled by itself, and, outside the gate, the clatter of tin plates and galloping horses. The society’s timeline says a photograph taken at the February 1980 séance captured the image of a Confederate soldier; ghost-lore books add a woman in old-fashioned dress.

Inside the keepers’ house, especially the stairs and upper rooms, and on the grounds and shoreline around the lighthouse at the tip of the point. Stories also attach to the site of Camp Hoffman, most of which has been lost to erosion.

Point Lookout features in Maryland ghost-lore books, on lists of America’s most haunted lighthouses and in regional TV and Halloween coverage. The Confederate Memorial Park and cemetery nearby make the point a site of ongoing debate about how the Civil War is remembered.