Seguin Island Light

Seguin Island rises steeply from the Gulf of Maine a few miles off the mouth of the Kennebec River, in notoriously foggy waters. In 1607 the ships of the Popham Colony anchored beneath it before sailing upriver to found one of the first English settlements in New England. George Washington approved a lighthouse for the island in 1793; the first wooden tower was lit in 1795, a stone tower replaced it in 1819, and in 1857 the present 53-foot granite tower and keepers’ house were built. Standing 180 feet above the sea, it holds the only first-order Fresnel lens still in a Maine lighthouse.

Life on Seguin was hard and isolated. Keepers and their families lived through months of fog – the station’s fog signals sounded for days on end – and hauled supplies up the island’s steep slope, eventually by a tramway built in 1895. The first keeper, Major John Polereczky, began in 1796; the last civilian keeper, Clarence Skofield, left with his family in 1942, and Coast Guard crews kept the light until it was automated in 1985. Since 1986 the Friends of Seguin Island Light Station have restored the buildings and run a small summer museum, with volunteer caretakers living on the island.

Seguin’s ghost stories come mainly from those last keepers and from the writer William O. Thomson, who collected them. Coast Guard keepers told him of a young girl seen running and laughing through the keepers’ house, said to be a keeper’s daughter who died on the island, and keepers spoke of furniture moving, doors slamming and coughing no one could account for. Thomson also recounted the story of the crew sent to remove the furniture after automation in 1985: their officer said a figure stood over his bed in the night and begged them to leave the house alone – and the next day the boat carrying the furniture broke loose and sank.

The island’s best-known tale is older and darker. A nineteenth-century keeper’s wife, the story goes, had only one piece of sheet music and played it endlessly on her piano through the long winter, until her husband, driven mad, smashed the piano with an axe and then killed her and himself. On calm nights, people say, the tune can still be heard across the water. No record of such an event at Seguin has been found, and some locals attach the same story to nearby Pond Island; it is best understood as a cautionary tale about lighthouse isolation.

Keepers and visitors describe a girl running and laughing in the keepers’ house, footsteps, doors slamming, furniture moving, unexplained coughing, and a figure seen standing over a sleeper. The legend adds faint piano music drifting over the water on still nights.

Inside the 1857 keepers’ house – now the museum and caretakers’ quarters – and around the tower. The piano music is said to be heard offshore on calm evenings.

Seguin’s ghosts feature in New England lighthouse-lore books and regional ghost-story collections, and the piano legend is one of the best-known lighthouse ghost stories on the East Coast.