St. Augustine Lighthouse

St. Augustine, founded by the Spanish in 1565, had watchtowers and beacons on Anastasia Island for centuries before the United States lit Florida’s first official lighthouse there in 1824. By 1870 the sea was eating away the shore beneath the old coquina tower, and work began on a new one. Completed in 1874 and lit on 15 October that year by keeper William Russell, the black-and-white spiral tower stands 165 feet tall and still carries its original first-order Fresnel lens. The old tower fell into the sea in 1880 and is now an underwater archaeological site.

Its best-known ghost story comes from a documented tragedy during construction. Hezekiah Pittee was the superintendent overseeing the work, and his family lived on site. On 10 July 1873, according to the museum, four girls – Pittee’s daughters Mary, 15, Eliza, 13, and Carrie, 4, and a 10-year-old African American girl whose name has not been recorded – were riding a small rail cart used to haul supplies from the dock at Salt Run. The stop board at the end of the track was missing, and the cart ran into the water and overturned on them. A young African American worker, Dan Sessions, lifted it off, but only Carrie survived. The museum notes that it has never found where the fourth girl was buried, and that the name “Ellie” sometimes given to her comes from psychics, not records.

Later residents brought other stories. A 1950s relief keeper heard footsteps upstairs in the empty keepers’ house; head keeper James Pippin reportedly moved his family into a smaller building, saying the big house was haunted; and a craftsman renting the house in the 1960s said he woke to find a small girl standing by his bed. After the keepers’ house was gutted by an arson fire in 1970, volunteers from the Junior Service League restored it from 1980, and workers reported odd incidents, especially in the basement. The museum’s tours also introduce former keepers – among them Joseph Andreu, who died in December 1859, and Peter Rasmussen, who died in 1926 and is said to prefer the quiet of the basement and a cigar.

The lighthouse became a national paranormal landmark after Syfy’s Ghost Hunters filmed there in 2006, returning in 2008 and again for A&E in 2019. The museum now runs Dark of the Moon ghost tours, whose proceeds support its maritime archaeology programme – while presenting the Pittee story first and foremost as real local history.

Giggling heard at the top of the empty tower and on the stairs, footsteps in the keepers’ house, a small girl in Victorian dress seen by a bedside or on a trail bench, a shoelace found tied to the stair rail, and EMF meter spikes during “hide-and-seek” on tours, according to accounts collected by the museum.

The tower and its spiral stair, the 1876 keepers’ house – especially the basement and parlour – and the wooded maritime hammock trails; the Dark of the Moon tours run after dark.

The lighthouse is one of the most visited haunted sites in Florida, featured on Ghost Hunters and Most Terrifying Places in America, and its Dark of the Moon tours are a staple of St. Augustine’s ghost-tour scene. The museum’s archaeology programme, LAMP, has excavated several colonial-era shipwrecks offshore.