Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

The lighthouse at the mouth of Yaquina Bay is one of the oldest buildings in Newport, a wooden house with the light tower rising from its roof and the keeper’s family living below. First lit on November 3, 1871, it guided ships for only three years: the taller Yaquina Head Light opened four miles north, and on October 1, 1874, keeper Charles H. Peirce, a Civil War veteran who lived there with his wife and many children, put out the lamp for the last time and moved on to Cape Blanco.

The building then served intermittently as quarters for an Army engineer working on the north jetty, for a lifesaving crew and for the Coast Guard, before standing empty from 1933. The state took over the property in 1934, and as the wooden house sagged and weathered, local people campaigned to save it. The Lincoln County Historical Society, formed in 1948, opened it as a museum in 1956; Oregon State Parks restored it in 1974, and the light was relit as a private aid to navigation on December 7, 1996.

Its ghost story has a known author. In 1899 Lischen M. Miller published “The Haunted Lighthouse” in Pacific Monthly: a fictional tale in which Muriel Trevenard, a sea captain’s daughter left in Newport, explores the empty lighthouse with friends, returns alone for a forgotten handkerchief and vanishes, leaving bloodstains and a hidden iron shaft behind a closet panel. Over the decades the story was retold as if it had happened, and visitors began reporting a light in the tower, moaning in the fog and a girl at the upper windows.

The lighthouse is a textbook case of fiction becoming folklore – helped along by the building’s long years of abandonment – and today’s tours tell the Muriel story alongside the true history of the Peirce family.

A light glowing in the tower of the long-dark lighthouse, cries or moaning in the fog, a girl in old-fashioned dress at an upper window and cold spots inside – reported by locals and visitors after the 1899 story spread.

The upper floor and lantern room, the stairs and the linen closet where Miller’s fictional secret panel was said to be; at dusk and in fog.

Miller’s story has been reprinted many times and inspired later books, including the 2017 local novel The Lighthouse Ghost of Yaquina Bay. The lighthouse is a centerpiece of Yaquina Bay State Recreation Site, with tours by the Friends of Yaquina Lighthouses.