Kind of place · 8 hauntings
Haunted Ships & Lighthouses
Ocean liners, warships, lighthouses and the stretches of sea with a ghost of their own.
- 8 places
- 7 in the USA
- 8 you can visit
Ships and lighthouses are lonely, dangerous places with long traditions of sailors’ lore, and their ghosts reflect that. The RMS Queen Mary, moored at Long Beach, California, since 1967, is one of America’s most famous haunted attractions; the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in Alameda hosts ghost tours; and on the sea itself the Flying Dutchman remains the archetypal phantom ship. Lighthouses such as St. Augustine in Florida and Point Lookout in Maryland have stories of keepers and their families who never left.
Ships are noisy. Steel hulls creak and bang as they warm and cool, ventilation and machinery hum at low frequencies, and water slaps and echoes in enclosed spaces – all well-known sources of sounds that seem to have no source. Low-frequency sound, or infrasound, has been proposed as a cause of unease in such places. Lighthouses add isolation, storms and the very real history of shipwrecks.
Each entry here gives the vessel’s or lighthouse’s real history – the voyages, the wrecks, the people who served – along with the reports and the likely explanations.
Haunted Ships & Lighthouses in the USA
RMS Queen Mary
The retired Cunard liner moored at Long Beach since 1967, now a hotel whose paranormal tours tell of a drowned girl, a crushed crewman and wartime dead. Widely reported
Point Lookout Lighthouse
An 1830 lighthouse on the Potomac beside a Civil War prison camp where nearly 4,000 Confederate captives died. It is often called Maryland’s most haunted. Regional legend
St. Augustine Lighthouse
The striped 1874 lighthouse on Anastasia Island, where staff and visitors tell of girls’ laughter – echoes, the museum says, of a drowning in 1873. Widely reported
Seguin Island Light
An island light guarding the Kennebec River mouth since 1795. Keepers told of a laughing girl in the house; legend tells of a piano tune on the wind. Regional legend
USS Constellation
The Navy’s last all-sail warship, in Baltimore since 1955, has long had ghost stories – many of them about an older, different ship of the same name. Regional legend
Yaquina Bay Lighthouse
A short-lived 1871 lighthouse whose famous ghost, Muriel Trevenard, came from an 1899 magazine story – fiction that locals and visitors came to believe. Folklore
