The haunted St. Augustine Lighthouse

News4JAX reporter Aaron Farrar visited the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum for this Halloween 2022 report, climbing the 219 steps to the gallery about 140 feet up. He talks with Sammy Washburn, who had led the museum’s Dark of the Moon paranormal tours for six years.

Washburn describes windows opening and closing on their own, a shadowy figure some connect with a former keeper, and the time she was locked inside the tower until a colleague climbed out of a window to open the door. She names ghosts featured on her tours: Maria Andreu, the wife of a keeper of the old lighthouse who fell to his death, said to appear in white and to guide tired climbers with a hand on the back; and Peter Rasmussen, keeper for 23 years in the early 1900s, whose cherry pipe tobacco she says she smelled after a guest insulted him. Back in the studio, the anchors joke about spending a night there.

The report passes on the guide’s stories without challenge, so it helps to know their background. Joseph Andreu, a keeper of the earlier lighthouse, died in a fall in 1859, and his widow Maria took over the light; Peter Rasmussen kept the present lighthouse in the early twentieth century. The site’s best-documented tragedy – the drowning in 1873 of three daughters of construction superintendent Hezekiah Pittee and an African American girl whose name was not recorded – lies behind the stories of girls’ laughter told there.

A tall brick tower is a natural sound tube, and windows, doors and draughts behave unpredictably in sea wind and humidity. The museum runs these paranormal tours as part of its programming, so the ghost stories are also part of how the site pays its way.