Haunted Lighthouses - the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

I have always loved the supernatural and paranormal stories that come up around Halloween. I don't know why I am not scared or frightened by stories of ghostly haunts. Instead they fascinate me to no end. If there is a TV show on about haunted houses or ghostly legends then I am the first one to schedule the TV so I get to watch it.

A few years ago when we first moved to Oregon I happened to catch a show on haunted lighthouses of the Oregon coast. I think it was done by the local PBS TV channel and it did show up on the Travel channel about a year later. I watched it, transfixed by the legends. During a break in the show I found the state road map and followed along with the program from that point on to see if any of the lighthouses were close enough to visit. Sure enough there was one only 90 minutes away.

As soon as the weather was nice on the coast my daughter and I made plans for a day at the beach. I had not thought about the lighthouse and made no plans to visit it during our trip to the beach. We headed out to Newport, a nice quite seaside town. Newport has its share of tourist attractions which we planned on visiting that day. First thing I did was drive around and get my bearings for the area. There was a small but nice park right next to the beach on the north side of the bridge that highway 101 goes over. I drove into the park. As we went in we drove by one of the haunted lighthouses that were shown on the PBS TV show. It was the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. It was built in 1871 and decommissioned in 1874 so it was short lived as a lighthouse. It was in 1899 that the story came out about the lighthouse being haunted. The story goes that a young teenage girl was exploring the old decaying building and had dropped her handkerchief inside it. She reportedly went back inside to retrieve it and the persons that were with her heard 3 screams from inside the house. She was not seen again but they did find her blood stained handkerchief.

My daughter and I took the self guided tour of the now restored lighthouse and talked to the volunteer guides. Other than feeling a bit uneasy about climbing the narrow staircase to the watch tower that was the only "supernatural" experience we had at the lighthouse. My uneasiness was due to my fear of heights. The house itself had been restored to what it might have looked like when the original lighthouse keeper, his wife and 10 children lived there. The volunteer guides played down the fact of the place being haunted due to the fact that none of them had experienced anything at the place.

It was a nice step back in time despite not having any paranormal goings on with us. The Yaquina Bay lighthouse is open daily for self guided tours Yaquina Bay Lighthouse is open daily except for Christmas, New Years, and Thanksgiving. From Memorial Day weekend through the end of September hours are 11:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. The rest of the year, hours are noon until 4 p.m.