Yaquina Head Lighthouse At Dusk Yaquina Head Lighthouse - Footsteps in the Dark

Standing 93 feet tall ( 28.5 meters ) atop a 162 foot seaside cliff, Yaquina Head is Oregon's tallest lighthouse whose illumination can be seen 19 miles out to sea. Since its completion in 1873, it was operated by the U.S. Lighthouse Board until 1939 when the U.S. Coast Guard took over the operations. Located near Newport, Oregon and constructed with over 370,000 bricks in double wall construction, its original first order Fresnel lens still remains today though no longer with oil burning wicks but with a 1000 watt theatrical globe. 

Every lighthouse has its stories, some good, some bad, and this one is no exception with its own particularly haunting tales.

One story involves a workman who apparently accidently fell off scaffolding during construction and was buried in between the double brick wall cavity of the tower, and whose body was never retrieved due to it being inaccessible. Cries for help from within the walls were said to continue for several years after. 

The second tale, as it goes, involves two lightkeepers working on a cold and stormy January night in 1930 when the oil burning wick in the lantern room at the top of the tower had extinguished itself. The older lightkeeper was so inebriated he could not do the fairly simple task of climbing the stairs and relighting the wick. Though ill at the time, the younger lightkeeper had to get out of bed and walk the 114 stairs to the top of the tower to re-light the oil wick in the middle of the night. However, once he reached the top of the tower he collapsed and died. The older lightkeeper fearing vengence from that day forward always walked to the top with his bulldog for protection due to ghostly footsteps he would hear on the cast iron stairway at unpredictable hours both day and night until 1945. On the day WW II ended, the footsteps stopped. The deceased younger lightkeeper had been a war veteran from WW I.

This photo was taken at dusk in April 2012 with a Nikon D7000, 28-300mm lens set to 28mm,1/60th at f/3.5 with an exposure compensation of +0.7.