Haunted Lighthouse

 Hubs and I had a ghastly date night this last weekend at the Haunted Lighthouse!

It was built in 1859 and is still operational to this day.

It boasts a gorgeous iron spiral staircase with 177 steps.

 For the haunted tour, the grounds and interiors were all spooked up.

 There were several locations where actors were dead still and appeared to be mannequins, but then would lurch toward someone.  Even when I saw it coming I couldn't help but jump!

 The clown on the staircase of the living quarters was not embodied but I volunteered Hubs to encounter it first. 

  However, beyond all the staged hocus pocus, there is another side to this lighthouse.  It is actually considered to be one of the most haunted lighthouses in the country, having been featured on the Travel Channel and Scifi's Ghost Hunters.

There are claims of a stabbing murder in the lighthouse's past which to this day there are dark stains, appearing to be blood, that will not come off the wood floors.  Other unexplained activity is echoing footsteps on the spiral staircase when no one is there,  low murmuring heard in uninhabited rooms, and icy hands grabbing the backs of legs.  Doorknobs have been seen appearing to turn on their own and doors opening and closing by themselves. There have been claims of faint apparitions of a man with a beard and a woman wearing a dark grey dress in various locations.  A paranormal team conducted a professional investigation in 2009 where electromagnetic spikes, audio differentials, and photographs of shadow-like fogs showed something was amist.
There are even ghost meters for sale in the gift shop to take on the tour.
We did not encounter any spirits on our tour but really loved the beauty of the lighthouse and hearing it's history.   Here's a bit of that history:

The top of the lighthouse still contains it's original first-order Fresnel lens system.  The Fresnel lens was invented in 1822, resembling a giant beehive with a complex system of multi-faceted glass prisms mounted in a brass framework.  The prisms reflect and refract light to magnify it, thereby taking rays of light that would normally scatter in all directions and then focusing them into several  beams.  All of this is mounted onto rotating gears that move the beams around 360 degrees over the water.  It was truly stunning seeing it at night. 

I thought it kinda resembled the Fizzy Lifting Drink Bubble Room from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!

Only we couldn't just burp to get back to the bottom of the tower!