In Brief
Visitors and staff at Absecon Lighthouse in Atlantic City keep catching the smell of pipe and cigar smoke in a tower where no one is smoking. Six keepers worked the light from 1857 to 1933, and the most-told stories all circle back to them.
The Full Story
The thing people report most often at Absecon Lighthouse in Atlantic City is a smell. Pipe smoke and cigar smoke, drifting through the tower and the keeper's quarters, in a building where no one is allowed to light up and no one is smoking.
The lighthouse went up because the water below it kept killing people. Between 1847 and 1856, 64 ships wrecked at Absecon Inlet, enough that locals called it the Graveyard Inlet. The worst was the packet ship Powhatan, mostly German immigrants, which broke apart in an April 1854 storm off Long Beach Island. As many as 311 died, and the bodies washed ashore as far south as Atlantic City's beaches. The lighthouse site was bought later that year.
First lit on January 15, 1857, the tower stands 171 feet, the tallest in New Jersey and Atlantic City's oldest standing structure. It was designed by George Meade, the same officer who would later command Union forces at Gettysburg. Six head keepers worked it before it was deactivated in 1933, climbing the 228 steps to the watchroom and back, year after year, watching the dark water that had earned the inlet its name. Abraham Wolf had the longest run, 1873 to 1896. He was on watch the night an earthquake hit in 1886, and he wrote it down in the logbook: the tower swayed so he could hardly keep his footing, and the pipes in the closet rattled as if a gale were blowing.
The keepers saw stranger things than earthquakes. One night in 1905, the story goes, a keeper stepped out onto the gallery 171 feet up, saw a creature perched on top of the tower, and fired his gun at it. The thing howled and flew off into the dark, and he swore it was the Jersey Devil. No newspaper or logbook records it as a real event. It has simply been told and retold here for over a century.
The smoke is the part that keeps the keepers present. The named hotspot is the oil house, where they gathered to smoke once the lamp was trimmed for the night. A worker there once came face-to-face with a bearded man in coveralls who vanished the instant he was seen. People report footsteps in the tower, laughter, the door opening and closing on its own. In 2023 a visitor said they recorded heavy breathing behind them on the stairs, and tapping they described as something like Morse code on the railings.
When Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here, which aired in March 2010, the crew worked through a coastal storm and debunked a lot of it as wind and rattling windows. But a camera moved on its own, and one thing they couldn't explain. A female voice answered them on tape.
It said, "I like you."
