Barnegat Lighthouse ("Old Barney")

A vanished 1800s couple froze in a nor'easter off Barnegat Inlet and still approach strollers on Old Barney's lawn, looking for their daughter.

On clear winter days at Barnegat Lighthouse, young parents pushing strollers have been approached by a couple in eighteenth-century clothing who ask to see the baby. The strangers bend close, compliment the child, and then their faces change. They realize this isn't their daughter. They vanish.

The story goes that they froze to death in a nor'easter just offshore sometime in the late 1800s. Their ship had been evacuated, but the husband stayed on board because the cargo belonged to him, and his wife refused to go without him. They handed their infant to a crew member who made shore. The ship rode out the storm. The couple did not. Their daughter is the figure they keep trying to find, and every young mother on the lighthouse lawn in January is, for a second, her.

Old Barney has been warning ships off this piece of the Jersey coast since January 1, 1859. Lt. George Meade designed it, fresh off his work on Absecon, four years before he commanded Union forces at Gettysburg. The tower is 163 feet tall, 217 steps to the watch room, and it was put there because the Barnegat Inlet was killing people. Sandbars, cross-currents, and shoals that shift overnight turned this stretch of the Atlantic into one of the deadliest on the East Coast. The three keeper families who lived here got used to bodies washing up in their yard.

The oldest blood on this beach is colonial. On October 25, 1782, months after the Revolution's formal hostilities had paused for peace talks, Captain John Bacon and his Loyalist Pine Robbers rowed a whaleboat to the northern tip of Long Beach Island. Captain Andrew Steelman and his Patriot crew had just finished salvaging cargo from a grounded merchant ship, including a load of valuable hyson tea. Steelman's men were asleep on the beach next to the haul. Bacon's raiders walked among them with knives and bayonets. They killed Steelman and roughly nineteen others where they lay. Governor Livingston put a fifty-pound bounty on Bacon's head. Visitors to the lighthouse grounds describe low moaning on the dunes at night, and blurry figures in sailor's clothing drifting through fog near the waterline.

The tower has its own ghost too. In 1928, head keeper Andrew Applegate drowned while fishing with his seventeen-year-old son Robert just off the inlet. A weighted net tangled around him and pulled him under. Robert and three other men got to him fast. They couldn't revive him. Staff climbing the spiral stairs on a late check sometimes hear a second set of footsteps behind them that stops when they stop. A keeper making his last round.

Old Barney was decommissioned in 1944 and relit as a seasonal light in 2009. You can still climb it. On a clear February afternoon, keep an eye on the lawn.