In Brief
On clear, cold days in January and February at Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, a young couple in old-fashioned clothes walk up to parents pushing strollers, admire the baby, then realize it isn't theirs and disappear.
The Full Story
On clear, cold days in January and February, parents walking the beach at Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, get approached by a young man and woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The pair stop to admire the baby in the stroller. Then they realize the child isn't theirs, and they're gone.
An official Ocean County publication, "Haunted Ocean County," tells who they're said to be. A young couple were aboard the schooner *Tolck* when it ran aground near Barnegat Light one cold January and broke apart. Their baby girl was already onshore, the account says, "just out of sight from where the boat sank." Accounts differ on how the parents died — the county version has them lost in the wreck, while a popular tour telling holds the ship survived the storm and the couple froze on board after the husband refused to abandon his cargo. Either way, the story goes that they never stopped looking. "Bound by the eternal power of love," the publication reads, the couple "walk up and down the beach, often heard lightly singing 'In the Sweet, Bye and Bye,' forever searching for their daughter." Locals along Barnegat Bay have told the same legend for generations — the period dress, the hymn, the lost daughter.
They are not the only dead this stretch of sand is said to keep. On October 25, 1782, after the Revolution's formal fighting had paused for peace talks, a Loyalist captain named John Bacon led about nine men in a whaleboat against salvagers sleeping on the northern tip of Long Beach Island. The men had been offloading a cargo of Chinese green tea from a cutter aground on Barnegat Shoals. Wikipedia records that Bacon "stealthily murdered 19 men in their sleep," including Militia Captain Andrew Steelman, though the exact toll is disputed. The governor put a £50 bounty on Bacon's head. Historian Charles J. Adams III has collected reports tied to that night ever since: murky figures on the beach, moaning from the dunes, sailors in old garb who turn and disappear.
The tower itself was designed by Lt. George G. Meade, who later commanded the Union army that beat Lee at Gettysburg, and was commissioned January 1, 1859. Keepers worked the inlet through its deadliest years. One of them, Andrew Applegate, drowned off the lighthouse in 1928, tangled in his own weighted fishing net while his teenage son watched, unable to lift it free in time. The light went dark in 1944 and was relit on its 150th anniversary, January 1, 2009. You can still climb the 217 steps to the top. From up there you can see the whole length of the beach — the one the young couple are said to walk, every cold January, looking for a child who reached the shore.
