Cape May Lighthouse

The Cape May Lighthouse is the third tower on this spot. The first two are underwater. A woman in white holds a child on the first landing.

The Cape May Lighthouse is the third tower they've built at this spot. The first two are underwater. Erected in 1823 and 1847, they both lost their fight with the Atlantic and were swallowed by coastal erosion years before the current 157-foot tower was first lit in 1859. The waters off the southern tip of New Jersey were called the Graveyard of the Atlantic for good reason, and the land itself doesn't hold still.

Craig McManus, the psychic medium who wrote The Ghosts of Cape May, puts the main ghost on the first landing of the cast-iron spiral staircase. A woman in a long white gown holding a lantern in one hand and a child in the other. She has never been identified. Local lore ties her to the story of an Irish woman who was shunned by Cape May society in the nineteenth century for having a child out of wedlock, who stood on the third floor of the tower looking out for the child's father to come back on a ship that never came. The bleakest version of the tale adds that her child was struck and killed by a trolley after running toward the water at the sight of a sail he thought might be his father's.

Visitors who climb the 199 steps to the watch room describe translucent figures on the staircase above and below them. Some of them are probably former keepers. The job here came with weather. In 1891, lightning hit the tower and routed itself through the electric call bell into the keeper's dwelling. In 1901, a different lightning strike stunned and burned the keeper's daughter. In 1905, assistant keeper John Pusey nearly drowned when his boat flipped in the shallow Lighthouse Pond behind the tower. The pond's mud pulled him in up to his neck. The life-saving crew at the next station got to him before he went under.

In 1995, a visitor climbed the 199 steps, squeezed through the observation-platform railings at the top, and jumped. Staff and tour guides report a heaviness at the base of the tower on the side where he landed, and point visitors to the other side when they take photographs. It's the most recent addition to the lighthouse's roster of ghosts and the one most likely to bring tears during a tour.

The Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts has run the lighthouse since 1986 and opened it for climbing in May 1988. Since then, more than 2.1 million people have made the trip up. The organization runs a Ghost of the Lighthouse trolley tour on Saturday evenings out of Ocean and Washington Streets, a respectful version of the haunted walking tour that does not sensationalize the jumper and does not name the Irish woman.

Visitors who pause at the first landing on the way up sometimes feel a draft that seems to come from somebody else's coat. Some of them turn around and come back down without finishing the climb. The lantern she's carrying is supposed to be lit.