In Brief
Climbers at the Cape May Lighthouse keep seeing a woman in white on the spiral stairs, a lantern in one hand and a child in the other, stuck on the lower landing. She has never been identified. The tower she haunts is the third on this spot. The first two are underwater.
The Full Story
At the Cape May Lighthouse, at the southern tip of New Jersey, the people who climb the stairs keep seeing a woman who isn't on the climb with them. She wears a flowing white gown and carries a lantern in one hand and a child in the other. Witnesses describe her the same way every time, on the cast-iron spiral staircase, often fixed on the lower landing, as if she can't go any higher. The Stockton Inn's account of her puts it plainly: a ghostly woman in white, "holding a lantern in one hand and a child in the other."
No one has ever figured out who she is. There's a backstory the local tours tell, but it doesn't hold together against the records, so the honest version is the unsettling one: a woman with a child, stuck on a stair, and not a name to put to her.
She isn't always inside. Some climbers report her out on the gallery near the top instead, at the railing, looking out to sea.
The tower she haunts is the third one to stand on this ground. The first was built in 1823, brick and 70 feet tall, about a third of a mile west of where the current tower stands. The second went up in 1847. Both lost their fight with the Atlantic. The exact spots where they stood are underwater now, taken by the same coastal erosion that has never let this land hold still. The current 157-foot tower was first lit in 1859, and that one held.
The other thing people report is sound. As the writer Chris Daley records it, climbers hear "the sound of heavy boots echoing on the iron steps above or below" them, even when they're the only one in the tower. Some tour accounts pin the footsteps on a former keeper, though no record names him.
The keepers here had reason to leave something behind. Directly behind the tower sits a shallow patch of water called Lighthouse Pond, and in 1905 the assistant keeper, John Pusey, upset his boat in it and sank up to his neck in the slushy bottom before the life-saving crew from the nearby station pulled him out. Twice the dome took lightning, once in 1891, and a later strike injured a keeper's daughter. It was not a quiet post.
There are 199 steps in that iron staircase, and the light at the top was first lit on October 31, 1859. They lit it on Halloween, and the woman on the lower landing, lantern in hand, has been waiting on those steps ever since.
