Currituck Beach Lighthouse

The keeper's wife died of tuberculosis in the North Room. The village kids broke in and played dress-up in her sealed clothes.

The lighthouse keeper's wife died of tuberculosis in the North Room of the keeper's quarters at Currituck Beach. Before she died, she was quarantined there, isolated from her family so she wouldn't infect them. When she was gone, the family did what families in the late 1800s did with a consumptive's belongings. They sealed every piece of clothing and cloth she had owned into a barrel, closed the barrel, and left it in the North Room. Children in the village of Corolla were told not to go in and not to touch the barrel.

The children eventually broke in, pried the lid off, and played dress-up in the dead woman's clothes.

The North Room is the reason nobody who has tried has been able to spend a full night in the keeper's quarters since the last keeper's family moved out. The keeper's quarters next to Currituck Beach Lighthouse are still standing, still accessible, and still, according to visitors and staff alike, wrong. The second ghost in the room is a child. Her name was Sadie, and she belonged to an earlier keeper's family that occupied the house after it went operational in 1875. Sadie liked to play on the beach. One day a riptide pulled her under. Her body turned up on the sand the next morning.

Sadie and the tubercular wife share the same room. Visitors describe the temperature dropping sharply when they cross the threshold, soft voices that can't be isolated to any single direction, the feeling of being watched from an empty corner. A few have described the presence of two distinct figures, a woman and a small girl, which is the combination the story already tells you to expect. People who don't know the story walk in, feel what they feel, and come back with descriptions that match the ones from people who came in cold a decade ago.

The lighthouse itself is a landmark worth looking at on its own. It went up in 1875 as the last major tower built on the North Carolina coast, 162 feet tall, a million bricks left unpainted, making it the only one of the big Outer Banks lighthouses that isn't wearing a distinctive paint job to tell ships apart from the others. Currituck just stayed red. It was fully restored in the 1990s by Outer Banks Conservationists and is climbable today. The keeper's house is the part the tours handle carefully.

The legend underneath the legend is older than either the keeper's wife or the little girl. A ship went down off this stretch of coast sometime in the 1600s, more than two centuries before anybody thought to build a lighthouse here, and its wreck is still somewhere offshore. Whether the passengers attached themselves to the keeper's quarters when the building went up, or whether the quarters were built on land that was already crowded, depends on which Outer Banks tour guide you ask. The source most often cited for the full chain of stories is Nancy Roberts' 1985 book Ghosts From the Coast, which is the book that rescued the North Room legend from becoming purely local memory.

Today, visitors can climb the 214 steps to the top of the tower and walk around the grounds. The keeper's house is roped off at certain points, and the North Room carries a quiet warning that few people choose to test. The barrel is long gone. The dress-up game is long gone. Whatever the children shook loose when they opened the lid did not leave with either of them.