Heceta Head Lighthouse

Her name is Rue. The assistant keeper's house haunting is one of America's best-documented, ranked among the top ten haunted houses.

In 1975, a workman named Jim Anderson was cleaning an attic window in the assistant keeper's house at Heceta Head Lighthouse. He noticed something odd in the reflection. He turned around. An elderly woman in a Victorian gown was standing right behind him, close enough to touch. Anderson left the attic, refused to go back for several days, and when he finally did return he accidentally broke the window he had been cleaning. He left the broken glass on the floor and went home.

That night, the caretakers living on the floor below heard a sound from the locked attic above them. Someone was sweeping. The next morning they unlocked the door and found the broken glass piled into a neat little heap in the middle of the attic floor. Nobody had been up there.

This is the most documented ghost story on the Oregon Coast, and it is not about the lighthouse. The 56-foot tower at Heceta Head, lit since 1894, is one of the most photographed lighthouses in the United States, and its beam still reaches 21 miles out. The haunting belongs to the assistant keeper's house next to it, a Queen Anne-style cottage that the Tammen family rented as an innkeeping operation starting in the early 1990s, and that has been ranked among the ten most haunted houses in America. Inside, the resident is known as Rue.

The name came from a Lane Community College Ouija board session decades ago. The planchette spelled R-U-E and that was that. Local lore says she was the wife of a former lighthouse keeper, and that her daughter drowned, either in the ocean below the cliffs or in a cistern on the property. There's an unmarked grave on the hillside above the keeper's house, overgrown and never disturbed, that locals attribute to the child. The historical record can't confirm the identities of the mother or the daughter. What survives is the grief and the housekeeping.

People who see Rue describe an elderly woman with long silver hair in a dark Victorian-era gown. The bed and breakfast that has occupied the assistant keeper's house since 1995 keeps a guest book where visitors write down what happened to them, and the entries follow a pattern. Items left out at night are moved or rearranged. Things that go missing turn up later in obvious places, as if someone wanted them found. A gray figure has been seen drifting across an upstairs hallway. One guest reported feeling a presence climb into bed beside them at 4:30 in the morning, the mattress sinking under invisible weight. From the locked attic, sounds of sweeping and furniture being moved drift down through the floorboards at night.

The character that emerges from a hundred years of these reports is gentle and intensely tidy. Rue puts things back. She straightens up after the living. She sweeps. The story that the locals tell, of a mother who lost a child in a place she couldn't leave, fits the housekeeping. So does the unmarked grave on the hill.

The bed and breakfast now serves a daily wine and cheese social and a seven-course breakfast in the dining room downstairs. Guests check in for the view, usually, and the breakfast, and stay one night, and some of them come back down at checkout with a story to add to the book. This is the haunting that has been quietly accruing for over a century, written one entry at a time in a guest book on a cliff edge, by people who came expecting a lighthouse and found something else.