Heceta Head Lighthouse

Completed in 1894, this lighthouse sits 206 feet above the Pacific and its beam is visible 21 miles out — the strongest on the Oregon coast. The keeper's house is now a B&B.

Heceta Head Lighthouse began operation in 1894 on a dramatic headland between Florence and Yachats on the Oregon Coast, its beam visible twenty-one miles out to sea. The lighthouse compound included a keeper's house and an assistant keeper's house, where families lived in isolation on the windswept cliff maintaining the light. It's the assistant keeper's house, not the tower itself, that has earned Heceta Head recognition as one of the ten most haunted houses in the United States.

The ghost is known as Rue, a name that emerged during a Ouija board session conducted by Lane Community College students decades ago when the board spelled out R-U-E. She's believed to be the wife of a former lighthouse keeper who suffered a devastating loss when one of her two daughters drowned, either in the ocean below the cliffs or in a cistern on the grounds. An unmarked grave on the hillside above the keeper's house, overgrown and undisturbed, is thought to be the child's resting place, though historical records haven't confirmed the identity of either mother or daughter. Witnesses describe Rue as an elderly woman with long silver hair wearing a dark-colored, late-Victorian-style gown.

The most thoroughly documented encounter occurred in 1975 when workman Jim Anderson was cleaning an attic window in the assistant keeper's house. Anderson noticed an odd reflection in the glass and turned to find an elderly woman in Victorian dress standing right behind him. He fled the attic and refused to return for several days. When he finally did, he accidentally broke the window he'd been cleaning and left the shattered glass on the floor. That night, the caretakers living below heard scraping sounds from the locked attic that sounded like someone sweeping broken glass. The next morning, they found the glass swept into a neat pile, though no one had entered the attic overnight.

Guests and staff at the bed and breakfast that has operated in the house since 1995 report a consistent pattern of activity. Items left in guest rooms are moved or rearranged, and objects that go missing are later returned to obvious locations. A gray figure has been seen floating across the hallway, and one guest described feeling a presence climb into bed beside them at four-thirty in the morning. The sounds of sweeping and furniture being rearranged drift down from the locked attic at night. Rue appears to be a meticulous housekeeper in death as she presumably was in life, tidying up after the living and maintaining order in the home where she lost her child. The six-room bed and breakfast now serves a daily wine and cheese social and an elaborate seven-course breakfast, and maintains a guest book where visitors document their encounters with the Grey Lady of Heceta Head, adding new chapters to a haunting that's persisted for well over a century.