In Brief
The ghost at Heceta Head Lighthouse near Florence, Oregon keeps house next door. They call her Rue, and the story goes she sweeps up after guests, puts things back, and still walks the halls looking for a daughter who drowned below the cliffs.
The Full Story
The famous photograph at Heceta Head is the lighthouse, a white tower on a fog-wrapped headland near Florence, Oregon. The ghost lives next door, in the old keeper's house, and the first thing people tell you about her is that she sweeps.
In 1975, a workman named Jim Anderson was cleaning a window in the attic when he caught an odd reflection in the glass. He turned around and saw an elderly woman in a late-Victorian gown standing behind him. He fled, and he wouldn't go back up there. To finish the job he worked from the outside, where he accidentally broke an attic window, patched it from the exterior, and left the broken glass lying on the attic floor.
That night the caretakers woke to a scraping sound overhead, like someone sweeping. They didn't yet know a window had broken. The next morning, the shards were gathered into a neat little pile.
The students who came later named her with a Ouija board. The planchette spelled R-U-E, and Rue she has been ever since. The house is the surviving assistant keepers' dwelling, a red-roofed Queen Anne that served as a military barracks, then a college campus, and since 1995 a bed and breakfast that sleeps 15 guests, "16 if you count the resident ghost."
Rue keeps the place tidy. Guests find their belongings moved and set back in obvious spots, things gone missing and then turning up again. The housekeeper says that after she makes a bed, there will sometimes be a depression in it, as if someone has just sat down. "My job is to take care of the place and make it look nice," she says, "and I think she likes that."
The inn keeps a notebook where guests write down what happens to them. One woman in the Cape Cove room woke at 4:30 in the morning and felt something climb into the bed beside her and settle there for a couple of hours. She wasn't frightened, exactly. "Need I say I feel strange about this experience," she wrote, "but in a way honored. Concerned but not harmed." Others have seen a wispy gray figure drift down the hallway near the foot of the stairs.
The story locals tell is that Rue was a lightkeeper's wife whose daughter drowned, in the ocean below the cliffs or a cistern on the property, and that the unmarked, overgrown grave on the hillside above the house is hers. No record confirms any of it. The inn's manager puts it more plainly: Rue is watching the house, looking for her daughter.
