In Brief
Point Lookout Lighthouse sits at the tip of a Maryland peninsula where a Union prison camp once stood. In 1980 investigators recorded 24 distinct voices inside the empty building, including one near the staircase that simply says: my home.
The Full Story
On January 14, 1980, a paranormal investigator named Hans Holzer brought a team of psychics into the empty Point Lookout Lighthouse in Scotland, Maryland, and left with a recording of 24 distinct voices. Male and female, singing and talking, through a building with no one in it.
One of them was caught on the tower staircase. It says "my home."
The voice is attributed to Ann Davis, and the lighthouse gives her reason to claim the place. Her father, James Davis, lit the lamp here for the first time in 1830 and was dead by December of that same year, a few months into the job. Ann took over. She kept the same $350-a-year salary her father had earned and ran the light until her own death around 1847. People who report seeing her describe a woman at the top of the staircase, in a white blouse and a long blue skirt.
Another of the 24 voices was a man's. It says, "Fire if they get too close to you." It reads like a guard's order, and on this peninsula, there was plenty to guard.
The tip of land below the lighthouse held Camp Hoffman, the largest Union prison camp for Confederate soldiers. It was built for 10,000 men and swelled to roughly twice that at its peak. More than 52,000 prisoners passed through over the course of the war, and around 4,000 of them died of disease, exposure, and bad sanitation, within sight of the tower. For decades, park rangers have reported a man in a tattered Confederate uniform crossing one of the park roads. They see him in the rearview mirror, and when they turn to look, the road is empty.
The light was shut off for good on January 11, 1966. The dead seem not to have noticed.
Laura Berg, a state employee, lived in the lighthouse from 1979 to 1981 and reported heavy boots pacing the hall at night, a woman singing in the empty rooms, and books thrown off the shelves. One night she saw a cluster of strange lights hovering over her bed. Then she found the space heater beneath them, on fire.
There is older lore here, too. In October 1878 the steamship Express went down in a gale off Point Lookout, and a second mate named Joseph Haney rowed for shore to bring help and drowned. People who have lived in the lighthouse say that on storm nights, someone knocks at the door. When they open it, no one is there, only puddles of water leading away toward the bay.
The lighthouse reopened as a museum in May 2025, after seven years closed. The voices were here first.
