Point Sur Lighthouse

The Point Sur Lighthouse sits on a 361-foot volcanic rock about 25 miles south of Monterey, California, where keeper families lived in near-total isolation for decades. The volunteers who run the tours today say those families are still keeping house.

They have names for them. There's Catherine Ingersoll, a Danish immigrant who married one of the keepers — John Ingersoll really did run the light, and the family really did live here. There's her daughter, a girl the docents call Pokey. And there's Ruth, said to be another keeper's wife, who closes the kitchen doors of the keeper's house when no one is near them.

The names come partly from a recording. When the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures investigated the station in 2012, the docents say a recorder caught a woman's voice saying, "Pokey, go to bed," with a faint child's voice answering. Later on the same tape: "Now she wants you to go home."

One volunteer, Sheila Fraser, says she saw a woman on a stair landing — turn of the century, hair pinned up, long puffy sleeves, a long skirt. A separate investigation in 2015 spent the night in the blacksmith's workshop and reported a child-like voice that came close and sudden a few minutes after they walked in.

The light was first lit on August 1, 1889. The Coast Guard automated it in 1972, and the resident families left the rock in the years after. The volunteers came in to restore it and run it as a state historic park, and they tell the stories on Moonlight Walks and Halloween tours that pay for the work.

The lead docent, Julie Nunes, calls the place her Shangri-La. She doesn't tell it like a haunting at all. "Nothing evil or malevolent ever happened here," she says. "These are nice ghosts." The families lived on the rock for the better part of a century. She seems to think they simply never had a reason to leave it.