Point Sur Lighthouse

Point Sur Lighthouse sits 361 feet up on a volcanic rock 25 miles south of Monterey, and families lived and worked there from 1899 until automation in 1974. The voice of Catherine Ingersoll, a Danish immigrant and keeper's wife, was reportedly captured on audio telling her daughter Pokey to go to bed. Lighthouse keeper Hal Lentz vanished in a 1949 storm and his body was never found.

Catherine Ingersoll told her daughter Pokey to go to bed. This happened a hundred and twenty years after Catherine's death. It was captured on a recorder during a Ghost Adventures investigation in 2012, and according to the crew that played it back, the voice was clear enough to make out the words. Catherine was a Danish immigrant who married a Point Sur lighthouse keeper in the early 1900s and raised her daughter, nicknamed Pokey, on the rock. Her recorded instruction is one of the more specific and domestic pieces of audio evidence attached to any California haunting.

Point Sur Light Station sits 361 feet above the Pacific on a massive volcanic rock 25 miles south of Monterey, jutting out of Highway 1 like a misplaced fortress. When fog closes in, which is most days, the rock disappears and leaves only the light. It was commissioned in 1889, after decades of shipwrecks had piled bodies and wreckage along the Big Sur coast. The first light was lit on August 1, 1889. Families lived on the rock continuously from that year until 1974, when the Coast Guard automated the station and the last keeper, a man named Bill Owens, walked down the hill for the last time.

Three-quarters of a century of isolation does something to a place. Keepers and their families lived in near-total seclusion, battered by wind that could knock a grown man off the path. Children grew up there. People died there. Supplies came by donkey trail for the first several decades. The lighthouse kept running through it all, and the rock accumulated the residue of everyone who ever served on it.

Hal Lentz is the one the locals really talk about. Lentz was the keeper in 1949, when a storm came in hard enough to break windows. He went out to check the light during the worst of it and did not come back. His body was never recovered. The official finding was that he had been swept off the rock by a wave. Whispers around the Big Sur coast afterward said that his ghost had been seen walking the lighthouse path in the years that followed, sometimes in full keeper uniform, sometimes as a figure in the distance that volunteers would follow only to lose in the fog.

Catherine Ingersoll's voice is the most specific piece of evidence. Hal Lentz is the most dramatic story. But the Point Sur rock has a third layer of ghosts that volunteers and Ghost Adventures investigators keep pointing to: the drowned. Hundreds of sailors died in the waters off Big Sur before the light was lit, and more died in the decades of heavy commercial traffic afterward. The USS Macon, a Navy dirigible, crashed into the ocean off Point Sur in 1935, killing two crewmen. Shipwrecks along this stretch of coast produced so many bodies that the lighthouse keepers helped bury the unidentified in a small cemetery on the rock. Some of those graves are still there.

The lighthouse complex is now a state historic park, open for guided tours led by volunteers. The walk up from the parking area is steep enough to be its own warning. Once you're up there, the wind does most of the work of convincing you the rock isn't empty. Guides will tell you about Catherine and Pokey. They will tell you about Hal Lentz. They will tell you that they've had flashlights die on them in the officer's quarters, heard footsteps behind them on the tower stairs, and watched visitors go pale in the old blacksmith shop. The rock was never meant to be comfortable. It isn't now.