Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse

Keeper Joshua Card ran Portsmouth Harbor Light for 35 years before being forced out in 1909. Visitors see him on the catwalk in his pea coat.

At Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse, a man's voice asks "what are you doing?" in an empty watchroom. More than one visitor has. The voice is male, clear, and close. When people turn around nobody is there, which is the part that sticks with them after they get back to the parking lot at Fort Constitution.

The current cast-iron tower, painted white against the water at the tip of New Castle, was built in 1878. A wooden lighthouse stood here first, lit in 1771, which makes this site one of the oldest lighthouse stations in the country. The keeper that most of the ghost stories come back to is Joshua Card, who took the job in 1874 and ran the light for the next 35 years. He wore a cap with a brass K on the front, which some visitors insist they have seen.

Card was forced to retire in 1909. He died in 1911 at age 86. Since then, a man in a pea coat and keeper's hat has been seen walking the tower catwalk and vanishing before anyone can get close. One woman who saw him at midday later picked Card out of a historical photograph. "That's the man I saw," she said. She had never heard of him before that afternoon.

The second thread of the haunting is older and harder. On July 4, 1809, soldiers at neighboring Fort Constitution were preparing a fireworks display for Independence Day. The gunpowder went off early. Somewhere between 10 and 14 people were killed, many of them children. Witnesses at the time said the blast threw bodies and debris as far as the lighthouse grounds. The fort and the lighthouse share the same small peninsula. The explosion is part of the reason the site has had paranormal reports for two centuries.

The Watchroom is the current hot spot. It is the circular space just below the lantern, with three portholes looking out to sea, and it tends to produce voices when it should not. One visitor heard a woman talking on the other side of the porthole glass. Another heard the male voice ask the "what are you doing" question while she was completely alone in the tower. Unexplained footsteps on the spiral iron stairs are the most common report of all.

In December 2008, the SyFy series Ghost Hunters filmed a Season 4 finale at the lighthouse. The TAPS team reported hearing footsteps on the stairs where no one was walking and said they established a back-and-forth communication through knocking with something in the tower. That episode is what put Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse on the national map, but the reports predate the show by decades.

The lighthouse is an active Coast Guard aid to navigation, maintained and opened for tours by the nonprofit Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouses. Tour guides are usually willing to talk about the hauntings if you ask, though they are careful not to sell the site on the ghost stories. "Haunted Lighthouse and Fort" tours in October are the exception, and those book up fast.

Joshua Card gave 35 years to this light. He was removed against his will in 1909, and two years later he was gone. The tower he kept on schedule for three and a half decades has someone walking the stairs in a keeper's coat. Details like that do not make a ghost story go away.