In Brief
At Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Castle, New Hampshire, a man in an old keeper's uniform walks the wooden walkway. One visitor saw him in daylight, took him for a costumed guide, then later picked Joshua Card out of a photograph she had never seen.
The Full Story
At Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Castle, New Hampshire, people keep seeing a man on the wooden walkway in an old-fashioned keeper's uniform. He's there, and then he isn't. One visitor watched him in broad daylight and assumed he was a costumed tour guide going about his work. She thought nothing of it until later, when someone showed her an old photograph she had never seen before. She looked at the man in it and recognized him at once as the figure she'd watched on the walkway. The man in the photograph was Joshua Card.
Card ran this light for 35 years, from 1874 to 1909. He had started life as a cabin boy at 12, sailed until he was 27, spent six years at Boon Island light, and then came here, and in his three and a half decades tending the lamp he failed to light it only 11 times. He wore a cap with a "K" stitched inside a wreath, and when people asked him what it stood for, he'd answer, "Why, Captain, of course." In 1909, after a stroke, he was forced out against his will at the age of 86. He was dead by 1911. The keeper who almost never let the light go dark didn't get to choose when he finally left it.
He seems to have come back anyway. Coast Guard personnel stationed at the site have reported a shadowy figure crossing the grounds at night.
The voices are stranger. Directly below the lantern is a room called the Watchroom, a circular space with three portholes facing the sea, and a solo visitor standing in it heard a man's voice ask, "What are you doing?" There was no one there with him. People climbing the iron spiral staircase have reported footsteps pacing it behind them in the empty tower. And in 2007, the lighthouse historian was guiding a young couple up the stairs when all three of them heard a clear voice say "HELLO" inside the tower. He heard it, and so did the husband. The wife heard nothing at all.
The current 48-foot cast-iron tower went up in 1878, but the station itself dates to 1771, making it one of the oldest in the country, lit before the Revolution. It's still an active Coast Guard aid to navigation. Every keeper it ever had has long since moved on. One of them, it seems, only moved as far as the walkway, where a stranger who never knew him once picked his face out of a photograph.
