In Brief
The St. Simons Island Lighthouse in Georgia has a sound that keeps coming back: footsteps climbing the 129 iron steps of the spiral tower, steady and deliberate, with no one on the stairs. They belong to a head keeper shot dead in 1880.
The Full Story
The St. Simons Island Lighthouse on the Georgia coast keeps a set of footsteps that nobody can find the owner of. They come up the spiral staircase — 129 cast-iron steps, the same ones visitors climb today — slow and even, like a man making nightly rounds. The keepers who lived there said the stairs were empty every time they looked.
The footsteps belong to Frederick Osborne, by every telling. He was head keeper from 1874 to 1880, and he lived in the keeper's duplex at the base of the tower — head keeper below, his assistant and the assistant's wife in the rooms above, sharing one central stairway. On a Sunday morning in March 1880, the two men argued over a woman. Osborne drew a pistol. The assistant went upstairs, came back down with a shotgun, and shot him. Osborne died of the wound. The assistant was charged with murder and acquitted once the jury heard the circumstances.
Accounts don't agree on his name — John Stevens, sometimes spelled Stephens — or on exactly who said what to set the fight off. They agree on how it ended.
After that, the keepers who came after Osborne started hearing him on the stairs. Carl Svendsen, who held the post for 28 years starting in 1907, heard the footfalls with his wife often enough that the family dog would work itself into a frenzy at the sound of them.
The best account is the oldest. A 1908 newspaper told of a keeper's wife alone in the tower, unable to fix the malfunctioning light, who remembered that Osborne had once promised to help her — and called out to his ghost to do it now. There was a clink and a rattle. She looked up and saw, in her words, "the distinct figure of the French Canadian bending over the works," and fainted. When she came to, the light was clicking along, perfect.
