Tillamook Rock Lighthouse

Built on a basalt rock 1.2 miles offshore, killed nineteen people, ran 1881-1957, and briefly stored cremated human remains.

The first man assigned to Tillamook Rock died there before construction began. John Trewavas, a Cornish master mason, climbed onto the basalt formation in September 1879 to survey it for a lighthouse foundation. A single wave came over the rock and pulled him into the Pacific. His body was never found. The U.S. Lighthouse Board went ahead and built on the rock anyway.

Tillamook Rock sits 1.2 miles offshore from Tillamook Head on the northern Oregon coast, a wedge of basalt that local mariners had called dangerous since long before any white surveyor saw it. The Tillamook and Clatsop people considered it a haunted place inhabited by spirits living in tunnels worn into the rock by the surf, and refused to land on it. The Lighthouse Board needed a navigation light there because too many ships were going down between Astoria and the Columbia bar, and the headland itself was too shrouded in fog to mount a useful beacon. So they built on the rock. It took 575 days. Workers were transferred from supply ship to lighthouse by a rope strung across the open water, hauled across one at a time with their tools dangling beneath them.

In January 1881, two weeks before the light was scheduled to go into service, the British bark Lupatia sailed into the fog south of the construction site. Crewmen on the rock heard a voice from the deck shouting "hard aport." The ship cleared Tillamook Rock by yards and struck Tillamook Head instead. All sixteen sailors aboard drowned. Their bodies washed up on the beach below the headland the following morning. The only survivor was the ship's dog, found alive on the sand. Locals around Seaside have long described hearing a dog howling somewhere out toward the rock on stormy nights.

Once Terrible Tilly was operational, it was crewed by four male keepers at a time, in shifts, with six months of supplies. Wives, children, and women in any role were forbidden on the station. Storms regularly threw boulders against the lantern room a hundred and thirty feet above the waterline. The fog signal ran almost continuously. At least one keeper had to be removed for psychological collapse. The accounts from those who lasted are uniform in tone: whispering moans during storms, the sense of an additional person on the rock, and one shared sighting by all four keepers on duty of a sailing ship passing close to the lighthouse and dissolving back into the fog. A new keeper reported being chased up the tower stairs by something he couldn't see and, in a panic, throwing it back down behind him.

Terrible Tilly was decommissioned in 1957 after seventy-seven years of service. Then it became a columbarium. In 1980, the new private owners began storing cremated human remains inside the abandoned lighthouse under the name Eternity at Sea. Roughly thirty urns were placed in the empty rooms before the columbarium's license was revoked in 1999, partly over questions about how the remains had been stored and how the structure was being maintained. Most of those urns are still inside. The license was never renewed.

You cannot land on Tillamook Rock. It's a federal seabird sanctuary now and accessible only by helicopter, which is rarely permitted. From the beach at Cannon Beach or the cliff at Ecola State Park you can just make out the lighthouse: a rectangular stub on a black wedge, lit from above by gulls. It has been abandoned twice, killed at least seventeen people, briefly housed the cremated dead, and is now closed to everyone except the birds and the urns the state forgot about.