Tybee Island Lighthouse

Georgia's oldest lighthouse (1736) has been destroyed and rebuilt four times across 290 years. The ghost of a five-year-old girl named Lachlan warns visitors on the 178-step staircase, electronics die in the keeper's house children's room, and the spirits of cholera victims and a keeper who died under suspicious circumstances linger on the grounds.

Five workers died of cholera while rebuilding this lighthouse after the Civil War. The foreman was among them. The rest of the crew fled the island, leaving the half-finished tower standing over their graves.

Tybee Island Lighthouse is the oldest and tallest in Georgia, 154 feet of octagonal brick at the mouth of the Savannah River. General James Oglethorpe ordered the first tower built in 1736, a 90-foot wooden structure that lasted five years before a storm knocked it down. The second went up in 1742, built from stone and wood by Thomas Sumner. Shoreline erosion ate that one. The third, a 100-foot brick tower constructed by John Mullryne in 1773, provided the foundation for everything that followed. Its lower 60 feet are still embedded inside the current structure.

Confederate forces burned the upper section in 1862 and hauled the lens away when they retreated to Fort Pulaski. Federal troops arrived to rebuild. They brought cholera with them. After the deaths and the exodus, work resumed and the tower was completed in 1867 with a first-order Fresnel lens, nine feet tall with 320 glass prisms. That lens is still in use. On November 8, 1792, a fire had heavily damaged an earlier version of the upper section. An 1871 hurricane cracked five faces of the tower. The 1886 Charleston earthquake displaced the lens and broke its mounting ring. Each time the lighthouse was repaired and relit. The tower was electrified in 1933, automated in 1972, and underwent a .9 million restoration completed in 2024.

The ghost stories run through the whole history. A five-year-old girl named Lachlan, believed to be the daughter of the first keeper, appears on the winding 178-step cast-iron staircase. She warns visitors to turn back. A visiting psychic described seeing two children playing jump rope in the yard and a man dressed as a lightkeeper standing in front of the tower. A staff member saw a figure in the first assistant keeper's house and heard constant footsteps from empty rooms.

Ghost tour companies attribute the most persistent haunting to a head keeper who died under suspicious circumstances, with his assistant suspected of involvement. The keeper's former house is the most active building on the grounds. Visitors climbing to the second-floor children's room report their cameras and phones malfunctioning, shutting off or draining battery in the same spot.

The grounds of the light station include the keeper's cottages and the remains of Fort Screven, a coastal defense installation active from the 1890s through World War II. Soldiers, keepers, construction workers, cholera victims, and the crews of ships that wrecked within sight of the light all have claims on this stretch of beach. Visitors describe hearing whistling when nobody else is around. On the 178 stairs to the top, where the original Fresnel lens still throws light across the Savannah River, a little girl tells you to go back.