White Island Lighthouse

Joshua Card kept White Island Lighthouse for 35 years and apparently never stopped. Coast Guard crews still see a shadow on the grounds at night.

Joshua Card lit the White Island Lighthouse every night for thirty-five years. He took the post in 1874, retired in 1909, and died in 1911 at eighty-six. His replacement said the first strange thing happened within a month of Card leaving, and Coast Guard personnel have been seeing a shadowy figure walk the station grounds at night ever since.

The island is the southernmost of the Isles of Shoals, a nine-island cluster sitting about six miles offshore in the Atlantic between New Hampshire and Maine. White Island is small, exposed, hard to land on in anything but calm water. The original rubblestone tower went up in 1820. The current brick replacement, forty feet of whitewashed masonry with a black lantern, dates to 1859. Nathaniel Hawthorne visited in September 1852 and wrote about the isolation breaking keepers' wives.

Keeping the light was grim work. Thomas B. Laighton served in two stretches between 1839 and 1849 and raised his daughter Celia Thaxter on the island. She grew up to write poems about the place that read like someone still trying to process it. The station logbook records a sailor arriving bleeding and soaked at the keeper's door during a March gale, alerting the keepers to a Russian brig grounded offshore. The crew was rescued by rope line. The sailor collapsed inside the house. Incidents like that happened regularly.

Card arrived in 1874 and stayed. Staff who knew him described him as meticulous, never sick, never late with the light. When Atlantic Paranormal Society investigators came out years after automation, they recorded footsteps climbing the tower stairs with no one in the tower, a knock pattern on the keeper's dwelling door that repeated three times, and EVPs that caught a male voice saying what sounded like "mind the light." Coast Guard personnel stationed at the nearby maintenance building filed reports of a shadowy figure pacing the rocks below the tower at night, always moving toward the light.

There's a second ghost on the island that predates Card by two centuries. Local legend puts Blackbeard's wife on White Island, left behind when Edward Teach sailed south to die at Ocracoke in 1718. Visitors describe her as a tall woman in a dark sea cloak with long blonde hair, usually seen at the waterline on the north side of the island. The story has no documentary backing and plenty of romantic holes. Multiple nineteenth-century Shoals histories record it anyway, which is the definition of folklore doing its job.

The light was automated in 1986. The Coast Guard pulled its personnel. The property transferred to New Hampshire State Parks in 1993, and a group of middle school students who called themselves the Lighthouse Kids raised the money that kept the tower from falling into the ocean, finishing major restoration in 2005. You can visit the island by cruise from Rye Harbor. The tower and dwelling are closed. You can walk the rocks Card paced. People report footsteps behind them on the path more often than the tour operators would like to advertise.