Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

Oregon's only wooden lighthouse, built in 1871 and decommissioned in 1874. The oldest structure in Newport. Saved from demolition in part because of its ghost story.

The Yaquina Bay Lighthouse in Newport, Oregon holds a distinction shared by no other historic structure in America: it is the only building known to have been saved from demolition by a ghost that never existed. Built in 1871 to guide ships into Yaquina Bay, the lighthouse was decommissioned just three years later when the taller Yaquina Head Lighthouse was constructed several miles to the north. After only three years of service, the light went dark, and the lighthouse sat abandoned on its bluff above the bay, slowly deteriorating through decades of coastal weather.

In August 1899, Lischen M. Miller, sister-in-law of the famous poet Joaquin Miller, published a short story in Pacific Monthly Magazine titled "The Haunted Light at Newport by the Sea." The tale told the story of Muriel Trevenard, a teenage girl left at a boarding house near Newport by her seafaring father. Muriel befriended a group of local young people, and one day they decided to explore the abandoned lighthouse on the hill. Inside, the group discovered a secret door leading to an underground shaft. They dropped burning scraps of paper down the pit but could not see the bottom. As the group prepared to leave, Muriel realized she had left her handkerchief behind and went back inside alone to retrieve it. Moments later, the others heard blood-curdling screams. They rushed back in to find a pool of warm blood on the floor and Muriel's handkerchief beside it. The secret door was locked from the inside. Muriel Trevenard was never seen again.

Miller's story was published as fiction, and its origins remain uncertain. No one knows whether Miller invented the tale entirely or drew on local whispers already circulating about the abandoned lighthouse. But the story took on a life of its own. Over the following decades, condensed versions appeared on restaurant placemats, tourist brochures, and local gift shop merchandise throughout Newport. Retellings gradually dropped the fictional framing, presenting Muriel's disappearance as historical fact. Visitors began asking to see the bloodstains Muriel had supposedly left behind.

The lighthouse served the U.S. Lifesaving Service and Coast Guard as quarters between 1906 and 1933, then fell vacant again. By the 1940s, the neglected structure faced demolition. But the legend of Muriel Trevenard had given the lighthouse a romantic, haunted identity that inspired citizens to form the Lincoln County Historical Society specifically to prevent its destruction. Industrialist L.E. Warford provided financial assistance, and the lighthouse was preserved. In 1955, it was leased to the historical society as a museum. Between 1974 and 1996, the building underwent extensive restoration, and its light was relit after 122 years of darkness.

With the legend firmly established as local truth, reports of genuine paranormal encounters began to accumulate. Visitors and passersby have reported seeing shadow figures in the windows of the keeper's house, dark silhouettes that appear to be a young woman. Screaming sounds have been heard at night from the direction of the lighthouse. Unexplained lights appear on foggy nights, though skeptics note this effect is likely caused by city lights behind the lighthouse being obscured and distorted by dense fog. A 1975 newspaper article documented a hitchhiker's account of encountering a ghostly female figure outside a lighthouse window who predicted he would find employment the following day, a prediction that reportedly came true.

The Yaquina Bay Lighthouse is now an Oregon state park and remains Oregon's only surviving wooden lighthouse. Whether Muriel Trevenard ever existed is almost beside the point. The fictional ghost became real enough to save a building, and the building in turn generated real enough encounters to keep the ghost story alive for over a century.