Point Sur Lighthouse

OVERVIEW

A stone lighthouse and keepers' quarters on the top of Point Sur, a 361-foot rock rising from the beach 25 miles south of Monterey, reached by a road across the sand and up the cliff. The Lighthouse Board named it 'a most important point' in 1874 after the wreck of the Ventura nearby, and the light was first lit on 1 August 1889; keepers and their families lived on the rock, cut off until Highway 1 opened in 1937. The Coast Guard automated it in 1972, the last keeper left in 1974, and the station passed to California State Parks in 2004 as Point Sur State Historic Park, kept and restored by the volunteer Central Coast Lighthouse Keepers, who returned the original Fresnel lens.

HISTORY

More than a dozen ships were lost along this stretch; on 12 February 1935 the Navy airship USS Macon went down in the sea off the point with the loss of two of her crew. The keepers' families are on the station records — the Ingersolls among them.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Volunteers' accounts are the tradition: Sheila Fraser, a cleaner, told KQED of a woman in turn-of-the-century dress on the stair landing and a man's face at the living-room window; docents report footsteps, a keeper in the visitor centre, a woman in the kitchen of the keepers' house and voices on recorders. The docent Julie Nunes leads ghost-hunting tours on the weekends before Halloween to raise restoration money; Ghost Adventures filmed here in 2012. Monterey County Weekly's verdict — it 'may or may not be haunted, but it's a scary place' — is the entry's.

VISITING

Guided walking tours only, on set days from the locked gate on Highway 1 (about three hours, a steep half-mile climb; no reservations, cash). Moonlight and Halloween ghost tours are run by the volunteers. No access outside tours.