[SPEAKER_00]: Warning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: July 1873.
[SPEAKER_00]: Four children climbed into a small rail cart and a construction site on Florida's Anastasia Island in the city of St. Auguste.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were Mary Adelaide Pity, her sisters Eliza and Carrie and a friend, a 10-year-old girl.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their father has a chia pity was overseeing the building of a new lighthouse, and the children had turned the rail cart that hold bricks up to the site into their own theme park like roller coaster.
[SPEAKER_00]: The daily activity was that the girls would ride the cart down the tracks towards the water then haul it back up for another run.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only a simple wooden board at the end of the rail prevented the cart from plunging into the sea.
[SPEAKER_00]: That day, as the children carrying down towards the shore, the cart hit the end of the track, but the board wasn't there.
[SPEAKER_00]: They fell into the water, the cart landed on top of them, painting them beneath the surface.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dan Sessions a worker on the property raced to the water, and with all his strengths lifted, the heavy cart, but by the time he freed them, three of the four children had drowned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only four-year-old Carrie survived.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, visitors to the St. Augustine Lighthouse sometimes hear giggles, or find their shoelaces, mysteriously tied together, and some even mentioned feeling small hands, tugging at them,
[SPEAKER_00]: in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are these the spirits of the dead girls?
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if they are, what are the explanations for all the other strange things happening at the St. Augustine Lighthouse?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the show, I'm Michael May.
[SPEAKER_00]: Due to popular demand of my random haul episode just a few weeks ago, I'm doing another haunted location.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always been fascinated with lighthouses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the connection to history, they're creepy, they're cool, but more can you ask for really?
[SPEAKER_00]: And personally, the St. Augustine Lighthouse has intrigued me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to feel like such a dork saying this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But many years ago, I saw Ghost Hunters episode that was filmed there, where they caught some things on video, some movement and shadow figures while looking up the tower that I could not explain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm a skeptic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Normally, I'm coming up with a million explanations for weird things that happen on shows like that, but I could not for that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's been very intriguing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's dive in to the St. Augustine Lighthouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: If any Lighthouse is truly haunted.
[SPEAKER_00]: St. Augustines would be the one, not only do we know about the deceased girls that I talked about in the introduction, but more tragedies have taken place there, and the city itself has a long and storied history.
[SPEAKER_00]: St. Augustine is America's oldest permanent European settlement, which has seen many wars, battles, and political changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its original lighthouse can be traced back to 1589 when a watch tower was built.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was updated and changed in 1731, and then when Spain seeded Florida to the United States in 1821, the government quickly converted the old Spanish watch tower on Anastasia Island into a lighthouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tower was made of Kukina blocks, and it stood roughly 50 feet tall, and was tinded by Juan Andru, sometimes pronounced Andru in some tellings of this story, and he was a fisherman who became St. Augustine's first official lighthouse keeper in 1824.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tower received a Fresnel Lens in 1854,
[SPEAKER_00]: In December 1859, the headkeeper Joseph Andrew, once cousin, was whitewashing the tower when his scaffolding broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fell 60 feet, and apparently bounced off the roof of one of the below buildings before hitting the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to lore, Joseph's wife climbed the tower and shouted into the wind what shall I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: She then hurt her husband's voice answer,
[SPEAKER_00]: Taking this ghostly advice, Maria became the first female lighthouse keeper of Hispanic American descent in the United States, and served until the Civil War.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the sea was eroding the land around the old town, so Congress appropriated funds in 1871 to build a new lighthouse for their inland.
[SPEAKER_00]: construction began that year of 1873, only the foundation and 42 feet of the 165 foot tower were complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rail cart used to haul materials, now the pity children's toy, ran from supply ships down on the coast up to the building's site.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hezekiah pity was the superintendent of Lighthouse construction and he had uprooted his family from Cape Elizabeth main and moved them down to Florida for this project.
[SPEAKER_00]: He and his wife Mary lived on site with all of their children.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the children's deaths with that horrendous accident with the rail cart,
[SPEAKER_00]: work stopped for the funeral and the pity family returned to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth mentioning there was a girl playing with the pity children that day that also sadly died in that accident and she's unnamed or probably more appropriate to say that her name is unknown.
[SPEAKER_00]: This may have something to do with the fact that she was African-American,
[SPEAKER_00]: and just due to the nature of historical context and racism and things like that, it's likely her name is unknown because press that time may not have even tried to find her name or report it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have come across that and work I've done before, not just in the late 1800s, but even through the 20th century,
[SPEAKER_00]: where certain minorities are just unreported or they're left nameless in articles and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The staff at the St. Augustine Lighthouse in Maritime Museum are trying to find her grave and find out who she is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's just important to share that aspect of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, construction continued, and the Newt Lighthouse was completed and lit on a October 15th, 1874.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's black and white spiral tower capped with a first order Fresnel lens crafted in France.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 150 years since that accident, strange occurrences at the lighthouse have been attributed to the spirits of those children.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many accounts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them vague but there are commonalities between these experiences about hearing laughter in the tower in the Keepers House, or feeling small hands in the dark and seeing little girls in Victorian dresses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read an account on Reddit, where someone claimed to have seen a little girl on a bench outside the lighthouse, and the girl was dressed in Victorian era closing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman looked away for an instant, and when she looked back, the little girl was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: A tour group soon appeared, and the woman asked the group if any of them were looking for one of their daughters, but no one was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another guest famous acclaim that her shoelaces were tied to the staircase, as if by a mischievous child.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the pity children accident, around 1875, a new lighthouse keeper made your William horn a veteran of the Civil War, arrived with his family.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died of tuberculosis, though they were likely still calling it consumption at the time, in 1889.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many claim to see and or feel his presence today.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few accounts I heard mentioned a ghostly figure of a man in the basement, and many believe it to be major harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's also an interesting anecdote.
[SPEAKER_00]: that people share that say if you don't call him major, like if you just call him William Harn or Mr. Harn, his spirit gets upset.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now while I can't confirm any of these accounts in the basement with photographs or videos and things like that, the basement itself is a common place for people to feel uneasy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's interesting because it's one of the only original parts of the Keeper's house to survive a 1975.
[SPEAKER_00]: the St. Augustine Lighthouse is more than a monument to tragedy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has served an important service, and among its most devoted guardians was headkeeper Peter Rasmussen, who started work there in 1901, Rasmussen held the post for 23 years the longest tenure in the station's history.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1921, his wife Lula died of tuberculosis, and overcome with grief, Rasmussen
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1924, he left the station and died just the following year.
[SPEAKER_00]: almost immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: Experiences began happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Visitors and staff reported being brushed or pushed by unseen hands, especially when they behave disrespectfully to the lighthouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doors opened and closed on their own hats were knocked off heads, foot steps being heard in empty rooms, and people reported smelling cherry tobacco, which just so happened to be
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a story I've read where the lighthouse keeper, James Pippin, had an experience that was so frightening it changed his life, but I have to make one quick correction to the story I'm about to share because it wasn't James Pippin.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a relief keeper who was working one night in the 1950s.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the keeper's house, he heard footsteps upstairs, but no one else was supposed to
[SPEAKER_00]: This story very well would have made it back to James Pippin or he just had his own similar experiences because Pippin soon abandoned the main house and lived in a much smaller building on the property swearing that the big house was haunted and he would never stay another night in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1960s, a local leather worker who rented the house was a woken one night.
[SPEAKER_00]: As his eyes were adjusting to the dark, he suddenly saw a small girl standing by his bed.
[SPEAKER_00]: A moment later, she was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1970s, after years of vacancy, the Keeper's house caught fire in two of this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one knows what started it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Volunteers from the junior service league raised over a million dollars to restore the house, however during the renovation, both workers and volunteers allegedly experienced unexplained phenomena, especially in the basement, and that brings us to modern day.
[SPEAKER_00]: where the lighthouse has been seen on countless ghost hunting shows, it's talked about in books, newspapers, articles, blogs, about being one of the most hunted places in America, and the museum that's there gives tours to people interested in stories like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So is the St. Augustine lighthouse actually haunted?
[SPEAKER_00]: While Lighthouse is themselves in vite stories like this, they creak and groan, sea winds make hums and whistles, who have waves crashing against the rocks, and in such an environment, you are primed to find meaning in all of these random noises and movements.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the St. Augustine Lighthouse has witnessed real trauma.
[SPEAKER_00]: Children have drowned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keepers of died loved ones and family have died on the property.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ghost tales offer a way to honor the dead, confront the unknown, and also learn about the history.
[SPEAKER_00]: The St. Augustine Lighthouse in Maritime Museum acknowledges that it has embraced these stories as part of its mission because proceeds from ghost tours, from visitors.
[SPEAKER_00]: They help fund Maritime Archaeology, Preservation Education Programs, and Historical Research.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether you believe in the ghost or not, there is a positive benefit to these stories sticking around.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I said earlier, lighthouses are a fascination of mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know of any other haunted lighthouse that I should look into for the show, email me, a study of strange at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: you've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminating the unexplained by subscribing to our sub-steck, just head to the support tab at astudyofstrange.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.