The lighthouse at Point Lookout was built in 1830 to mark the entrance to the Potomac River — a modest white clapboard structure, two stories, at the southernmost tip of Maryland’s western shore. Thirty-two years after its first light was lit, the Union Army arrived and transformed the surrounding peninsula. What had been a navigational aid became the edge of Camp Hoffman, one of the largest Confederate prisoner-of-war camps in American history.

The camp operated from 1862 to 1865. In that span, approximately 52,000 Confederate soldiers passed through, and thousands never left. Estimates of the dead range from 3,000 to more than 8,000, killed not by combat but by smallpox, scurvy, dysentery, and the grinding compression of too many men into too little space. The lighthouse and its adjacent hospital annex served as the camp’s medical facilities — the last address for those who had run out of options. Paranormal researcher Gerald Sword, working with acoustical engineer Dr. Steven Kaplan, later installed recording equipment throughout the building and captured approximately two dozen distinct voices that no member of the investigation team could account for. The recordings have circulated and been debated ever since, and have never been fully explained.

The accounts from the structure describe two figures. One is a soldier in period dress, seen near the lower level without warning, gone before the witness can fully process what they have seen. The other is a woman in 19th-century clothing, reported in the upper levels by multiple independent visitors who described the same details without knowing one another. The cemetery that holds some of the war dead adds its own register: lights moving among the markers, sounds without apparent source, the sensation on the path back from the grounds of not being quite alone. The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1966. Maryland has since restored it and opened it to the public — a museum, now, for history that has not agreed to stay quiet.

Story Source: Documentary titled “Haunted Lighthouses” (The Learning Channel, 1998)

Address: Point Lookout Light, Point Lookout State Park, Scotland, MD 20687

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