The St. Augustine Lighthouse has stood on Anastasia Island since October 1874 — 165 feet of black-and-white spiral tower, its first-order Fresnel lens sweeping nineteen miles out to sea, the oldest surviving lighthouse in Florida. During the three years of its construction, the superintendent of the project, Hezekiah Pittee, lived on the island with his family. His children grew up on the building site, playing on the grounds while the tower rose around them.
Workers ran a railway cart down a track toward the water to move supplies from offshore vessels to the building site. The Pittee children and their companions had been riding it for sport. On July 10, 1873, four girls climbed in together: Mary Pittee, fifteen; her sister Eliza, thirteen; a companion; and their youngest sister Carrie, four years old. The stopping board that would have arrested the cart before it reached the water was not in place. The cart broke free. Three of the four girls did not come back. The lighthouse they never saw completed was lit the following October.
What the lighthouse kept, in the decades that followed, was not silence. Lighthouse keepers and visitors reported the sound of giggling from somewhere in the upper tower — not moaning, not weeping, but something lighter and harder to dismiss. In the early 2000s, the Atlantic Paranormal Society filmed a shadow figure leaning over the staircase railing in a section of the tower where no crew member was present. The reports had been accumulating for more than a century before the cameras arrived. The giggling, most accounts agree, sounds like girls at play.
Story Source: www.staugustinelighthouse.org
Address: 81 Lighthouse Ave, St. Augustine, FL 32080
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