Description of Place: Built in 1909, the lighthouse itself is a unique, one-of-a-kind structure with a square dark blue brick quarters with white trim topped with a mansard roof, a French type of roof designed to make maximum use of the interior space of the attic and a circular lantern room referred to as an observatory because it faces the bay below. Large enough for a crew of five, the structure is connected midway through the base of the main lighthouse reaching three and a half stories to the light with an exterior stairway down the cliff on which it rests. The lighthouse was built in Colonial and French architectural style in order to blend in with the large and historic homes on the shores. The rocky shore is dotted with homes and businesses against a horizon of islands with a nearly clear view of the ocean. The nautically-themed interior is filled with seaside artifacts dating back to the 18th Century, thirty percent of which were recovered from sunken wrecks ranging from a 17th fishing trawler, a Civil War frigate and a lost excursion yacht from 1979.

Ghostly Manifestations: From the diary of Captain Sherman T. Winchester of the SS Endicott: "She sails on an unearthly breeze on still waters, her sails full and proud like the bounty of a beautiful woman. Not a soul or presence can be seen on her decks, and yet, a strong hand somewhere keeps her afloat. Her bow cleaves through the waters with barely an effort, and she leaves nary a trace of her presence. Where she glides, the sea is laid with the blanket of a million tears, and dark curtains cover the moon and stars. She's not a wraith nor a specter of the sea. Her decks are the home of drowned sailors and lost mariners, a guardian spirit of those lost at sea."

One might think the captain is describing the phantom ship known as the Flying Dutchman, a known portent of the sea for cursing jinxed ships, but her more pleasant rival is the New England schooner known as the Luck of the Irish. Since she went down in 1873 with all souls on board off Whitehead Island in the Bay of Fundy, she has been seen as a ghost ship drifting in the distance between Portland, Maine to the south and the seaside town of Piper's Bay in Nova Scotia to the north. There have been over twenty known sightings of her along the coast and almost forty unconfirmed sightings of her luminescent form in these New England waters. Most of the stories are the same, a distant white schooner drifting in the horizon, but her most popular story involves a local fisherman who after getting lost at sea swears he was rescued by the Luck of the Irish, only to learns a few days later she had sank forty years before. Most people who repeat the story usually replace the fisherman with a relative, but it is believed based on a real story that happened to a local physician in 1927. However, the best place to feel her presence is at her last known port near Crabapple Cove, Maine or specifically, the Crabapple Cove Historical Seaside Museum in the old lighthouse.

"The museum here holds several relics from the Luck of the Irish." Historian Jenny Pierce reveals. "We have her wheel, two brass lanterns, a pierce of timber and a few of Captain Finnegan's personal items donated by his heirs. We have possibly one of the largest personal maritime collections in the state with items from wrecks and ships from as far away as Seattle, and if you believe the legends, almost all of them have some sort of spirit or revenant attached."

As guides will attest to, objects move and change position constantly. Captain Finnegan's pocket watch has changed location in relation to his old log book several times despite being in a locked gas case. One might think the guides are repositioning objects, but the key to the case is locked in an upstairs desk, and the lid requires two people at opposite ends to open it. It is impossible to conceive that a practical joker could possibly get the key, open the case by themselves and return it without getting caught. The positioning is not always noticed nor is anything else ever disturbed, but the watch has moved from right to the left (where Finnegan as a left-handed person might have placed it as he was perusing his journal), placed opposite a Navy pistol from 1912 and even secreted under Finnegan's old captain's hat in the same case.

"We have somewhere between 500 to 600 objects here." Jenny continues. "And they are not touched, but they are dusted. The items have been collected from private owners and donated from family collections. There are over three hundred years of objects here with security sensors on every door and window, and yet after closing, when everything is closed and locked up and the sensors are turned on, something has been caught moving around in side here, and no one knows what it is."

Rumors are the presence is that of Captain James Finnegan, who is believed to walk the path between the lighthouse and the docks as he returns to the ruins of his ship up north in the bay where it sank. Others say the spirits are connected to the other relics, which includes the late Captain Walter Ferry, a retired ship's captain connected to the huge wooden globe on display. Another candidate is Lt. Frank Weatherby, a Naval captain and collector of Navy memorabilia who donated his beloved collection to the museum when he died in 1963. The voices of sailors in a card game echo from a table from a long-gone saloon known as the Sober Duck on the coast. Rusted guns recovered from sunken wrecks supposedly hold links to men killed by them. When the location is empty at night, they all reportedly get together and share stories and a few laughs.

"A few months ago," Jenny shares a story. "A volunteer guide called me to let me know that someone was locked inside the lighthouse and wandering around inside and up on top. We called the police, I met them there and we entered and searched the place up and down, but the whole time, you couldn't help but... feel this presence. You had this feeling you were being watched, but no one was there, and moments after they had searched the basement, there was this sound of men laughing. Like a shot, they charge down the stairs to grab whoever was down there, but no one was found, and they all came up looking shaken and unnerved to have not found anything.

Some of the stories of the ghostly light keepers have been passed down over several years. They come from the former Coast Guard crews who once manned the lighthouse, and they generally involve a former lovelorn keeper affectionately named Hank who allegedly jumped to his death after his wife abandoned him or who was violently pushed off the top of the lighthouse by a violent gale of wind. Maybe he's the presence that everyone thinks they hear and see or maybe he's just one of dozens linked to the relics and artifacts all over the place. For the brief time the place was a residence, tenants described all sorts of strange things happening at night, such as mysterious knocks on the bedroom doors in the middle of the night, doors opening and closing, the television being turned on and off repeatedly, and covers pulled off the end of their beds.

"I believe the lighthouse is haunted." Maritime historian Alan Farrell admits. "If you take into accounts all the stories of what people say they seen here, how can you deny it? You're talking about smart intelligent people, logical rational individuals who have nothing to gain from telling this stuff, and yet with the places locked up like a drum and security devices on every entrance, lights are turned on, objects are moved and the small of cigar smoke and cheap brandy come out of no where."

“You can lock the rooms at night." Jenny continues. "In fact, very religiously. I check all the rooms. They’re locked, the lights are off, the shades are down, and you come here at 8:00 in the morning and the light in the upstairs parlor might be on and then again it might not, but the shades may be up.”

Farrell adds: “I’m sitting in my office and something will take my attention. Either a window will rattle, the roses will hit against the window, some of the wind possibly, but something attracts me to the fact that I should be checking something. I will walk over to the parlor. Nine chances out of ten when I have this feeling and I open the door, more likely than not, the lights on the table are on. Most times, I will walk up the stairs and check the gun room. Very often, that too has the lights on and the window blinds open even though they have been closed and down. Because, the rule here is that after every tour, you pull the shades down, turn off the light and lock the door.”

Maggie Winchester, one of the volunteers, also began to believe that the building was haunted. She says: " I put down the blinds and turned off the light and locked the door and left. I came downstairs and left the building. There was nobody around. When I looked up, I saw the blind went up really slowly. It gave the impression that someone was holding it, you know, someone was doing it."

Jenny asked psychic Dawn Rochner to search the museum for ghosts. According to her, the lighthouse was full of restless spirits and she claims to have met several of them in the observatory at the top of the stairs. Two were playing cards, another stood by the window looking through the curtains, another was constantly running and checking the weather and another stayed in the top of the lighthouse, but, according to Dawn, one phantom seemed more aggressive than the rest:

“He looked at me and he said, “I want this chair closer to the east windows because I’m cold.” He also said his boot is too tight for him.” Alan said that information rang a bell: “What was interesting is my research showed that Navy Admiral Edward T. E. Blake, who had a destroyer blown up under him in World War Two, had frostbitten his left foot when he was pulled out of the North Atlantic while fighting the Germans in the Shetland Islands. Right around the ankle, above where the nerve endings were, there was a great deal of pain which he suffered much of his life. He would wear a boot that was a size smaller so that he could have more control of that foot, and he dragged it. His military keepsakes in addition to his old uniform were donated to us by his family after he died in 1976 and are still in storage in the basement. There is no way Dawn could have known that when she walked into the room. I had just started to uncover this research.” Dawn says that she continued to have visions upstairs, which seemed to explain some of the strange noises:

“I told Jenny, I said, ‘There’s a little boy here, and he’s throwing the ball up against the wall.’ She says, ‘Well, we’ve heard this thump, thump thump, and we couldn’t figure out what it is.’ And I said, “Well, that’s it. He’s throwing this ball up against the wall. If you want him to stop, just tell him to stop and he’ll stop.’”  

Among the relics in the museum are a few child's toys in a display case near the entrance. Recovered from a schooner that sank off North Carolina, they include a model boat, a small boy's 19th century sailor outfit, a weather-worn book, some iron jacks and a wooden ball. The ghost of a little girl has been claimed here as well. Her faint visage rushes through the displays giggling and laughing, but no one knows who she is. She was first described in a story attributed to the lighthouse in a 1983 book, "Ghost Ships and Haunted Lighthouses," and repeated by Mike Enslin in his book, "Ten Haunted Lighthouses," but most people agree this is likely a transplanted legend misplaced from the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse in Oregon.

Another vague apparition believed to haunt the location is a woman in white. Her first known appearance was when the Historical Society first moved into the structure in 1979, relics and boxes were already being stored and display cases were being delivered. As Jenny describes: "We were getting ready to turn the attic into storage space, and we hadn't even seen the attic yet. The door was lodged pretty tight up there, and as we pounded it open, we surprised the figure of a woman pressed against the wall. She could only have been there a few seconds before she vanished. I looked to Alan and then Max, our handyman, as if, "Did you see that?" and we stood there in the opening hesitant to go in a few minutes before deciding it was a trick of the light."

A few months later, Max was replacing all the old windows with weatherproof windows in the museum. By now, noises and strange sounds were routine and passed off as quirks of the building. As he was replacing the far east side window of the attic, he paused to clean the glass and the light through the window illuminated the figure of a young blonde girl in her twenties standing behind him. It rattled him pretty bad, but in the time it took for him to spin around, she had vanished. To anyone's knowledge, she hasn't been seen since, but Max now always brings his son when he's going to be working here.

At the end of the tour, Dawn said she “saw” the ghosts of Admiral Blake and three of his officers in a planning session in the observatory: “The Admiral was standing there at the table, and when we came in, he left what he was doing and went over and started poking in this box, and he turned to me and mentally projected that he wants his award. He wants the award. He’s trying to find an award. And I said, ‘What award?’ And he says, ‘I have an award, I want my award, and I want it on that wall.’”

Neither Alan nor Jenny had any information about the admiral having an award or a plaque, but Alan later had a realization: "I discovered later that when he left Washington, Admiral Blake did receive an award for his meritorious work in the Orkney Islands and possibly that could have been the plaque. However, his family has no idea where it is, and we can't find it”

History: Despite local lore placing the age of the lighthouse at over two hundred years old, the old lighthouse was built around 1860, and finally replaced by the modern lighthouse off-shore after a half-century of petitions requesting an up-to-date lighthouse from mariners and residents on the effectiveness of its location and the dangers to maritime traffic in the area. One part of the hesitancy to building the newer lighthouse was that the Sedgewick Bay Lighthouse was only twelve miles away, but the Lighthouse Board detailed the inherent dangers to maritime traffic through Blue Hill Bay to Congress in 1902 and 1903 and requested funds for constructing a lighthouse. The construction was completed in 1909 with the old lighthouse officially abandoned by 1940. The United States Coast Guard officially took over the care of the new Crabapple Cove Lighthouse in 1939, but it wasn't until 1958, twelve years after the rumors of the old location being haunted, that the former location was converted into a residence. In the 70s, it was briefly a restaurant. After three years of sitting empty, the location was used to house the local historical society.

Identity of Ghosts: The museum is filled with well over five hundred objects in virtually every nook and cranny, and Dawn believes about a quarter of them have spirits attached. She considers Admiral Ferry a very temperamental spirit while the rest of them quiet harmless and intrigued by their surroundings and company. She never experienced Hank or anyone connected to the lighthouse, but she adds that she was only able to experience a few at a time. Among them, she considers Captain James Finnegan and Admiral Tucker splitting the light house perimeters top and bottom with numerous ghosts wandering back and forth between the two halves.

What is unusual about Dawn's findings is that she identified and correctly described the spirit of Lt. Elliot Houlihan, the pilot of the HMS Latimer, whose clipper ship vanished off Greenland in 1899. A short slender man with light complexion, bold blue eyes and a soft beard of black hair, he and the Latimer had departed Whitby, England while delivering supplies to Nova Scotia but never arrived. Dawn said unidentified pieces from the ship were in the museum from where they had washed up in Newfoundland, but no one believed that the Latimer had made it that far. 

In 2008, the sunken remains of the Latimer was discovered in a shallow sea bed thirty-two miles off Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Source/Comments: M*A*S*H* (Episode: "Trick Or Treatment" ) - Loosely based on the Shipwreck Museum in White Fish Point  Michigan, Ledge Lighthouse in New Haven, Connecticut, Heceta Head Lighthouse in Florence, Oregon, Owl's Head Lighthouse in Portland, Maine, the Palpatine Light off Block Island Beach in Rhode Island, the Drum Barracks in Los Angeles, California and the legend of the Flying Dutchman on the Cape of Good Hope in Cape Town, South Africa.

Author Mike Enslin (John Cusack) from the movie, "1408" (2010)