News of the week October 20, 2023
A tale of a haunted lighthouse: Seul Choix Point’s (MI) spirits
LANSING — The smell of cigar smoke lingers as visitors walk through the dark living quarters of Gulliver’s Seul Choix Point Lighthouse.
They’d think someone was there because of the smell. But no. Instead, it’s the smoking spirits that inhabit the 1895 lighthouse on the Upper Peninsula shore of Lake Michigan.
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St. Augustine Lighthouse (FL) ranks 5th in Trip Advisor ‘Worlds Most Haunted Hotspots’
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Trip Advisor ranks the St. Augustine Lighthouse as number five in its top 20 list of the “World’s Most Haunted Hotspots.”
The spooky history of the lighthouse comes from the 1800s when tragedy struck a family living there during its construction.
Hezekiah Pittee was the superintendent of the Lighthouse’s construction, living in St. Augustine with his wife and four children: Mary Adelaide, Eliza, Edward, Carrie.
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Halloween festival at Hook Lighthouse, Ireland
Halloween is just around the corner so make plans to discover the history and mystery of the 800-year-old Hook Lighthouse and celebrate a free traditional Samhain Festival from Sunday, October 29 and Monday, October 30, with vastly lantern-led tours on offer each evening.
On Sunday and Monday a free Feile Samhain celebration will be on offer at Hook Lighthouse from noon to 4pm each day.
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Cape Canaveral Lighthouse (FL) Foundation to Host ‘Christmas at the Lighthouse’ December 2
BREVARD COUNTY • CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – The Cape Canaveral Lighthouse Foundation will open the lighthouse to a very limited number of guests on December 2 for Christmas at the Lighthouse.
Guests will enjoy seeing the lighthouse decorated for the season and get a close-up look at the beacon.
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For NJ Lighthouse Challenge, Heroic Historic Tales Linger in Today’s Sights
The 2023 Lighthouse Challenge of New Jersey on Oct. 21 and 22 brings a busy weekend to Barnegat Lighthouse State Park in Barnegat Light, where it will be the first year the lighthouse can be climbed for the event since before the pandemic and before the lighthouse’s $1.3 million renovation.
The challenge is to visit 10 land-based lighthouses, three lifesaving stations, one museum and one virtual site over the two-day weekend. Three are right here in Southern Ocean County: Barnegat Lighthouse; the Barnegat Light Museum, two blocks away, which holds the antique prismatic Fresnel lens; and Tucker’s Island Lighthouse within the creekside Tuckerton Seaport re-created maritime village on the mainland in Tuckerton.
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Escape the roar of Daytona’s Main Street with Biketoberfest at the Lighthouse in Ponce Inlet, FL
Although Main Street, packed wall-to-wall with motorcycles and the people who love them, remains a must-see destination during Biketoberfest, sometimes you just need to get away from the crowds.
Happily, one of the Volusia County’s most treasured historic landmarks also is rolling out the red carpet for motorcycle fans during Biketoberfest, the annual four-day event that runs Thursday-Sunday in Daytona Beach and throughout Volusia and Flagler counties.
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Illuminating: an illustrated guide to some of the world’s most remote lighthouses
José Luis González Macías acknowledges that he was not the most obvious person to write a book about lighthouses. “I grew up a long way from the sea and had no personal connection with the world of seafaring,” he says. “My professional life has been more centred on books than coastlines.”
As a writer, designer, illustrator and publisher of books and graphic materials for museums and other cultural institutions, he had always dreamed of creating a personal project that would put equal emphasis on images and text, but the fascination with lighthouses came later. He had been commissioned to design an album cover and came up with the image of lighthouses floating on asteroids. As he was researching designs, gazing at picture after picture of lighthouses, he says, “a strange attraction unexpectedly took hold of me, and it was as if I found myself trapped in my own isolated lighthouse”. This combination of “curiosity, and a fascination with the unknown”, together with a childhood love of maps, resulted in the idea for the atlas.
Click here to read more and see the drawings
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You’d never guess the importance of this little Esopus Meadows (NY) Lighthouse
Historical lighthouses light up the Hudson River and share stories of their past. Whether it pertains to how they kept the light shining during the night or provided a place for travelers to stay during a storm, it’s fascinating to still see them standing.
A Hudson Valley lighthouse may be small but has a significant historical past.
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The Lighthouse of Alexandria: A Wonder of The Ancient World
Rocky coastlines and reefs are among the biggest dangers sailors come across while venturing into the seas. Lighthouses — tall towers that emit light — are used to ensure that ships can safely navigate into harbors or along coastlines. Despite popular belief, this is not a modern invention. Ancient ships were guided with the help of fires built on hilltops.
At some point, the fires were placed on top of platforms that would increasingly get taller and taller, forming the structures we call lighthouses. One of the oldest lighthouses in the world was the Pharos (Lighthouse) of Alexandria in Egypt. Standing over 110 meters (360 feet) tall, the Hellenistic tower was even added to the list of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
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U.S. Lighthouse Society News is produced by the U.S. Lighthouse Society to support lighthouse preservation, history, education and research.
If you have items of interest to the lighthouse community and its supporters, please email them to Jeremy D’Entremont at Jeremy@uslhs.org