Race Rock Lighthouse

There is a point in the eastern reaches of Long Island Sound where three bodies of water — the Sound itself, Block Island Sound, and Fishers Island Sound — converge in a narrow channel four miles wide and choked with opposing tidal forces. Mariners have called it The Race for centuries, a name that captures the speed and turbulence of currents that can push six knots and reverse direction entirely with the tide. At the center of this convergence sits Race Rock, a submerged ledge rising only three feet above mean low water, decorated with shipwreck after shipwreck and surrounded by water that behaves like a living thing with bad intentions. The lighthouse that stands on that reef — granite, square at the base, octagonal at the top, its fourth-order Fresnel beam visible fourteen miles at sea — is one of the most consequential feats of American marine engineering, and one of the most persistently reported haunted sites along the Eastern Seaboard.

By 1837, eight vessels had been lost on Race Rock Reef in eight years. Congress appropriated funds for a lighthouse as early as 1838, but the money was never spent, the engineering problem seemingly unsolvable. Buoys couldn't hold in the current. Iron spindles driven eighteen inches into the reef disappeared with the spring ice. The Lighthouse Board reported in 1852 that every conventional approach had been tried and failed. The danger was well-documented; the solution was not. It would take another two decades and a total of $278,716 — and nearly eight years of continuous effort — before the light was finally activated on January 1, 1879.

The man who solved it was Francis Hopkinson Smith, a structural engineer contracted in 1871 who was also, improbably, a painter and novelist — a descendant of Francis Hopkinson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and later famous for fiction drawn from his own experiences on this reef. Smith had previously built the Block Island breakwater and a seawall on Staten Island; he would later build the foundation for the Statue of Liberty. Race Rock would be his most demanding project. He and his crew — led by master diver Captain Thomas A. Scott — lived on the construction site during working months, erecting a shanty on the partial foundation while the water moved around them. When the initial riprap foundation of 10,000 tons of granite began to shift, Smith donned diving gear himself and went down to examine it. He came up certain the design had to change. The Lighthouse Board resisted; he convinced them. The concrete foundation — a stepped, concentric platform sixty-nine feet in diameter — was poured beginning in 1873. The pier rose from it in fourteen courses of heavy masonry, and the lighthouse itself went up in a single working season in 1878.

The construction was not without its casualties. A boat carrying two hundred pounds of gunpowder exploded at the site, killing workers. The isolated conditions, the violence of the water, and the years of unrelenting labor extracted their price in lives and in men's minds. Smith later transformed those experiences into the novel Caleb West, Master Diver, thinly disguising Race Rock as its setting. The story had already written itself.

Thomas A. Carroll was appointed keeper in 1880. He rowed regularly from Race Rock to Noank for supplies and to visit his family on shore. In January 1885, a severe storm caught him on the mainland and kept him there for several days. When he finally decided he could no longer neglect his post, he pushed his small boat out into the waves alone. He was never seen again. His body was never recovered. Coast Guard crews who later worked maintenance shifts at the lighthouse reported hearing whispers, laughter, and unexplained footsteps moving through the structure. Some reported physical contact — being touched, poked, or pushed — by no visible source. Wet footprints were found leading from the former shower area after the water supply had been disconnected and the fixture removed. Boaters passing at night have reported a shadowy figure visible in the lantern tower when no one is assigned there, illuminated briefly by the rotating beam. Whether the figure belongs to Carroll or to one of the earlier dead — workers from the construction, sailors from the reef's long list of wrecks — has never been resolved.

The lighthouse was automated in 1978, ending any permanent human presence on the rock. In 2004, reportedly at the request of Coast Guard maintenance personnel who continued to report unsettling experiences during equipment checks, The Atlantic Paranormal Society conducted a formal overnight investigation, documented in the fourth episode of the first season of Ghost Hunters on Syfy. The investigation was conducted without electricity or facilities, in harsh weather and rough water. The team reported a chair moving across a room without assistance and an electromagnetic field that tracked consistently up and down the spiral staircase. At the conclusion of the twelve-hour session, investigators stated that Race Rock appeared to be genuinely haunted — an outcome the Coast Guard had hoped to disprove.

Skeptics point to the obvious: Race Rock is exactly the kind of place where the imagination does what it is built to do. Isolated, unlit, accessible only by boat and only in favorable conditions, surrounded by the sound of water that has killed for centuries, the lighthouse sits in the kind of environment that produces reports almost automatically. The spiral staircase creates drafts; the granite structure amplifies sound; the current generates low-frequency vibration detectable in the bones but not in conscious hearing. All of that is probably true. It doesn't account for the consistency of the reports across unrelated witnesses over more than eighty years, or for the specificity of a keeper last seen rowing into a January storm, still attributed by those who work the light as not entirely gone.

Race Rock Lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 and transferred to the New London Maritime Society in 2013 under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act. The light remains operational, maintained by the Society and the Coast Guard jointly. Tours are offered occasionally in summer through New London's Custom House Maritime Museum, weather and tidal conditions permitting — the latter qualifier a reminder that the water around Race Rock still sets the terms of everything that happens there.