St. Simons Island Lighthouse

St. Simons Island Lighthouse, first lit in 1810 and rebuilt after the Civil War, is best known for the ghost of its head keeper Frederick Osborne. In March 1880, Osborne and his assistant John Stevens, who shared the keeper's dwelling, argued over an alleged impropriety involving one of their wives, and Stevens shot Osborne dead on the lighthouse grounds and was later acquitted. Legend holds that in 1908 a lightkeeper's wife struggling alone with a faulty light mechanism called out to Osborne's spirit for help and watched an unseen presence fix the trouble, and visitors and keepers since have reported footsteps climbing the tower stairs when no one is there. The lighthouse is also tied to the island's best-known ghost story, Mary the Wanderer, said to be a young woman whose fisherman sweetheart Raymond drowned when his boat capsized in the Frederica River during the 1824 hurricane, and who is seen on stormy nights carrying a lantern along East Beach and the island's shore. Lighthouse Trolleys runs a nightly ghost tour that tells these stories, and the lighthouse museum is open daily.