Phil was in the Navy, but we’d known each other since high school. He had been the sort of angry kid who never met a fight he wouldn’t back down from, which was why it was so shocking to see those eyes alive with fear after he told me, over a beer, about the time he had to do maintenance work in the Point Lookout Lighthouse.
But fear was there, along with a certainty I only questioned once.“You’re sure you saw something? Like, something supernatural” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow, and without speaking, reminded me he was a guy who wasn’t prone to superstition. He had seen, or more accurately, felt something. But then, he had been working in what has been called the country’s most haunted lighthouse, which sits by the mass grave of thousands of souls. I shouldn’t have been that surprised.
The Point Lookout Lighthouse is situated in Point Lookout State Park, a spit of land that sits at the tip of St. Mary’s County, itself a rural peninsula that claws at the crossroads of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. Although ‘the County,’ as locals call St Mary’s, is rapidly becoming an exurb of Washington D.C., 80 miles to the north, for centuries it has been a rural backwater, draped in oak and pine woods in her interior, fringed by estuarine marsh at her edges.
During the American Civil War, Maryland posed a dilemma for the Union; the state surrounded Washington DC, but many of her citizens owned slaves and sympathized with the Confederacy. St Mary’s County, at the state’s extreme southern tip, was a particularly troublesome enclave of Confederate support.
St Mary’s was also isolated, sparsely populated and easily defensible, which presented the Federal government with an elegant solution: to intimidate local Southern sympathizers, and house an increasing number of…
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