Yaquina Bay Light

The white clapboard lighthouse at the mouth of Yaquina Bay is one of the oldest structures on the Oregon Coast, built in eighteen seventy-one and deactivated after only three years of service. The lighthouse was replaced by a newer station a few miles north, but the building itself was saved by local preservationists who fought demolition in the nineteen forties and fifties and eventually transferred to the Oregon State Parks system. What makes Yaquina Bay Light unusual is that the light was built directly into the keeper's dwelling, making it one of the few combined house-and-tower lighthouses on the Pacific coast. The building is now a museum inside the state park, and its ghost story, a nineteenth-century tale of a young woman who vanished from the lighthouse, has given it a particular hold on local imagination for well over a century.