THE GHOST CHILDREN OF ST. AUGUSTINE: Are Their Spirits Still Climbing the Lighthouse?
By Staff Reports
🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — Some ghost stories are invented. This one starts with a date in the record books: July 10, 1873.
The St. Augustine Lighthouse was still being built — 42 feet of what would become a 165-foot tower. Construction superintendent Hezekiah Pittee had moved his family down from Maine to run the job, and his children had found the best toy on the site: the railway cart that hauled supplies up from the docks at Salt Run. The kids rode it down the track toward the water like a roller coaster. A wooden board at the end of the track was all that kept the cart out of the water.
On July 10, 1873, the board wasn’t there.
Four girls were in the cart when it rolled into Salt Run and flipped on top of them: Mary Pittee, 15; Eliza Pittee, 13; their little sister Carrie, 4; and a 10-year-old African-American girl whose name the records never kept. A young worker, Dan Sessions, ran to the water and lifted the cart off them with his own strength. Three of the four girls had already drowned. Only Carrie survived.
That is not legend. That is the museum’s own account, from its own research. The lighthouse had already known death — keeper Joseph Andreu fell 60 feet to his death painting the old tower in 1859.
The legend grew from the grief. For 145 years, staff and visitors have reported children’s laughter when no children are there, small footsteps on the tower stairs, and figures near the top of the light. The St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum tells the Pittee girls’ story itself — and runs the “Dark of the Moon” ghost tours where visitors go looking.
Join the conversation: Have you ever climbed those 219 steps and felt something you couldn’t explain? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.
Sources: St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum (“Ghost Stories: The Pittee Girls”); St. Augustine Record; Florida Trust for Historic Preservation.
Photo: Jonathan Zander (Digon3), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).