Heceta Head Lighthouse

Florence, Oregon | C.1894

Photo Credit: Stu Ohler

Sometimes, those early morning check-outs are hard to stick to, and at the former keeper’s house of Heceta Head Lighthouse that now serves as a Bed & Breakfast, one guest just can’t seem to find the heart to leave.

The long-term, otherworldly resident of the Florence, Oregon lighthouse goes by the name “Rue”, which was given to her after a group of students huddled around a Ouija board that steadily spelled out R-U-E.

Though records were never kept of light keepers’ wives or children, rumor has it that Rue was the wife of a keeper who allegedly lost one of her two daughters in a tragic accident. Devastated, Rue left Heceta Head, but years later, her ghost returned to the keeper’s house in search of the daughter she lost. Typically she is known to out of the way, except for one occasion.

One day in 1975, a Lighthouse caretaker was fixing a window in the attic, when he noticed an odd reflection in the glass. Turning around he locked eyes with an elderly woman wearing a late-Victorian-style gown. Reasonably, Anderson fled and didn’t return for several days. When he finally worked up the courage to fix another broken window in the attic, he decided to repair it from the outside leaving the broken glass on the attic floor.

That night, the other caretakers were awoken by scraping across the attic floor that sounded like someone sweeping broken glass – they hadn’t known about the window repair. Lo-and-behold, the next morning, they discovered a neatly swept pile of glass.

Today, Rue continues to be a peaceful watcher of the house. Though she may have overstayed her welcome by a few decades, we’ve definitely heard of worse house guests.

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