Sheffield Island Lighthouse

Activated in 1868, the Sheffield Island Lighthouse served for 34 years before retirement in 1902. Named to the National Register of Historic Places, the lighthouse is maintained by the Norwalk Seaport Association and named one of the most haunted places in America by Conde Nast Traveler.

Sheffield Island Lighthouse stands as a sentinel in Norwalk Harbor, its Victorian stone walls holding secrets from nearly two centuries of maritime tragedy. Captain Robert Sheffield, a Revolutionary War veteran who escaped a British prison ship in 1778, purchased the island in 1804 for $6,000 and gave it his name. Sheffield was known throughout the region as an eccentric man with a peculiar passion for unusual musical instruments, including an oversized violin called a "long spell" that he played with porcupine quills instead of a traditional bow.

The island's first lighthouse keeper, Gershom Smith, was Sheffield's son-in-law who raised twelve children on the windswept island while tending the light for nearly twenty years until his death in 1845. During Smith's tenure, he witnessed one of Long Island Sound's worst maritime disasters. On the freezing night of January 13, 1840, the steamship Lexington caught fire while carrying 143 passengers and 150 bales of cotton toward Sheffield Island. The flames, ignited by an overheated smokestack, spread to the cotton cargo and consumed the wooden vessel. As the ship drifted helplessly toward the island, those watching from shore could do nothing as screams echoed across the water. Only four passengers survived by clinging to burning cotton bales; one survivor, second mate David Crowley, drifted for 43 hours before washing ashore nearly 50 miles away.

In July 1872, tragedy struck the lighthouse itself when Noah Mosher Sr., the sixty-four-year-old keeper, "fell dead from his chair while watching passing vessels with his spy glass." His sudden, unexplained death left his twenty-five-year-old son to assume keeper duties. The circumstances surrounding his collapse were never fully explained, adding to the island's growing reputation for mysterious occurrences.

The most significant paranormal encounter came in 1991, when archaeologist Karen Orawsky arrived to conduct preservation work on the historic site. As her boat approached the island, she heard what she described as "hypnotic and mystical" music emanating from the shore with no apparent source. She also heard a foghorn blaring across the water, despite there being no foghorn on Sheffield Island, followed by distant cries for help with no one in sight. Many believe the spectral music comes from Captain Sheffield himself, still playing his strange porcupine-quill violin across the centuries.

In 2006, Christine Kaczynski, founder of Connecticut Paranormal Research and Investigations, led a team of eighteen investigators to the lighthouse for an overnight investigation. Their equipment detected three distinct spirits inhabiting the island. The most poignant was a young girl named Abby, who appeared to be trapped on the island for unknown reasons. The investigators described all three entities as "friendly" but unable or unwilling to leave their island home. Whether Abby was a child of one of the lighthouse keeper families, or perhaps a victim of the Lexington disaster whose body washed ashore, remains unknown.

The Norwalk Seaport Association, which purchased the lighthouse for $700,000 in 1986, acknowledges that "many tales float on the tide and in the sea breeze about the ghosts and spirits that linger on the island." Maintenance workers over the years have reported hearing similar phenomena: unexplained music, phantom foghorns, and voices calling for help from the water. Conde Nast Traveler named Sheffield Island one of the 32 most haunted places in America, alongside the Mark Twain House in Hartford. Today, visitors can take ferry tours to the ten-room Victorian lighthouse from May through September, and the Seaport Association hosts special "Haunted Lighthouse" events for those brave enough to experience the island's supernatural legacy after dark.