Tillamook Rock Lighthouse

A decommissioned lighthouse perched on a basalt rock one mile offshore, nicknamed "Terrible Tilly" for the harsh conditions keepers endured. Built in 1881 and deactivated in 1957.

Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, known to generations of Oregon coast residents as Terrible Tilly, stands on a basalt formation 1.2 miles offshore from Tillamook Head, a desolate outcropping of rock surrounded by some of the most violent seas on the Pacific coast. In 1878, officials determined that ships needed better guidance around the treacherous headland, but no suitable land site existed, so they chose the remote rock itself, a decision that would prove deadly from the first day of construction.

The project's first casualty was John Trewavas, a master mason sent to survey the rock in 1879. A massive wave swept him from the surface and into the turbulent sea, and his body was never recovered. The death caused immediate public outcry about the viability of the location, but construction proceeded. Workers were transported to the rock by rigging a line between their ship and the top of the formation, using it to haul both tools and men across the churning water. The lighthouse was completed in 575 days of dangerous labor, but the tragedies were not over.

Just before the lighthouse began official operation in January 1881, the British merchant vessel Lupatia sailed near shore in thick fog and wrecked on Tillamook Head. Construction crews on the rock heard what they later described as the harrowing scream of "hard aport!" as the ship narrowly missed the lighthouse island itself before striking the headland. The next morning, the bodies of all sixteen crew members had washed ashore. A single puppy, the sole survivor, was found alive on the beach. For over 130 years following the wreck, locals in nearby Seaside reported hearing a dog howling in the darkness near the headland on stormy nights.

Native American tribes in the area had long considered the rock a cursed place inhabited by evil spirits living in tunnels carved into the formation. They never approached it willingly, and the disasters that befell those who built upon it seemed to confirm their warnings.

The lighthouse's four male keepers lived in an eighty-by-forty-five-foot building on the rock, forbidden from bringing families, women, or children to the station. They served in shifts, bunkered down with six months of supplies, enduring frequent storms and the constant blaring of foghorns. The extreme isolation took a psychological toll, and at least one keeper was driven to madness during his service. The keepers who maintained their sanity reported experiences that went beyond the effects of isolation. All four men on shift one night reported seeing a ghost ship emerge from the fog and pass near the rock before vanishing. Individual keepers described hearing whispering moans, like someone in pain, drifting through the lighthouse during storms. One keeper's ghost was said to be malicious, attacking his replacements; a new keeper claimed the spirit chased him up the stairs before he managed to push it back down.

Tillamook Rock Lighthouse operated for seventy-seven years before being decommissioned in 1957. In 1980, new owners converted it into Eternity at Sea Columbarium, storing the cremated remains of the deceased in the abandoned lighthouse. Approximately thirty urns were placed inside Terrible Tilly before the columbarium license was revoked in 1999 amid questions about the facility's maintenance and the condition of the remains stored within its crumbling walls. The urns reportedly remain inside the lighthouse. The rock is now primarily a seabird sanctuary, accessible only by helicopter, and Terrible Tilly continues to stand against the Pacific storms, still harboring whatever spirits have accumulated across nearly a century and a half of death, isolation, and madness.