The St. Augustine Lighthouse’s best-known ghost story began with a documented 1873 construction accident. The real lives behind the legend make the story far more haunting than a simple paranormal tale.
Before there was a ghost tour, there was a construction site
The lighthouse people visit in St. Augustine today was still being built when the tragedy happened. The older light station was threatened by shoreline erosion, so construction of a new 165-foot tower began in 1871. Hezekiah Pittee, the superintendent overseeing the project, brought his family to the site while workers raised the tower beside the water.
To children, a construction site can look less like danger than adventure. Supplies moved from the waterfront toward the tower on a small rail cart. The Pittee children and other children around the site turned the cart into a kind of improvised ride, rolling it down the track and bringing it back up to go again.
July 10, 1873
On that day, the usual game became a disaster. Mary Pittee, fifteen, Eliza Pittee, thirteen, four-year-old Carrie Pittee and a ten-year-old African American girl were riding the cart when the wooden stop meant to keep it from running into the water was not in place. The cart went over the end and overturned into the water, trapping the children beneath it.
A worker named Dan Sessions rushed in and lifted the cart. Carrie survived. Mary, Eliza and the other girl did not. The lighthouse museum’s research has preserved the Pittee family’s names and details, while the identity and final resting place of the African American child have remained harder to recover. That unevenness in the historical record is part of the story too.
A town mourned while the tower kept rising
The lighthouse did not stop being built. The project continued, and the new light was first illuminated in 1874. That creates a strange emotional split in the site’s history. The tower became a symbol of safety for ships at sea, but its construction had already produced a private catastrophe for the family responsible for overseeing the work.
The Pittee family eventually left Florida. Carrie, the child who survived, grew up and had a family of her own. Descendants later returned to the museum and helped reconnect the institution with family history. That detail pulls the story out of the realm of anonymous tragedy. These were not simply 'children who died at a haunted lighthouse.' They belonged to families whose lives continued after the accident.
Then came the footsteps, the children and the stories
Over the decades, unexplained experiences at the light station were increasingly associated with the girls. Keepers and later occupants reported footsteps or the sense that someone was upstairs when no one was there. Visitors told stories of seeing or hearing children. Paranormal tours eventually made those reports part of the public identity of the lighthouse.
The museum itself presents the stories as ghost stories and invites visitors to decide what they think. That is a useful distinction. The accident is documented history. A report of footsteps decades later is a reported experience. A claim that the footsteps are definitely Mary and Eliza Pittee is an interpretation.
Why naming the girls matters
Haunted tourism can accidentally erase people while pretending to remember them. A tragedy gets reduced to 'three girls drowned here,' then the dead become characters who exist only to scare tourists. The St. Augustine story deserves better because the surviving records allow us to recover more than that.
Mary and Eliza were Hezekiah and Mary Pittee’s daughters. Carrie was their younger sister and survived. A fourth child died with them, and the difficulty of recovering her name reflects the limits and inequalities of the nineteenth-century record. Dan Sessions, a Black worker, was the person who rushed into the water and lifted the cart. Those details make the event human again.
The haunting is strongest when the history stays intact
You do not have to decide that children’s spirits remain at the lighthouse to feel the weight of the story. The construction rail, the water, the unfinished tower and the family living beside the project are enough to make the 1873 accident vivid.
If visitors later hear laughter, footsteps or a voice on a dark tour, they will interpret those experiences in their own way. Haunted Backroads keeps one thing fixed: before the legend, there were real children on a summer day who thought they were playing.
Sources and trip planning
- St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum — Ghost Stories: The Pittee Girls ↗
- St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum — History ↗
- St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum — Pittee Descendants Visit ↗
Documented history, folklore, first-person paranormal reports and promotional claims are different categories. We keep them labeled separately and link practical visitor details back to current sources.
