Climbing the St. Augustine Lighthouse: 219 Steps, a 150-Year-Old Lens, and the Ghost Story Locals Actually Believe

I counted the steps on the way up, because that's the kind of thing you do when your legs start asking questions around the halfway mark. Two hundred and nineteen. The St. Augustine Lighthouse is a cast-iron spiral that screws straight up the inside of a 165-foot brick tube, and somewhere around step 140 the staircase narrows, the air gets close and warm, and you start to understand why the people who used to do this for a living got an entire house thrown in as part of the deal.

Then you push through a small door at the top, step out onto the gallery deck, and the whole reason for the climb arranges itself below you: the Matanzas Inlet pouring into the Atlantic, the red-tiled rooftops of the old city across the water, Anastasia Island's white beach running south, and the curve of the coast doing exactly what a coast is supposed to do when you finally get high enough to see it. It's the best view in St. Augustine, and you have to earn it on foot.

Here's everything I learned going up — and why this candy-striped tower is a far stranger, sadder, and more interesting place than the gift-shop postcards let on.

The tower that replaced a tower that fell into the sea

The black-and-white spiral you see today is not the first light to stand on this island. It's not even close.

The Spanish were watching this inlet for pirates and rival flags as far back as the late 1500s — there's a documented wooden watchtower on the north end of Anastasia Island going back to around 1589, built while the Spanish were also raising the great coquina fort across the bay. (That fort is still there, and worth its own afternoon — see our guide to the Castillo de San Marcos.) In 1737 the Spanish swapped the wooden tower for a sturdier coquina-and-wood structure about 30 feet tall. The Americans took it over, added a fourth-order Fresnel lens in 1855, and watched the Atlantic slowly eat the ground out from under it. By the 1870s the old tower was doomed, and around 1880 it finally toppled into the sea.

So they built a new one, set safely back from the water, and they built it to last. Construction ran from 1871 to 1874, cost roughly $100,000 — real money then — and used about 1.25 million bricks. When it was lit for the first time on October 15, 1874, by keeper William Russell, it stood 165 feet tall, one of the tallest lights on the Atlantic coast. It remains the oldest surviving brick structure in St. Augustine, which in a city this old is a genuinely odd sentence to write.

Two details are worth knowing before you go up:

The stripes mean something. That bold black-and-white spiral isn't decoration — it's a daymark, a paint pattern that let ships identify which lighthouse they were looking at in daylight before any of them had a name they could read from the water. The same spiral logic dresses the more famous tower at Cape Hatteras. The red lantern room on top is part of the signature.

The lens is the real artifact. Up in that lantern room sits a first-order Fresnel lens — nine feet tall, hand-ground in Paris by the firm Sautter & Lemonnier, shipped across an ocean, and hauled up an island. It's the largest class of lighthouse lens ever made, a beehive of cut glass that can throw a beam more than 19 nautical miles out to sea. Most lights this old lost their original lenses long ago. St. Augustine still has its 1874 glass, still lit, still doing the one job it was built for. When you reach the top, that's the thing to look at — not just the view.

A house, six daughters, and a porch full of lemonade

Tending this light was a family job, and the duplex keepers' house at the base of the tower is now the museum — the part most climbers blow past on their way to the stairs, which is a mistake.

The keeper who defined the place was William A. Harn, who ran the light for about 20 years. Harn wasn't a small man in history: he was a Union artillery officer who commanded a battery at Gettysburg before the Coast Guard's predecessor service sent him to mind a beacon in a Reconstruction-era Southern town. He moved in with his wife, Kate, and the family grew to six daughters. Locals remembered the Harn girls handing out lemonade on the porch — a small, human detail that survives precisely because it was so ordinary.

The keepers wound their clockwork, hauled oil up those same 219 steps, and kept the flame from going dark for decades, until the Coast Guard automated the light in 1955 and the human era ended. The house sat, the paint peeled, and by 1980 the whole site was close enough to demolition that the local Junior Service League stepped in to save it. The keepers' house restoration finished in 1990, the full-time museum opened in 1994, and in 2002 the Coast Guard handed the tower and its lens to the nonprofit that runs it today. Inside, the rooms are dressed the way the Harns would have known them, and the back wall of the maritime gallery is where the island's darker story lives.

The girls under the construction cart

If you take one of the museum's after-dark tours — they're branded "Dark of the Moon," and they're the only tours that put you inside the tower at night — this is the story you came for.

During construction, in 1873, the work crew used a small rail cart to haul building materials up from the supply dock by the water. On July 10, the superintendent's daughters and another local girl climbed aboard the cart for a ride. A safety board that was supposed to stop the cart at the water's edge wasn't in place. The cart ran off the end of the track and flipped into the bay, trapping the children underneath. A young Black worker named Dan Sessions heard it and got to the water fast enough to lift the cart, but by then three of the four girls had drowned. Only the youngest survived.

That's the real event under the ghost stories. Night-tour guests and staff report children's laughter echoing up the tower shaft, a small figure in Victorian dress turning up in photographs, an empty playground swing moving against still air. The lighthouse got a wave of national fame when the Ghost Hunters TV crew investigated it in 2006 and caught footage that sent the internet into a spiral of its own. You don't have to buy any of it. But standing in the keepers' house knowing what happened to those girls, and then climbing the tower their father helped build, lands differently than a standard tourist photo op. The history is true whether or not the hauntings are.

What's underneath the water

The full name is the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum, and the "maritime" half is genuinely good — better than it has any right to be for a small-city attraction.

The museum runs its own archaeology outfit, the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, or LAMP, founded in 1999. These are working underwater archaeologists who dive the wrecks scattered across the inlet and the offshore sand bars — and St. Augustine, as the oldest continuously occupied European city in the country, has a lot of wrecks. The oldest they've positively identified is the Industry, a British supply sloop lost in 1764 while trying to cross the sand bar with cargo for the new British garrison: cast-iron cannon, an iron swivel gun, crates of shot, anchors, millstones, and a toolkit's worth of axes and blades. Pulled up, conserved, and displayed in the keepers' house, those artifacts are a direct line back to the messy frontier moment when Florida changed hands.

The water tells a 20th-century story too. In 1942, German U-boats hunted freighters right off this beach; the tanker Gulf America was torpedoed within sight of shore, and the Coast Guard used the lighthouse as a lookout post through the war. The tower has been on watch for a lot longer than the tourists have. If maritime history is your thing, you'll find more of it up the coast — the working St. Johns River mouth in our Mayport ferry and shrimping village guide, and the port town that hides behind a beach in Amelia Island.

How to actually visit (and what I'd skip)

The lighthouse sits on Anastasia Island, a quick drive over the Bridge of Lions from the old town. Here's the practical layer for a 2026 visit:

Detail	What to know
Adult admission	$12.95 (tower + museum + grounds)
Senior (60+) / child (12 & under)	$10.95
Climb requirement	Must be at least 44" tall; under-44" kids free, no climb
Steps	219, no elevator, rest landings along the way
Free guided tours	On the hour, roughly 11 a.m.–3 p.m., included with admission
Parking	Free on-site lot, but small — fills fast midday
Time needed	Plan 2–3 hours to do it properly

A few honest notes. Go early. The tower is a brick chimney, and a St. Augustine summer afternoon turns the climb into a sweat-soaked slog — morning is cooler, the light is better for photos, and the small free lot still has spaces. Don't skip the keepers' house the way most climbers do; the shipwreck gallery and the Pittee story are half of what makes this place worth the ticket, not a warm-up act for the stairs. And pair it with the beach. Anastasia State Park is right around the corner with four miles of white quartz sand and the Matanzas Inlet — the same water you'll be staring at from the gallery deck. Lighthouse in the cool of the morning, beach for the afternoon, old town for dinner is close to a perfect St. Augustine day.

The one thing I'd be choosy about: the after-dark ghost tours cost more and book out, so only commit if the paranormal angle is genuinely your draw. The daytime climb already gives you the view, the lens, and the history. For more of the city's deep past, the free Black militia town just north of here is its own remarkable story in our Fort Mose guide, and if you're working your way down the coast, the hard-packed sand of Daytona Beach is an easy next stop south on A1A.

Two hundred and nineteen steps is not a lot. But few climbs this short give you this much on the way down.