OREGON COAST – It’s a place as full of atmosphere and mystery as it is pristine.

Oregon’s coast, with its moody weather, craggy rock structures and empty beaches, practically begs for legends of the otherworldly. Indeed, talk of ghosts and such abound up and down the sleepy beach towns – but sometimes there’s more to the story.

Lighthouses are of course the big source you’d suspect, but there are some twists. The two lighthouses in Newport – Yaquina Bay and Yaquina Head – have longstanding legends of the paranormal. The house-like lighthouse over the bay was only used for a few years before it was decommissioned in the late 1800’s, and then sat derelict and dilapidated for decades. Somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, a legend of a teen girl haunting the beaches after supposedly being killed in the lighthouse took hold of locals, until in the 1980’s the tale was discovered to have come from a short story someone wrote in the 1910’s. It somehow became engrained in local culture, and was even written about in several books.

The gargantuan lighthouse at the tip of Yaquina Bay has had several ghostie legends, including that of a light keeper named Higgins who was said to be a bit ticked at a co-worker, after his irresponsible drunkenness indirectly caused Higgins to die.

Around 2001, the Bureau of Land Management – which runs the lighthouse – received a letter from a descendent of Higgins, saying yes he worked at the lighthouse but never died there. He moved to Portland and eventually passed away of natural causes in the 1930’s.

Scarier still, however, was the presence of a Hollywood film crew in the 70’s that left the lighthouse in such a shambles that they had to be sued to come and clean it up.

Heceta Head Lighthouse, near Florence, is the one on the coast with all sorts of corroborations about its ghost in the nearby keepers quarters – now a B&B. For decades, wispy smoke figures have been seen or strange noises at night heard, often said to be that of a woman who has actually become endeared to by those who’ve ran the B&B.

Up near Seaside and Cannon Beach, the Tillamook Rock lighthouse sits about a mile offshore, but hasn’t really collected any tales over its run, except warnings by local tribes to the builders of the structure that the rock was cursed. Yet in the 30’s, a ship called the Lupatia nearly hit the lighthouse in dense fog, but was warned away just in time. However, it did soon after slam into Tillamook Head, killing all aboard except the ship’s dog. There’s a local legend that on some foggy nights you can hear that dog howling on the tip of the headland.

Lincoln City has an abundance of ghost tales, including that of a ghost ship that supposedly appears now and again in Siletz Bay. This one has several eyewitnesses. Other local haunted landmarks include one of the fire stations, a couple of restaurants, and the upper floor of the Spouting Horn restaurant in Depoe Bay.

Ghost hunting groups seem to flock to the Nehalem Bay area to try and catch glimpses of the ectoplasmic at Old Wheeler Hotel and the Nehalem Bay Winery, where bundles of spooky things have been sighted. Another legend in Wheeler talks about a house that was burned down on purpose by the owner years ago because she claimed it was haunted by the tortured spirits of native children. She won’t allow the property to be built upon.

Astoria may as well be called “Ghostoria” with all the yarns of spooks from the myriad of ancient buildings there – a town that’s the oldest west of the Mississippi. The fire fighter museum, the Liberty Theater and numerous Victorian mansions have ghost talk associated with them.

If you’re looking for more paranormal places to explore, BeachConnection.net and its sister site, TravelParanormal.com, have tons of options on the coast and around the world.

Andre' Hagestedt is the editor of Oregon Coast Beach Connection, a travel news and entertainment Web site about the upper half of Oregon’s coast. He has been a journalist for nearly 15 years, having been employed at or written for a variety of media organizations throughout the Northwest. He lives in Portland and in Manzanita part time, and admits he is "so obsessed with the Oregon coast that it's ready to take a restraining order out on him."