Point Lookout Lighthouse: Maryland's Most Haunted Shore

Point Lookout is the last finger of land in St. Mary’s County, where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. It looks peaceful now: a state park of beaches, campsites and fishing piers, with a small white lighthouse at the very end of the road. But for two years of the Civil War this was the site of Camp Hoffman, the largest prison camp the Union ran, and somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 Confederate soldiers died here of disease, cold and hunger.

That history is why Point Lookout is so often called the most haunted place in Maryland, and its lighthouse the most haunted in America. Unusually, many of the stories come from people the state employed: park managers, rangers and the families who rented the lighthouse after it went dark. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has published them itself. Since May 2025 you can walk inside the restored lighthouse, now a small museum, and judge the place for yourself.

History of Point Lookout

Congress ordered a beacon for the point in the 1820s, and contractor John Donahoo built a modest keeper’s house with a lantern on its roof. The light was first lit on September 20, 1830. Its first keeper, James Davis, died within months of taking the job, and his daughter Ann Davis kept the light until 1847. A second story was added in 1883 so the house could hold two keepers and their families, and the lighthouse worked for more than 135 years.

The Civil War turned the quiet point into something very different. The federal government leased a resort here for Hammond General Hospital, which took its first Union patients on August 17, 1862. After Gettysburg, the government built a prison camp beside it, officially called Camp Hoffman and designed for 10,000 men. It was a tent city on 40 acres, guarded by three earthwork forts; one of them, Fort Lincoln, still stands in the park.

The camp filled far beyond its design. The Maryland DNR’s history gives 4,000 prisoners in September 1863, 9,000 by December and more than 20,000 by the following June. Most were enlisted men; most officers went to Fort Delaware. Prisoners drank from contaminated wells, froze in thin Sibley tents in winter and starved on short rations. By the time the last were released in late June 1865, 52,264 Confederates had passed through, and estimates of the dead run from about 3,000 to 8,000; some writers go higher. Some grave sites are now under water. Maryland raised a monument to the dead in 1876, and the federal government added another in the early 1900s.

The point has other tragedies too. A history in Bay Weekly lists the explosion of the steamer USS Tulip off the point in November 1862, which killed 57, and the wreck of the steamer Express in an 1878 hurricane, as well as the fire that burned the Fenwick Inn the same year.

The lighthouse was deactivated on January 11, 1966, after the Navy bought the surrounding land, and an automated light was placed offshore. Civilians, including park managers, rented the house until 1981. Maryland received the property in a 2006 land swap, the Point Lookout Lighthouse Preservation Society formed that year to restore it to its 1927 appearance, and after years of volunteer open days the Maryland Park Service opened it as a self-guided museum on May 15, 2025.

The ghosts of Point Lookout

Ann Davis on the stairs

The best-known ghost of the lighthouse is said to be Ann Davis, the first keeper’s daughter, who kept the light for years after his death. The Maryland DNR’s own account describes her standing at the top of the stairs in a white blouse and a long blue skirt. A friend visiting a later resident reported seeing a woman in a blue dress, and a female voice on one investigator’s recordings was said to speak of “my home”. (The DNR article calls her the keeper’s wife; the lighthouse history says she was his daughter.)

The residents' stories

Laura Berg, who lived in the lighthouse in the early 1980s with her husband, told the DNR and Bay Weekly about heavy boots in the empty hall, a bad smell in one room, a woman singing and men laughing, and two transparent figures in the basement. One night she woke to six strange lights in a circle and found a space heater on fire; she credited the lights with saving her life.

Gerry Sword, a former park manager who lived in the house in the 1970s, described candles that burned unevenly and relit, doors opening on their own, footsteps in empty rooms, snoring and voices, and his German Shepherd barking at something on an old Civil War road. Bay Weekly reports he once saw a young man’s face at a window during a storm and linked it to Joseph Heaney, a crewman lost when the Express broke up.

The running prisoner and the old woman

Ranger Donnie Hammett, working at the park in March 1977, told of a man he saw again and again running across the road and vanishing into the woods toward the site of the old smallpox hospital, leaving no footprints; he wondered if it was an escaping prisoner. The same ranger met an elderly woman searching the grass who asked about old gravestones, then vanished from an empty parking lot. He suspected she was a member of the Taylor family, whose graveyard has never been found.

Holzer's voices and the seance photograph

Around 1980 the Maryland Committee for Psychical Research, working with parapsychologist Hans Holzer and psychic Nancy Stallings, investigated the lighthouse. The team said it recorded 24 voices, one saying “Fire if they get too close to you”. A photograph taken during a late-1970s seance in the house is said to show a foggy figure of a soldier beside Laura Berg that no one saw in the room. Holzer told Bay Weekly the place was “as haunted as hell”.

Around the park

The stories are not confined to the lighthouse. Assistant park manager April Havens told Bay Weekly that on a midnight patrol she saw a row of white tents across the road where the camp once stood. Fishermen have reported calls for help from the water with no one there. In September 1999 a ranger’s living room turned bitterly cold in seconds on a hot day while his dogs barked at the dining room. Bob Crickenberger, a reenactor and self-described skeptic, told the Bay Journal he has never seen a ghost, but once smelled smoky canvas near the old prison pen with no tent or campfire nearby. Many people who have worked here say they have noticed nothing at all.

Where to look

• The lighthouse stairs: where Ann Davis is said to stand in her blue skirt.
• The lighthouse basement and upstairs rooms: the setting for most of the residents’ footsteps, voices and figures.
• The road toward the smallpox hospital site: where a ranger saw a running man vanish into the woods.
• Fort Lincoln: the earthwork fort that guarded the prison pen, and the best place to picture the camp.
• The Confederate monuments: raised by Maryland in 1876 and the federal government in the early 1900s for the dead of Camp Hoffman.
• The shoreline: where fishermen report calls for help from the water.

Visiting Point Lookout

Point Lookout State Park is open from 7 AM in summer (8 AM from October to April) until sunset, and is closed at night except for active night fishing. The lighthouse is open Thursday to Monday, 9 AM to 5 PM, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, with hours outside that season depending on staffing. Inside, exhibits cover the keepers’ family life with period furniture. Day-use fees apply, and day-use reservations are needed on summer weekends and holidays.

The Point Lookout Lighthouse Preservation Society has held seasonal ghost walks and paranormal nights in past years. Check its announcements before you go, as the park itself does not allow ghost hunting, and no one may stay after sunset unless they are camping or fishing. Respect the park’s rules: the camp ground is a burial place for many of the men who died here.

For a night investigating a historic building with our team, the nearest Haunted Rooms ghost hunt is at Linville Manor in Upper Marlboro, about an hour and a half north.

• Visiting State park open from morning to sunset; closed at night except for night fishing
• Tours Seasonal ghost walks and paranormal nights have been run here by the Point Lookout Lighthouse Preservation Society
• Hours and season Park 7 AM (8 AM Oct to Apr) to sunset; lighthouse Thu to Mon 9 AM to 5 PM, Memorial Day to Labor Day
• Tickets State park day-use fee
• Ghost hunting No public investigations; the park closes at sunset

Tips for your visit

• Time your visit for a Thursday to Monday in summer so the lighthouse is open.
• Walk out to Fort Lincoln and read the panels about Camp Hoffman before you go inside the lighthouse.
• Stop at the two monuments to the Camp Hoffman dead.
• Stay for sunset over the Potomac from the point, then leave before the gates close.
• Bring bug spray in summer; the point is low and marshy.

More haunted places nearby

• Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House Museum: where John Wilkes Booth had his leg set in 1865, about an hour north
• Linville Manor ghost hunt: our overnight ghost hunts in Upper Marlboro
• Haunted places in Annapolis: the State House dome and the city’s colonial inns
• Haunted hotels in Maryland: where to stay overnight with a ghost story
• Haunted places in Maryland

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Maryland DNR: Spirits of Point Lookout
• Maryland DNR: Point Lookout State Park
• Wikipedia: Point Lookout Light
• Bay Journal: Point Lookout, a gateway to the Bay's Civil War history, perhaps the great beyond
• Bay Weekly: Legends of Point Lookout
• Visit the Potomac: Ghost stories of the Potomac River region
• WMAR-2 News: 13 haunted places in Maryland