The Cat in the Crawl Space: Fairport Harbor Lighthouse

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 13, 2026 · How we verify

A mummified cat found in a crawl space is the strangest artifact connected to the Fairport Harbor Lighthouse, and it is the reason a sandstone tower on a bluff above Lake Erie in northeast Ohio has a ghost story about an animal rather than a drowned sailor. The tower itself has a long, well documented life: two lighthouses on the same ground, a demolition order that was beaten by letter writing, and a second career as one of the oldest maritime museums on the Great Lakes.

Quick Orientation to the Grand River Light

• Also known as: the Grand River Light
• Where: the intersection of Second and High Streets, Fairport Harbor, Lake County, roughly halfway between Cleveland and Ashtabula
• The tower: 60 feet of sandstone with a detached keeper’s house, first lit on August 11, 1871
• Its predecessor: a 56 foot whitewashed brick tower completed in the 1820s on the same site
• Deactivated: 1925, when the Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Light took over
• Now: the Fairport Harbor Marine Museum, 129 Second Street, open seasonally
• Listed on the National Register of Historic Places: November 5, 1971
• The ghost story: a cat

Why the Mouth of the Grand River Needed a Light

The land that became Fairport Harbor was deeded to settlers by the Connecticut Land Company in 1798, and the harbour’s problem was obvious to anyone who tried to use it. When the steamship Walk-in-the-Water called in during the summer of 1818, it had to put ten passengers ashore using a tender because the harbour was unimproved. Regular cargo and passenger runs by the steamship Superior followed in 1823, and in October 1825 the steamship Pioneer ran aground in the harbour, which sharpened the argument residents had already been making to Washington.

U.S. Representative Elisha Whittlesey took the case to Congress. Appropriation bills in 1824 and 1825 produced $8,000 for a lighthouse and $1,000 for a pier at the mouth of the Grand River. On March 26, 1825, the customs collector in Cleveland advertised for proposals to build “a Light-House and Dwelling House, at the mouth of the Grand River,” and the contract went to local builder Johnathan Goldsmith with a deadline of on or before October 10, 1826. The finished tower stood 56 feet tall in whitewashed brick, and the total bill for tower and keeper’s house came to $5,032.41.

It did not age well. Within ten years the tower had settled enough to require foundation repairs. Goldsmith, meanwhile, applied to become keeper of the lighthouse he had built and was turned down: letters from Representative Joshua Reed Giddings in 1841 attribute the refusal to the congressman’s opposition to patronage appointments. The man recorded as the first keeper of the Fairport Harbor Light, Samuel Butler, later turns up in a very different setting, as one of the 2,300 delegates at the Chicago River and Harbor Convention of 1847, convened after President James K. Polk vetoed federal spending on harbour improvements.

The 1871 Replacement, Built on a Better Foundation

By 1868, inspectors from the United States Lighthouse Board judged both the tower and the keeper’s house to be in poor condition and recommended replacement. Congress appropriated $30,000 on March 3, 1869. Temporary patching kept the old light usable through the winter while a temporary tower was raised and lit on December 10, and construction of the new lighthouse began on April 4, 1870, starting with a foundation designed specifically to avoid the settling that had plagued the first tower. Two thirds of the stonework was up by September 5, 1870. The new light was lit for the first time on August 11, 1871, and the keeper’s house was finished on October 20.

In service, the beacon showed a fixed white light with a focal height of 102 feet above the lake, focused by a third-order Fresnel lens and visible up to 18 miles out. That lens now sits in the museum next door.

The Letters That Stopped the Wrecking Crew

The case for a light out on the pier rather than up on the bluff had been made as early as 1838, but funding was not allocated until 1917 and America’s entry into the First World War delayed it further. The cast iron structure of what became the Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Light was prefabricated in Buffalo and delivered to Fairport by the steambarge Wotan on June 21, 1921. Once a lantern had been craned into place, the breakwater light was lit on June 5, 1925, and the old bluff-top light was switched off.

The same appropriation that paid for the new light set aside $1,600 to knock the old tower down. Fairport residents refused. Regional chapters of Civitan International, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Kiwanis and other groups wrote to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, and both of Ohio’s U.S. senators, Simeon D. Fess and Frank B. Willis, weighed in. The government backed off, and the tower survived, though it then stood largely abandoned for about twenty years.

Getting it into local hands took longer than the folk version suggests. Congress authorised disposal in 1935, but only if the village handed the government a parcel of land and built a brick dwelling on it for the Lighthouse Service, terms Fairport could not afford. In July 1941 the Coast Guard leased the lighthouse to the village for five years, renewing in July 1946. The Fairport Marine Museum was founded by the Fairport Historical Society in 1945 and formally dedicated on July 2, 1946, during the village’s 150th anniversary. Outright ownership passed from the federal government to the village in 1953, and the village leased the site back to the Historical Society.

Mary Babcock and the Cat in the Crawl Space

The lighthouse and museum are alleged to be haunted by a ghost cat, a claim unusual enough that the site turned up on an episode of My Ghost Story on The Biography Channel in 2011.

The story as it is told locally centres on Mary Babcock, described in lighthouse lore as a keeper’s wife who spent her final years in the keeper’s house and took comfort in the company of her gray cats. After her death the cats were said to have disappeared. Years later, during renovation work, a mummified cat was reportedly discovered in a crawl space, and the two halves of that account have been joined ever since. It should be read as tradition rather than record: the connection between the preserved animal and Mary’s pets is an inference made after the fact, not something anyone documented at the time.

What Visitors Say Happens

• The sensation of a cat brushing against the legs when no animal is present
• A small shadow darting across the kitchen
• The distinct feeling of a cat jumping onto a bed in the keeper’s quarters

These are visitor and staff accounts collected over decades, and they are consistently small scale and domestic rather than frightening. None of them demonstrates that the building is haunted. What they do reflect is how firmly the household story of one keeper’s wife has attached itself to the place.

Visiting the Fairport Harbor Marine Museum

The museum occupies the keeper’s house at 129 Second Street and is open seasonally, so check hours before travelling. Exhibits cover the history of the lighthouse and its keepers, the Fresnel lens taken out of the tower, lifesaving equipment, life on the Great Lakes, ship models and maritime artefacts. The pilothouse from the Great Lakes carrier Frontenac is attached to the museum building, which is not something most lighthouse stops can offer.

The tower balcony is part of the appeal. When the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 crossed Lake Erie, Fairport Harbor Light sat within and near the centre of the path of totality and went dark for 3 minutes and 52 seconds; the community held its viewing party here, with some watching from the tower balcony. Come for the harbour history and the view down the lake, and treat the cat as a bonus you probably will not collect.

See Fairport Harbor Lighthouse for Yourself

Sources

• Ohio SP Fairport Marine Museum (Archives (official))
• Solar Eclipse of 2024 April 08, Delta T: 72.8s, Sun in Total Eclipse at this Location 41.757° N, 81.2773° W, Height 184m
• Fairport Harbor Historical Society offering chance to watch solar eclipse from lighthouse tower
• Fairport Harbor Lighthouse: The Freedom Light
• The Lights and Lost Lights of Fairport Harbor
• Wikipedia: Fairport Harbor Light

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