An iconic Outer Banks lighthouse is ‘bleeding,’ NC park says. What’s causing it?
The iconic North Carolina lighthouse built in 1870 to stand guard over the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” is dripping something akin to blood, according to Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
Long streaks of red began appearing not long after workers began a Cape Hatteras Lighthouse restoration project that is pulling at the 154-year-old tower’s bones.
It’s “spooky” yet coincidental that the “bleeding” was noticed just weeks before Halloween, the National Park Service wrote in an Oct. 2 Facebook post.
The renovation work is to blame, the park has learned.
“Here’s the spooky part,” the park wrote. “Vapor blasting the paint ... resulted in near complete removal of all surface coatings and no degradation of the brick face or mortar joints. But the red garnet used in vapor blasting resulted in ‘bleeding’ effects.”
The creepy red streaks will vanish early next year when the structure’s black and white spiral is repainted, officials said.
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is “the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States” at 198 feet and is visited by about 500,000 people annually, the park reports.
Its location on a barrier island exposes the brick structure to “salt air, high winds, and intense sunlight,” which speed up the deterioration process, experts say.
The tower’s light, which could be seen for 16 miles, was intended to keep ships from running aground on the shoals off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The region earned the name “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” due to the more than 2,000 vessels that sank off the Outer Banks, including some sunk by German U-boats during World War II.
Hauntings long linked to the barrier islands include a mysterious “gray man” that appears as “a misty apparition” during storms, and a “ghost cat” that roams Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, according to Outerbanks.org.
“The Ghost Cat will rub against visitors’ legs and allow you to pet him. Heed the warning, if you reach to pick him up he will magically vanish,” the site reports.
This story was originally published October 4, 2024 at 1:56 PM with the headline "An iconic Outer Banks lighthouse is ‘bleeding,’ NC park says. What’s causing it?."