Hello lighthouse ghost(s). Who "were" you?

Never expected to be spending my day bidding on ebay for a DVD of a some ghost hunters doing a paranormal investigation of the Whitefish Point lighthouse.

After all, I headed up to the point jutting into Lake Superior this past weekend just to watch the banding of some tiny owls--haunting in their own way, to be sure, but certainly nothing in need of paranormal intervention. But the birders share the point with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, which has handily turned some remodeled Coast Guard crew quarters into a B&B--just a few short steps from the banding station but right off the coast often called the "graveyard of the Great Lakes."

So I checked in, with a friend, in thick fog, to the backdrop of lightning and approaching thunder, to the cozy house we'd share with a few other birding couples and, apparently, a few people we never officially got to meet.

A true ghost story?

Now I want to know who it was that was stroking my face in the night (thought it was my imagination until the woman downstairs says someone was stroking her side). Was it the same person who popped open my locked door at 6 a.m. (and the door of the couple downstairs - at 6 a.m. both Friday and Saturday mornings)? And just who it was another guest saw, like a faded old photograph, standing in his room in an old uniform?

I did watch a DVD picked up in the birding gift shop about hauntings at the lighthouse, hauntings that at one point were apparently so bad, driving so many staffers away, that an exorcist was called in. Was "my" ghost the little girl that one employee says sat on a bunk bed with her once, leaving an indentation in the mattress, and patted her arm? Maybe.....

What I do kind of know for sure is the spirits--if they actually do exist--had a sweetness about them. And that I'm compelled to learn more.