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by Alexandra Mason (Author)
Long-time residents of Newport, Oregon report seeing a feeble light in the tower of the defunct lighthouse at Yaquina Bay. They ascribe this to the presence of the ghost of Muriel Trevenard, a teenaged girl who, in the years after its abandonment in 1874, went alone into the lighthouse to retrieve a dropped handkerchief and was never seen again. Lischen M. Miller gives body and form to the apocryphal tale of Muriel in the "Pacific Quarterly" in 1899. And now Alexandra Mason brings Muriel's tale into the present. We hear Muriel's thoughts of her (non)existence since her death, as she is trapped in the lighthouse and in an endless limbo. Young Amelia Allen and her father Hal visit Newport and see Muriel's light from their condo across the bay. When they visit the museum, Muriel takes a chance and materializes to them. Amelia senses that a personal mission is now hers, to help put Muriel to rest-and she discovers that Muriel is actually a distant ancestor. Romance blossoms between Hal and Letty, the lighthouse curator, as Amelia learns the ritual to transport the spirit of Muriel to a resting place in the Eureka Pioneer Cemetery, where she sleeps peacefully-or maybe not? Illustrated by Lila Pasarelli."THE LIGHTHOUSE GHOST is the Mother of all Ghost Stories, well-written with a can't-put-down plot." - M. C. Arvanitis, author of Hank of Twin Rivers Series."A fun and loving tale of a girl who wanted to find the proper burial place for Muriel, the ghost girl who lived in Yaquina Bay Lighthouse. Eureka Cemetery was just the spot, as its first known burial was John Jessup, 1879, the Assistant Lighthouse Keeper of Yaquina. Mason brings to life activity around the Newport area, piquing our curiosity and interest to keep us rapidly moving through this exciting story!" -- Paula Wenell, former Manager Assistant, current Board Member of Eureka Pioneer Cemetery of Newport, Oregon
Author Biography
Alexandra Mason has lived a life devoted to reading, writing, teaching, and publishing. As a Shakespeare scholar, she published one of the first essays to focus on the language of Ophelia (rather than of Hamlet); and she helped bring to critical light the first woman playwright in England, Elizabeth Cary. After a full academic career, Mason is author of five books, one of them scholarly (Econolingua), two of them volumes of poems (Poems along the Way and Lost and Found), one a novel (The Lighthouse Ghost of Yaquina Bay), and one a biographical sketch of her late husband, J.Carl Ellston of Exeter, Missouri. With the Tuesday Writers of Waldport, she has been working on both memoirs and a sci-fi fantasy novel. Her poems and essays are widely published in journals and anthologies, most recently in The Oregonian, Groundwaters, Oregon Stories, and Seeds of . . . She lives in the perfect spot overlooking the sea on the central Oregon coast.
