Five Auctions, One Ghost: The Haunted Lighthouse Uncle Sam Keeps Putting on the Block

Every few years, the federal government puts a granite lighthouse in the middle of Long Island Sound up for auction, and every few years the bidding climbs a little higher. Penfield Reef Lighthouse sits on a submerged reef about a mile from the entrance to Black Rock Harbor, off Fairfield, Connecticut, and it has gone to auction five times since 2011, with the high bid rising from $45,000 to $370,000. It comes with a 51-foot tower, a two-story keeper's house, a front door you can only reach by boat, and, if you believe the men who kept the light, a former head keeper who never quite clocked out. At UX Auctions, where we cover government auctions across the country every day, no listing captures the spirit of Halloween quite like this one.

A light built on the rocks

Congress set aside $55,000 for the station in 1870 and 1871, and crews spent three seasons building it. A granite riprap foundation went down in 1871, an 18-foot cut-granite pier filled with concrete rose in 1872, and a mansard-roofed keeper's house followed in 1873, built from the same plans used for lighthouses on the Hudson River. The light was first lit on January 16, 1874, flashing red through a fourth-order Fresnel lens, and keepers lived on the reef for 97 years until the station was automated on September 4, 1971. Today the lighthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still serves as an active aid to navigation.

The keeper who stayed

Just before Christmas in 1916, Head Keeper Frederick A. Jordan set out in a rowboat for the Connecticut shore to see his family, whom storms had kept him from for weeks. The weather turned, his boat capsized, and Assistant Keeper Rudolph Iten watched from the station as Jordan drifted away holding onto the overturned rowboat. Jordan's body came ashore on Long Island the following March, and Iten was promoted to head keeper.

That is where the legend begins. According to the lighthouse's recorded history, Iten reported an unexplained chill in the station and "a hazy presence" drifting from the dead keeper's former room. He said the logbook was found taken from its shelf and lying open to the page that recorded Jordan's death. After ten years on the reef, Iten said he had seen the figure several times, and that two of his assistant keepers had seen it too and were prepared to swear to it in an affidavit. To this day, some Fairfield locals say that when the beacon behaves strangely, it is Fred Jordan still keeping watch.

Five auctions and counting

The modern chapter began in 2000, when Congress passed the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act, which lets the government offer surplus lighthouses first to preservation groups and public agencies and then sell them at public auction. Penfield Reef was first offered to qualified groups in 2007, and in 2011 it went to its first online auction, where three bidders pushed the price to $45,000. In 2016, freshly restored after a roughly $1 million project in 2014 and 2015, it drew five bidders and a high bid of $282,345 from America's Castles LLC, which planned to turn the station into a columbarium, a resting place for cremated remains, a plan with a Halloween twist all its own.

Interest kept growing. The 2021 auction opened at $100,000 and drew six bidders to $360,000, and the 2023 auction opened at $50,000 and drew ten bidders back up to $360,000. Each time, the lighthouse returned to the government and then to the auction block, and the General Services Administration sent it out again in the summer of 2025 with a $10,000 registration deposit, $10,000 bid increments and rolling closes that extended the sale each time a late bid arrived. "This is an extraordinary opportunity for historic preservation," said Glenn C. Rotondo, regional commissioner of GSA's Public Buildings Service. That auction ran from June 11 to September 4, 2025, and the high bid reached $370,000, the best price the reef has ever seen.

By August 2026, the lighthouse had a fresh set of plans. An application before Fairfield officials from the Penfield Reef Lighthouse Preservation Company and the property's purchasers sought permission for a floating dock and a small boat landing at the light, a welcome step for a station with no power, no water and no sewer, and a sign that the light on the reef may finally have its next keepers. For a station that has waited more than fifty years for a new family to tie up at its door, that is quite a homecoming.

Lighthouses, missile sites and more

Penfield Reef is part of a remarkable federal tradition. Since the lighthouse act passed in 2000, government lighthouse sales have raised more than $10 million, and the buyers have included families, preservation societies and dreamers who simply wanted a light of their own. The winning bidder takes on a few unusual duties, too, from keeping the light working for passing boats to arranging a submerged land lease with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, because the reef beneath the tower belongs to the state.

You can follow sales like this one without waiting for the next headline. A search for lighthouse on UX Search checks GSA Auctions, the federal real estate site and the other government auction platforms at once, and our military surplus page tracks the bunkers, missile sites and equipment the government sells every year. UX Search Analytics shows what government property actually sold for, our UX Auctions stories cover the finds worth knowing about, and the free workspace at UX Console lets you save your searches and follow every bid.

The keeper of Penfield Reef has been watching over Long Island Sound for more than a century, and the next great government auction story could be waiting just offshore. Find yours at uxsearch.app.