Souter Lighthouse opened in 1871 near Whitburn, between Sunderland and South Shields, and was at the time the most technologically advanced lighthouse anywhere in the world, the first ever designed and built specifically to use alternating current electricity rather than the older lighting systems still standard elsewhere. It was decommissioned in 1988 after well over a century of continuous service and is now cared for by the National Trust, who run it as a visitor attraction complete with restored keepers' cottages that give visitors a genuine sense of the working lives once lived there.
Staff at the site describe a range of phenomena consistent with a long-serving haunted building of this kind: shadowy figures glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, unexplained sounds echoing through the empty tower, running footsteps and slamming doors with no one responsible, sudden drops in temperature, and the smell of tobacco smoke with no living smoker anywhere nearby to account for it. Objects, particularly tools kept in the engine room, are said to go missing from where they were left and reappear elsewhere in the building without explanation.
The site's two most commonly named ghosts are a former lighthouse keeper, sometimes identified simply as John, and a colliery worker known as Bob, said to have died at the lighthouse in the 1930s, whose presence is specifically associated with the recurring tobacco smell. The story has been featured on the television series Most Haunted, and the National Trust does not shy away from the lighthouse's reputation when marketing the site to visitors today, which is worth bearing in mind when weighing the more dramatic modern reports against the building's genuine and considerable technological history.
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