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This Ask Us column, on a topic of continuing interest, originally appeared April 19. Ask Us will resume Tuesday with new questions and answers.

Q: Lighthouse legend

I'd like to know the legend about the lighthouse in Rancho Palos Verdes. There's supposed to be some kind of a story about a lady who wields a knife or something like that.

- MIGUEL A. FIERRO

Torrance

You are referring to the Lady of the Light at the Point Vicente Lighthouse.

A Jan. 20, 2002, Daily Breeze story on the lighthouse included the following on the

phenomena:

A few years after World War II, people began seeing a lady in a flowing white gown haunting the lighthouse and the nearby cliffs in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Some said the apparition was the widow of a lighthouse keeper walking around the tower's catwalk. Others said she was the spirit of a woman who leaped off the 130-foot cliff when her lover did not return from a voyage at sea.

But the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates the Palos Verdes Peninsula landmark, has a more practical explanation.

After World War II, the landward portion of the 67-foot-tall lighthouse's lens room was given a coat of white paint to dim the powerful 1.1-million-candlepower light, which had been disturbing the sleep of nearby residents.

In 1955, a thicker paint was used to repaint the lens room windows, ending "the spirit's nightly romp around the tower," according to a ghost story information sheet prepared by the U.S. Coast Guard.

According to another Coast Guard publication, a young lighthouse employee tried to dispel the ghost stories with a scientific explanation.

A 1986 Daily Breeze story reported the employee "came to the conclusion that the ghost was created by an unusual reflection of the light as it rotated. The structure of the lighthouse lens was such that it threw an arc in the reversed parenthesis, causing the ghostly image to appear. The reflection, when seen from a distance of 80 to 200 yards, bore a remarkable resemblance to a lady in a long gown."

- Stephanie Walton

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