The lighthouse in the fairway

Come for the candy stripe if you want. If you want a lighthouse, go to Palmetto Dunes in daylight and stay off the greens.

Take the Sea Pines gate, park by the basin, and look up. That red-and-white tower is why you came, and it’s okay that it is. Harbour Town Lighthouse, 149 Lighthouse Road Directions. Fraser put it there in 1969 and 1970 so the marina would have a landmark: a privately built facsimile with a lantern on top, not a historic U.S. Light House Board station. Climb it if you want the view. The museum desk takes $8 a person, children five and under free, from 10 a.m. until sundown every day. Getting that far still costs a Sea Pines gate pass, $10 a day as of March 1, 2026. That pass is not a Beach Club pass, and on ordinary days daily visitors may not ride in on a bicycle. Gate plus climb is what the postcard actually costs. During Heritage week, a Sea Pines gate pass is not a tournament ticket.

The island’s actual lighthouse is a quieter walk in Palmetto Dunes. Hilton Head Rear Range Light, called Leamington, stands at 53 Leamington Lane Directions on the Arthur Hills course, between the 5th and 15th greens. A cast-iron skeleton, built in 1879 and 1880 to range ships into Port Royal Sound. Deactivated in 1932. Listed on the National Register on December 12, 1985. The front-range light is gone. This rear tower is what remains.

You cannot climb it. The tower is closed. The grounds are open. Check in at Palmetto Dunes’ South Gate and ask for a guest pass. Not after 5 p.m. Not onto an active hole. Park on the road. Motorcycles are not allowed in Palmetto Dunes. Unlike Sea Pines, Palmetto Dunes does not publish a dollar toll for the visit.

What you will be told, often as fact, is a hurricane story. Keeper Adam Fripp climbs the tower in 1898, dies of a heart attack. His daughter Caroline, blue dress, keeps the lamp burning. Some versions kill her a few weeks later. Some let her live a long life. After that, a woman in blue walks the Leamington grounds on stormy nights. In the resort telling, she also rattles bottles in cottages later associated with Harbour Town.

It is a good story to hear on a dark stretch of road. It is folklore. The earliest published pin is Terrance Zepke’s Ghosts of the Carolina Coasts, from Pineapple Press in 1999. Palmetto Dunes still sells it as a “true tale.” The keeper lists do not. Palmetto Dunes’ own page, citing the U.S. Coast Guard Registry of Keepers, and Lighthouse Friends both show no Adam Fripp and no Caroline Fripp. In 1898 the head keeper was Paul Schwarzer, on the job from 1891 to 1905. Sisson and Turner are on those lists. Fripp is not. Lighthouse Friends is blunt: records do not show a Keeper Fripp as ever having served here.

The record that does exist is quieter, and worth standing still for. Head keeper Robert A. Sisson wrote up the 1886 Charleston earthquake as it was felt at the station. A hurricane made landfall at the south end of Hilton Head around August 31, 1898. An October storm that same year cut away the beach in front of the front-range dwelling. The range lights later went dark in 1932. What the island later sold was a Victorian ghost onto a light that never had that keeper.

Harbour Town’s museum notes a lesser-known 1880 rear-range light in Palmetto Dunes, and that two original keepers’ cottages, “said to be haunted,” were moved to Harbour Town. Palmetto Dunes marketing then loops the Blue Lady back to the candy-stripe marina. That mix-up is engineered. The famous tower is 1970. The haunted story, even as folklore, belongs to Leamington. Come for the candy stripe if you want the climb and the gift shop. If you want a lighthouse, go to Palmetto Dunes in daylight and stay off the greens.