#Oregon’s coast is home to one of the most notoriously dangerous lighthouses in the world: Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, famously known as “Terrible Tilly.”
Sitting on a sheer basalt sea stack just over a mile off the northern Oregon coast, its construction in 1881 was so dangerous that locals refused to work on it, forcing the government to bring in out-of-state laborers who didn’t know the reputation of the rock.
Once operational, the conditions were brutal. Winter storms produced waves so massive they would hurl 135-pound boulders over 100 feet into the air, completely smashing the lighthouse’s glass lantern room. The keepers were frequently cut off from the mainland for weeks at a time.
It was decommissioned in 1957, but its history gets weirder: in the 1980s, the abandoned lighthouse was bought and converted into a privately owned columbarium—a repository for the ashes of the deceased. Today, it still sits isolated offshore, housing dozens of urns and regularly getting battered by the Pacific Ocean.
