Standing 93 feet tall at the westernmost point of the basalt headland, the lighthouse has been a bright beacon of the night, guiding ships and their supplies along the west coast since the light was first lit on August 20, 1873.
Congress approved $90,000 (almost $2 million in 2020 dollars) for the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in 1871, but construction was slow and torturous. Workers wrestled with winter storms, and two boats were lost while trying to deliver building materials to the site. Construction materials shipped from San Francisco often had to be offloaded at Newport and then transported by wagon to the site. The double-walled tower required more than 370,000 bricks.
The lighthouse logged nearly 10,000 visitors in 1924, and by 1938 Yaquina Head was the most visited lighthouse on the West Coast and the fourth most visited in the country. The U.S. Coast Guard became the light’s manager in 1939, and the service stationed seventeen servicemen at Yaquina Head during World War II to keep a lookout for enemy ships and submarines. Both keeper dwellings were demolished in 1984, having been abandoned since the last Coast Guard keepers left in 1966, when the light was automated.
Congress designated a hundred-acre Outstanding Natural Area on Yaquina Head in 1980, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The Coast Guard handed the station over to the BLM in 1993, and it was opened to the public. The Coast Guard still operates the automated lighthouse lantern, and in 2005, BLM spent more than a million dollars to restore the tower and the light.
The Yaquina Head Lighthouse was used as the setting for the "Moesko Island Lighthouse" in the film "The Ring". In the movie, a group of teenagers gather to watch a videocassette that is supposedly haunted; story goes that if you watch it, you receive a telephone call wherein a ghostly voice whispers "seven days." A week later, you die. This very thing happens to one of the teens, and her aunt, a reporter named Rachel (Naomi Watts) begins investigating the tape. The cassette contains a phantasmagoric images straight out of a Mark Romanek music video (a floating chair, a broken fingernail, a dying horse), but also a few palpable real-world hints as to where it might have been filmed, including a mysterious lighthouse which is Yaquina Head Lighthouse.
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