Missing Lighthouse Found

(CN) - A Massachusetts lighthouse that went missing for 80 years has been found in California, according to an article in "Lighthouse Digest." The 30-foot tall Mayo Beach lighthouse at Wellfleet was believed to have been dismantled sometime between 1925 and 1939, but a lighthouse researcher said she found it on Montara Bay, south of San Francisco.

"This is the most exciting thing that I've found," Colleen MacNeney told the Cape Cod Times.

MacNeney says her parents have photographed every lighthouse in the United States.

The remarkable, migrating lighthouse was found by researchers putting together a digital archive, the Times reported.

MacNeney said the lighthouse was designated as "excess stock" by the Coast Guard and shipped across the country by unknown means and by unknown people.

The Times reported on Tuesday that the lighthouse was razed in 1939, but The Associated Press reported today that it had been taken down in 1925.

There was no explanation for this alarming discrepancy.

"This has to be the furthest a lighthouse has been moved in the U.S.," ManNeney's parents told the Cape Cod Times, in a masterpiece of understatement.

The lighthouse keeper's cottage still exists, in Wellfleet. The Malcynsky family has owned it since 2004. When informed that the lighthouse had been found in California, Joni Malcynsky told the Times, "That's definitely news to us."

The Lighthouse Times is available online, but its June issue has not been published yet.

Patrick Cassidy, the Cape Cod Times reporter who has been all over this story, reported that the Coast Guard did not know the lighthouse still existed.

"We have it down as being razed," a Coast Guard historian told the vigilant Cassidy. "We need to fix that, then."

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