Bodie Island Lighthouse

The name, local tradition holds, comes not from shipwrecks but from the Body family, who once owned this land before Roanoke Inlet closed and made it part of the mainland. The third lighthouse to stand here — two predecessors failed, one abandoned for a poor foundation, one destroyed by Confederate troops during the Civil War — was completed in 1872 and still carries its original first-order Fresnel lens. Renovation finished in 2013, and the public can climb it now. The waters around it earned their nickname honestly: the Graveyard of the Atlantic.