If atmosphere was all that a ghost story needed, the Old Globe Theatre might have in “Whisper House” a show of some promise.

Alas, the pop cantata by Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow, choking on lugubrious balladry and vague tangles of implausible plot, gradually tapers away and evaporates into a wan sentimentality.

The scene is a remote lighthouse on the New England coast, early in World War II when German U-boats lit up night skies with burning American merchant ships. Michael Schweikardt’s stately set, a cutaway of the light tower complete with the giant Fresnel lens at the top, could hold an entire summer camp’s worth of ghost stories. Jenny Mannis has made excellent costume choices (with one deplorable exception), and Matthew Richards keeps the lighting menace-dim, and Aaron Rhyne’s towering, elongated silhouette projections suggest restless spirits eager to tell tales.

Instead, however, we get a couple of cabaret singers who seem to be offering a narration in the form of several songs that sound alike, all equally incomprehensible due to bad singing choices and crudities of the sound system.

Without the clues presumably contained in these songs, the ghost part of the story never really happens. There’s talk of a yacht that sank on Halloween night in 1912 with all hands lost, including the two band singers who continue (some say) to haunt the scene, seeking a victim to die and release them.

And, sure enough, there are David Poe and Holly Brook, crooning away into hand mikes with strutting poses that suggest a tryout for the musical “Cabaret.” They look vaguely 1912ish, too, though they reek less of horror than of irony.

Their main focus seems to be on a boy come to stay with the lighthouse keeper after his Army Air Force father is killed in the South Pacific and his mother collapses. This kid, played with admirable concentration by A. J. Foggiano, sees the singers when others don’t and interacts with them even, possibly, including something carnal with the female. Hard to tell.

With the supernatural element mushed into confusion, there remains only a banal anecdote at about the Hardy Boys Books level, cruelly marred by inconsistencies.

For example, Mare Winningham, by far the most successful character on view with her worn New England finish, is supposed to run this lighthouse as her father did before her. The suggestion is that she owns it. In reality, the Lighthouse Service operated the major aids to navigation with civil servants until July 1, 1939, when they all were taken over by the Coast Guard. Few if any women were ever in charge, and the keepers mostly charged in 1939 to regular Coast Guard ratings.

But it doesn’t matter, I suppose, since, in this lighthouse, THE LIGHT NEVER REVOLVES!

The whole point of a lighthouse is to beam a signal that can be recognized, one that always blinks on and off in a predetermined fashion so mariners can know WHICH light they’re seeing. This one just glows. And, though there’s talk of bells and horns, none are ever heard.

I can sigh and shrug when Kevin Hoffmann shows up as a Coast Guard officer in a Navy uniform (though it wouldn’t have been hard to get that right), but I can’t sit still when the damned light doesn’t flash properly. (Full disclosure: I spent 24 years in the Coast Guard Reserve, including some time around lighthouses.)

Anyway, there’s a sinister Japanese skulking about (Arthur Acuna, achieving considerable dignity in a cardboard part) and a genial but vaguely ineffective sheriff (Ted Koch, ineffective and vague) plus Hoffmann, who plays that young Coast Guard officer like a brainwashed fool.

OK, OK, I already went there. But then, when the air strike about to bomb the U-boat zooms overhead with all the powerful menace of a lawnmower engine, I pretty much gave up.

These are the kinds of distraction that loom especially large when nothing else is working. Director Peter Askin is no help, picking at details of schtick and neglecting the entire ghost thing. There’s a “dance director” credited, Wesley Fata, but there’s no dancing except for a grotesque jig by the young Coast Guard officer. This suggests some truly basic tectonic shifts in the show’s birthing.

Nobody is credited with the musical arrangements for the seven-member band, including three horns, and I found them bracing and evocative under Jason Hart’s leadership. Probably more than the score deserves.

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DOWNLOAD SONG LIST HERE