by Aaron Mahnke
So many skeletons, in fact, that when the workmen began to remove them, they quickly filled up their cart. Three cartfuls later, they had finally moved all the bones out. When they were finished, though, they found something else in the pit: a watch.
A pocket watch, to be precise. And after studying the maker’s marks on the watch, researchers were able to estimate its age. According to them, it had been manufactured in the 1840s—mere decades before it was rediscovered.
Which raises a very interesting question. If the oubliette had stopped being used when the Darbys took over the castle in 1659, how did the watch get there two centuries later?
It seems the oubliette of Leap Castle had been used a lot more recently than we’d care to admit.
THERE IS THE world we all know, with its streets and houses and the bustle of everyday life. And then there is the other world, filled with places that are set away from the center of our lives, places that most of us rarely interact with. Graveyards are a good example of this, and maybe even hospitals; we go there for specific reasons, but only rarely, if we’re lucky.
But standing at the farthest edge of society, in a place it has held for thousands of years, is a structure we rarely give a second thought to. Not because it’s unimportant, or because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s literally on the edge of our world.
The lighthouse. There are few buildings that harbor such powerful meaning and purpose in our world. Without fail, though, they have stood watch for millennia, right on the border between safety and danger, between darkness and light, between hope and despair. And yet by their very nature they are isolated and nearly forgotten.
Since the earliest known accounts, right up to modern times, the purpose of these buildings has changed very little: to cast a light into the darkness so that sailors might better understand where they are and what’s ahead. They rarely waver, they frequently save lives, and they’re universally understood. Which is why we have such a hard time believing that even there, in the narrow walls and seemingly never-ending stairs, stories have taken root that chill the mind.
There doesn’t seem to be a lighthouse in the world without some whisper of unusual activity, some tale of tragedy or rumor of lost love. Oftentimes those stories speak of dangers from the world outside. Others, though, hint at something worse: a darkness that’s right inside the walls.
Because every now and then, horror is born where the light is brightest.
A BRIGHT HISTORY
For thousands of years, sailors around the world have used coastal lights to avoid risky waters and locate safe harbors. In an age before GPS, electrical lights, or anything more complex than celestial navigation, a lighthouse was often the only thing standing between a ship’s crew and certain death.
One of the oldest lighthouses in the world is the Tower of Hercules in Spain. It dates back nearly two thousand years and is the oldest known functional Roman lighthouse. It illustrates the simplicity of a design that has changed very little over the centuries: a bright light, held as high as possible, with room in the building for a caretaker.
And it’s that last bit—the caretaker—that sits at the center of nearly every whispered tale of lighthouse folklore. After all, without people, there would be no tragedy. That’s our legacy as humans. We bring pain and fear with us wherever we go, even to the edge of the world. And the staff who live inside each lighthouse eventually come to call the place their home. It’s the center of their life. Occasionally, though, it becomes their final resting place as well.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stories of unusual activity inside the walls of lighthouses all around the world. One such place, the Heceta Head Lighthouse in Oregon, has a reputation that goes back decades. There is a long-forgotten grave on the property that belonged to an infant. According to local legend, the baby was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper and his wife, and when the child died, the mother fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered.
Since the 1950s, nearly every keeper on duty has reported unusual activity inside the lighthouse. Screams have been heard in the middle of the night. Cupboards that were purposely left open were often found closed, and objects were seen to move in front of people.
In the 1970s, a groundskeeper was washing the windows of the house, inside and out, and while he was in the attic, he turned to see a silver-haired woman floating inches above the floor. The man, clearly frightened, bolted from the attic and refused to return, and so he was given permission to clean the outside of the attic window by way of a ladder.
In his effort to rush the job, though, the man broke the glass, but rather than go back into the attic to clean it up, he left it. Later that night, the lighthouse keeper was pulled from sleep by the sound of glass moving across the floor above. When he checked the next morning, he found that the glass had been swept into a neat little pile.
Another lighthouse, this one near Fairfield, Connecticut, holds an equally chilling history. Three days before Christmas in 1916, keeper Fred Jordan set off for the mainland in his rowboat, leaving his assistant, Rudy, in charge of the light. Rudy watched Fred row off into the distance, which turned out to be a good thing, because Fred’s boat capsized about a mile from the island.
Hoping to rescue his friend and boss, Rudy climbed into a second boat and rowed to help. Unfortunately, though, strong winds had pushed Fred far from the location of the accident, and Rudy never found him.
Two weeks later, Rudy claimed to have seen Fred’s ghost inside the lighthouse. According to his entry in the logbook, a light descended the stairs right in front of him and then began to act strangely. It moved toward the keeper’s quarters, disappearing into the room. When Rudy caught up, the light was gone, but the logbook had been opened. Rudy checked the date on the page it lay open to, and it was the day of Fred’s death.
In 1942, two boys were fishing near the lighthouse when their boat capsized in an eerie echo of Fred Jordan’s accident. Thankfully, a strange man happened to be there, and he pulled them both to shore on the island, telling them to walk to the lighthouse for help.
Once there, the current keeper of the light welcomed them in, gave them both warm drinks, and allowed them to dry off. They told the keeper about the man who had helped them, but he knew of no one else on the island who could have done such a thing. And that’s when the boys saw an old picture on the wall and recognized their rescuer in the photo.
“That,” they were told by the keeper, “was Fred Jordan.”
There are countless stories like these, scattered all around the world like the debris of a ship that broke upon the rocks. The ghosts of the past have a way of finding us, it seems. Sometimes, though, it is we who create the most frightful experiences, not some otherworldly force.
More often than not, it is people—not ghosts—who haunt lighthouses.
THE SMALLS
The Smalls are a collection of raw, lifeless basalt rocks that stretch out into the Atlantic, roughly twenty miles from the coast of Wales. The first lighthouse built there was small and rough, not much more than a house lifted high above the water on half a dozen or so oak and iron pylons, which allowed the waves and wind to pass right under.
It had been financed in 1776 by a man from Liverpool named John Phillips, and constructed by Henry Whiteside. To show just how much faith he placed in the structure, Whiteside himself lit the flame and tended the light for the first winter.
But this wasn’t a room at the Hilton, believe me. It was a simple one-room shack affixed to the top of the platform, with the light room above it. A rope ladder and trapdoor allowed access from below, and a narrow gallery and railing circled the perimeter, which allowed the keepers to step outside and do repairs. It was required that the trapdoor remain closed at all times unless someone was entering or exiting the house, because the door itself constituted the majority of the walking spa
ce of the room.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a treehouse strapped to a small rock in the cold Atlantic. But it served its purpose, and Whiteside survived the winter without incident. He even devised a system for passing messages to the mainland, using the old cliché of a paper note in a glass bottle.
After his short time in the lighthouse, Whiteside passed the torch—literally—to a pair of men who would be the professional keepers of the light. And that’s how the Smalls Lighthouse operated for over two decades, with a pair of men living in isolation, twenty miles from the mainland.
Weeks would go by without contact from others. During the winter, that silence could even be months long. Now, I’m an introvert, so I have to admit that the idea of weeks and weeks of silence, with piles of books and lots of writing to keep me busy, sounds like heaven. But during the winter of 1801, things were far from utopian.
Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith were the lighthouse keepers at that time. According to what we know of the two men, Griffith was a young, tall, powerfully built laborer. Howell, on the other hand, was a small, middle-aged craftsman who had worked for years as a cooper, making barrels. Both men were from Pembrokeshire, were married, and had families who lived on the mainland. But the thing people remember the most about them is that they didn’t get along. They hated each other, and everyone knew it.
It was said that during their infrequent visits to the mainland, the men could be seen in local pubs arguing constantly. The fights covered a wide range of topics, and witnesses claimed there was nothing the men could agree on. Sometimes their shouting would get so out of control that the pub would empty, just so the other patrons could get away from them. But not once were they ever seen to come to blows. People expected it, though.
During the winter of 1801, the weather contributed to their intense isolation. Relief keepers couldn’t dock at the island. Supply ships tried to reach the rock but failed, and because of that, fresh water and food began to run low. They tried to use Whiteside’s method of sending a message in a bottle, but no one ever answered—most likely the work of those same storm-tossed waves that kept away the supply ships.
One thing they didn’t run out of, though, was fuel for the light, so Howell and Griffith stayed busy. After all, those same storms that kept supplies and human contact from reaching them were also threatening the ships that passed through the Smalls. Their duty took precedence.
It was most likely in the service of that duty that Thomas Griffith took ill. Some reports say that it was a sickness that laid the big man low. Others make mention of an accident, of how Griffith slipped and hit his head one day while working in the house. Regardless of the cause, every record of the event agrees on the conclusion: after weeks of failing health, Griffith—so young and fit and full of life until then—tragically passed away.
And just like that, Howell found himself completely alone, stranded on a rock in the Atlantic, with only a corpse to keep him company.
ROOMMATES
Howell had a problem on his hands. Well, two problems, actually. The biggest of those was that he and Griffith were known to quarrel constantly, so he didn’t have the freedom to simply toss the man’s body into the sea and trust that others would consider him blameless. No, he needed to make sure everyone knew that Griffith’s death was not his fault, and so he kept the body.
Which led to the second problem. With no burial, the body would be left exposed to the elements, leading to decomposition. It probably didn’t take long for Howell to look around the small room he shared with the corpse to understand how bad an experience that would be, so he began to plan.
Taking apart some of the storage cabinets in the room, Howell constructed a makeshift coffin. He knew his way around a hammer and saw, and managed to build something that worked, but Griffith was big, and Howell was alone, and…well…he was in a hurry.
When he finished, he took the large box, along with Griffith’s corpse, outside onto the gallery that surrounded the house like a porch. It was cold outside, and that would help delay decomposition, but it was also harsh there. Waves crashed against the lighthouse constantly, and so, as a precaution, Howell tied the box to the rails.
The winter storms had other ideas, though, and one night soon after he had moved the coffin outside, a great wave washed up and smashed the box to pieces. All the wood and nails and rope that Howell had cobbled together to contain the body of his dead partner disintegrated and fell onto the rocks and into the water below. All of it, except Griffith’s body.
According to the reports from those who rescued Howell months later, Griffith’s corpse had managed to get tangled in the rope and railing at the edge of the gallery. Even though waves continued to wash over him and the occasional seagull approached for an inspection, nothing knocked the body free. Which means that rather than spend the coming weeks in peaceful retreat, Howell had a front-row view of his partner’s decomposition.
I have to imagine that there were many moments when he regretted his decision, when he had to fight the overwhelming urge to rush outside, cut the ropes, and kick Griffith’s body down to the waves below. It certainly would have ended the nightmare that he found himself living in. But it also would have stirred up the suspicion and judgment that he was hoping to avoid.
And so week after week, month after month, Howell lived in the small room of the lighthouse, tending the flame and maintaining the building, all while the rotting corpse of Griffith stood watch outside. He later spoke of how one of the body’s arms hung loose, and would swing and wave toward him.
It sounds like the sort of tale Edgar Allan Poe would scratch onto the page at night, echoes of the telltale heart thumping monotonously in the background. But for Howell, this was reality. And it drove him mad.
When a rescue boat finally landed at the small rock almost four months after the death of Griffith, they discovered the rotted corpse on the gallery and an emaciated, shell-shocked Howell inside. He was alive, but the prolonged exposure to the sight of the corpse had wounded him deep in his mind and soul.
It was said that even when he was finally on the mainland and brought into the care of his family and friends, many of them failed to recognize him.
Howell was alive, but there was very little of him left inside. Like an abandoned lighthouse, his flame had gone out.
EVEN THE LONELY ARE NEVER ALONE
Everyone loves a good ghost story. There is mystery and horror and moments that put you on the edge of your seat. They’re great around the campfire or the kitchen table, and they have a way of uniting people. Fear, after all, is a universal language.
But not every scary story has a ghost at the center of it, and while many frightening tales from the lighthouses of the world contain some element of the supernatural, perhaps it’s the stories without them that frighten us the most.
Isolation, loss, guilt, and hopelessness can happen to any of us, no matter where we live or what we’ve been through. Maybe that’s what makes the story of Thomas Howell so chilling: it could have happened to us if we had been in his shoes. And everything he experienced would be just as frightening and traumatic to you or me as it was to him.
Alone and isolated in tight quarters with dwindling supplies. The rotting corpse of the man he hated swinging in the wind and rain outside the window of his bedroom. And no sign of a rescue ship on the horizon, day by day, week by week, month by month. It’s a horror that would drive any of us mad.
Ironically, though, help had tried to reach him. Ships sailed. People watched. But every time they came close, they turned back, satisfied that everything was all right. It wasn’t the light that convinced them, though. It was something else, something that multiple ships and witnesses confirmed together afterward.
Every time they got close, they could see, high up on the gallery surrounding the light, the shape of a man. But he wasn’t cal
ling for help, or beckoning them to come dock on the island. No, according to those who saw him, this man did nothing but lean against the rail and wave. Over and over again.
THE MESSAGE TAPPED through the wires with a frantic, urgent beat. A British listening post picked up the first transmission in June 1947. If the Morse code message had arrived with intensity and speed, the message it carried was more sobering, capable of stopping people in their tracks.
“We float,” it declared. “All officers, including the captain, are dead, lying in the chartroom and bridge.” And then, as if it were unknown and only a pessimistic guess, it added: “Possibly whole crew dead.”
It was 1947. The war that had ended less than two years prior was still a painful, vivid memory in the minds of most people. For the men working in a number of listening stations in the Pacific, it must have sounded like a nightmare.
The ship was identified as the Ourang Medan. Using a number of stations, both British and Dutch, a location was calculated based on the ship’s signals, and a rescue vessel was sent to the Strait of Malacca near Indonesia to lend assistance. Before they reached the troubled ship, one final message was received, this time in the form of a voice over the radio.
It simply said: “I die.”
NOTHING LEFT
The Silver Star was the first ship on the scene, and her crew attempted to signal the Ourang Medan with both whistle and lights. When no one aboard responded to their attempts, a small team was assembled, and they climbed into a boat and rowed over.
The rescue team first headed to the bridge, where the message had come from. Music echoed down the steel hallway as they approached, giving them hope. But when they stepped into the room, it was lifeless. The bodies of several members of the crew, along with that of the captain himself, were found still seated at their stations. The communications operator—most likely their source of the mysterious distress messages—was still at his console, hands on the dials and teeth bared in a savage grin.
