by Aaron Mahnke
A small ship had been anchored at Jameson Point that night. The captain had done the smart thing and gone ashore to weather the storm, but he left some people behind on the ship. Three, actually: first mate Richard Ingraham, a sailor named Roger Eliot, and Lydia Dyer, a passenger.
While those three poor souls tried to sleep that night on the schooner, the storm pushed the ship so hard that the cables snapped, setting the ship adrift across the bay. Now, it’s not exactly a straight shot southeast to get to Owl’s Head—it’s a path shaped more like a backward C to get around the rocky coast—but the ship somehow managed to do it anyway. It passed the breakwater, drifted east, then south, and finally rounded the rocky peninsula where the Owl’s Head light is perched, all before smashing against the rocks south of the light.
The three passengers survived the impact, and as the ship began to take on water, they scrambled up to the top deck. Better the biting wind than the freezing water, they assumed. They huddled there under a pile of blankets against the storm, waiting for help.
When the ship began to actually break apart in the waves, though, Eliot—the sailor—was the only one to make an escape from the wreckage. I can’t imagine how cold he must have been, with the freezing wind and ocean spray lashing him from the darkness. But standing on the rocks with his feet still ankle-deep in the waves, he happened to look up and see the lighthouse on the hill. If he was going to find help, that was his best option. So he began the climb.
He was practically dead by the time he reached the lighthouse, but when he knocked, no one answered. A moment later, the keeper of the light rode up the path on a sleigh, having been out for supplies, and realized at once that Eliot needed help. He took him in, gave him hot rum, and put him into a warm bed.
But not before Eliot managed to whisper something about the others.
The keeper immediately called for help and gathered a group of about a dozen men. Together, they all traveled back down to the shore, where they began to look for the wreck of the ship and the people who were still on board, perhaps alive.
When they found the remains of the schooner, the men began to carefully climb across the wreckage looking for signs of the other two people. It was treacherous work; the wood was encrusted with ice, and with each step the planks swayed dangerously with the waves. When they finally found Richard Ingraham and Lydia Dyer, they were still on the portion of the deck where Eliot had left them.
But they seemed to shimmer whenever the light of a lantern washed over them. Climbing closer, the men discovered why: Ingraham and Dyer were both encased in a thick layer of ice, completely covering their bodies. They were frozen, Encino Man style, in a block of ice.
Not taking any chances, the men somehow managed to pry the two free from the deck of the ship, and the entire block was transported back up the hill to the lighthouse. All that night they worked fast and carefully. They placed the block in a tub of water and then slowly chipped away at the ice. And as it melted, they moved the limbs of each person in an attempt to get their blood flowing again.
And somehow, against all logic and medical odds, it worked. It took them a very long time to recover, but Ingraham and Dyer soon opened their eyes. Ingraham was the first to speak, and it was said that he croaked the words, “What is all this? Where are we?”
Roger Eliot didn’t survive in the aftermath of the shipwreck. Maybe it was the trauma of climbing up the hill to the lighthouse, soaked to the bone and exposed to the freezing winds of the storm. Perhaps it was an injury he had sustained in the shipwreck itself, or on the climb to the lighthouse. But his sacrifice did not go unrewarded.
Dyer and Ingraham fared better, though. They eventually recovered and even married each other. They settled down and raised a family together in the area. All thanks to the man who died to bring them help when all seemed lost.
GHOSTS
Later stories from inside the Owl’s Head lighthouse have been equally chilling. Although there are no other tragic events on record there, it’s clear from the firsthand accounts of those who have made Owl’s Head their home that something otherworldly has taken up residence there.
The Andrews family was one of the first to report any sort of unusual activity on the property. I can’t find a record of their first names, but the keeper and his wife lived there, along with her elderly father. According to their story, one night the couple was outside and looked up to see a light swirling in the window of her father’s room. When they climbed the stairs, they found the older man shaking in his bed from fright.
Some think he might have seen the old sailor, a common figure witnessed by many over the years. When John Norton was keeper in 1980, he claimed to have seen the same apparition. He had been sleeping, but when a noise woke him up, he opened his eyes to see the figure of an old sea captain standing over the bed, just staring at him.
The old sailor has also been blamed for mysterious footprints that tended to appear in the snow, footprints that could be found on the walk toward the house. The prints never seem to have an origin point, and always end abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk.
Others have claimed to feel cold spots in the house, while some have gone on record to swear that brass fixtures inside the lighthouse—fixtures that were usually tarnished and dark—would be found mysteriously polished. None of the keepers have been able to figure out who was doing the cleaning for them.
There have been other stories as well. Tales of a pale woman who has been frequently seen in the kitchen, of doors slamming without anyone in the room, and of silverware that has been heard to rattle in the drawers. Despite this, though, most have said that they’ve felt at peace with her there. More at peace, at least, than they are with the old bearded sailor.
In the mid-1980s, Andy Germann and his wife, Denise, moved in and settled into life on the harsh coast of Maine. Andy divided his time between tending the light and a series of renovations to the old lighthouse, which left the yard outside rather chaotic and full of construction materials.
One night after climbing into bed, the couple heard the sound of some of the building supplies outside falling over in the wind. Andy pulled on his pants and shoes and left the room to go take care of the mess before the wind made it worse. Denise watched him leave, and then rolled back over to sleep with the lamp still on.
A short while later, she felt him climb back into bed. The mattress moved, as did the covers, and so she asked out loud how it had gone, if there had been any trouble or anything unusual. But Andy didn’t reply, so Denise rolled over.
When she did, she found that Andy’s spot in bed was still empty. Well, almost. In the spot where he normally slept beside her, there was a deep depression in the sheets, as if an invisible body were lying right there beside her.
Of course, it was just the dent where Andy had been sleeping moments before. At least, that’s what she told herself then. But thinking back on it later, Denise admits she has doubts. There were moments when she was lying there, staring at the impression in the sheets, and could have sworn the shape was moving.
Maybe she was too level-headed to get upset, or perhaps she was too tired to care. Whatever the reason, Denise simply told whoever it was to leave her alone, and then rolled back over and fell asleep.
At breakfast the next morning, she wanted to tell Andy about the experience, thinking he would laugh it off and help her to explain it away. But before she could, he told her his own story. It turned out Andy had had an unusual experience of his own the previous night.
He explained how, as he had exited the room and stepped out into the dimly lit hallway, he saw what he could only describe as a faint cloud hovering close to the floor. And this cloud had been moving. According to Andy, when he walked down the hall, it moved right up to his feet and then passed on through him.
That’s when Denise asked Andy where the cloud had been going.
“Into the bedroom,” he told her. “Why?”
IMAGINARY FRIENDS
You don’t have to travel to a lighthouse to bump into tales of the unexplained or otherworldly. You can hear them from just about anyone you meet, from the neighbor down the street to your real estate agent. But lighthouses seem to have a reputation for the tragic. And maybe that’s understandable: these are, after all, structures built to help save lives in a dangerous setting. It might be safe to say that the well for these stories runs deeper than in many other places.
But are they true? Like a lot of stories, it seems it all depends on whom you talk to. Keepers across the decades have had a mixed bag of experiences. Some see odd things, and some don’t. Maybe some people just connect with the stories more than others and see hints and signs where others might see none.
One recent family described their time at Owl’s Head as normal. They never saw ghosts, never observed objects move, and felt right at home the whole time they were there. Another family, though, acknowledged that something unusual seemed to be going on in the lighthouse. They would find lightbulbs partially unscrewed, and their thermostat would constantly readjust itself. Perhaps whatever it is that’s haunting the lighthouse is just very environmentally conscious.
It’s easy to laugh off most of these stories. But we’ve never lived there. We’ve never heard or felt something that can’t be explained away. And like most samples of data, there’s always the outlier.
Another family who lived at the lighthouse in the late 1980s claimed to have experienced their fair share of unusual activity, though. One night, while Gerard and Debbie Graham were asleep, their three-year-old daughter, Claire, quietly opened her eyes and sat up in bed. She stared into the darkness for a moment, as if listening carefully to something, and then climbed out of her bed and left her room.
Her little bare feet pattered on the cold floor of the hallway as she made her way down toward her parents’ room. Inside, she slowly approached the side of their bed, then tapped her father on the arm to wake him.
When he did wake up, he asked Claire what was the matter. The little girl replied that she was supposed to tell him something.
“Tell me what?” her father asked.
“There’s a fog rolling in,” Claire replied, somehow sounding like someone infinitely older. “Sound the horn.”
When he asked her who had told her this, the little girl looked at him seriously. “My friend,” she told him. “The old man with the beard.”
WE NEVER PLAN for the moments that frighten us the most. They tend to creep up on us, floating on chance and propelled by some twisted mixture of Murphy’s Law and the worst side of humanity. Thankfully, those moments are rare.
In 2014, though, the people of Ireland came face-to-face with a real scare. A ship was slowly approaching the western coast of the green isle, and while countless ships do that every day, this one was different. This one, you see, was a ghost ship.
The Lyubov Orlova began life in 1976 as an ordinary Yugoslavian cruise liner. She was built to withstand sea ice, and spent a good portion of her career as a tourist vessel near Antarctica. But in 2010, the cruise ship entered troubled waters—figuratively speaking—and was taken out of service and docked in St. John’s in Newfoundland. Turns out that the crew of over fifty people hadn’t been paid in over five months, and so to cover the $250,000 in debts, the ship was impounded and sold for salvage.
In February 2012, the ship was pulled out of St. John’s by a tugboat, headed to the Dominican Republic, but the tow line slipped free just a day into the journey. They tried to reconnect it, but somehow the effort failed. And thus began a journey that even a scriptwriter couldn’t dream up, with the ship drifting back east, and then west, and north, until it was finally making its way toward County Kerry in Ireland.
Oh, one last detail. The abandoned cruise liner wasn’t empty; it was full of cannibalistic rats. Left unchecked, they’d multiplied over the years, and after they had eaten every bit of food on the ship, they turned on themselves. So it was the thought of that—of thousands and thousands of starving, flesh-crazed rats reaching their shores—that left the people of Ireland in fear.
Ghost ships are a lot more common than you’d think. The good news is, most of them aren’t overrun with cannibal rats. But that doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of stories. And just as with human settlements, it’s the ships that have seen the most action that always seem to carry the biggest number of legends.
BRIGHT BEGINNINGS
In the century between the mid-1800s and the end of World War II, the primary method of transportation between Europe and North America was the ocean liner. Today we can easily hop on a plane and zip between locations, but in the era before powered flight, enormous ships did the job for us.
Ocean liners were different from the cruise ships of today, though. They were stronger, could hold more fuel, typically carried cargo and mail along with the paying passengers, and had thicker hulls. They could hold thousands of people at once, and made their round-trip journeys constantly, week after week, year after year.
America is a country of immigrants, and the vast majority of that immigration was aided by the ocean liner. My paternal ancestors boarded a steamship in Bremen in 1893 and rode it all the way to Ellis Island in New York. I have a copy of the ship manifest with their names listed right on it. My guess is that many of you could tell a similar tale. And at the core of all those stories is the ocean liner.
In the early 1930s, a new ocean liner was being built at a shipyard in Scotland. Legend tells of how the shipbuilders approached King George V and told him that they wanted to name the ship after England’s greatest queen. They meant Queen Victoria, but before they could clarify, King George said, “My wife, Queen Mary, will be delighted to hear that.” How do you say no to that, right?
The RMS Queen Mary set sail from Scotland on September 26, 1934. She was over a thousand feet long and weighed in at just shy of 82,000 tons. Throughout her twelve decks, she could carry over two thousand passengers and over a thousand crew members. And she was fast. Very, very fast. Between 1936 and 1952, there was only one year where a ship was faster than the Queen Mary.
And that speed caught the attention of the British military when World War II broke out. In 1940 she was converted into a troopship, bumping her passenger capacity up from two thousand to over fifteen thousand. For an empire with troops scattered all across the globe, the Queen Mary became invaluable in getting them all to Europe to aid in the conflict with the Axis powers.
In October 1942, as the Queen Mary was approaching Britain, an escort ship was sent to protect her during the final leg of the journey. The HMS Curacoa was tiny in comparison, but that wasn’t unusual. The Queen Mary was enormous. What was unusual, though, was the navigational error that the Curacoa made. She mistakenly crossed directly in front of the larger vessel and was essentially run over, like an elephant running over a small wooden fence.
The Curacoa was sliced in two, and 331 of the ship’s 432 crew members perished in the disaster. The Queen Mary, though, was essentially undamaged, and it never dropped speed out of a fear of possible German submarine attacks.
In December 1942, over sixteen thousand American soldiers boarded the Queen Mary, headed to England, and in doing so set a world record for the most passengers on a single vessel. The record still stands today. But along the way, a freak wave nearly a hundred feet tall crashed against the ship and pushed her over. She came within three degrees of capsizing, and the events of that night went on to inspire the classic 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure.
At the end of the war, the ship stayed on call to transport American troops home, as well as making more than a few trips with war brides. Over twenty thousand European women and their GI-fathered infants were transported to the United States on the Queen Mary, allowing them to reunite with their loved
ones. The trips were called “Bride and Baby Voyages.”
In 1947, she was refitted for luxury passenger travel, and operated in that capacity until 1967. Nine years earlier, the first transcontinental passenger jet crossed the Atlantic, sounding the death knell for the world of ocean liners.
After completing her thousandth passenger voyage, the Queen Mary left port one last time and arrived in Los Angeles, California, on December 9, 1967. There she was converted into a luxury hotel, museum, and tourist attraction. She’s never left port since.
One last detail that should be mentioned: due to her dark colors and stealthy missions around the globe, the Queen Mary was nicknamed the “Grey Ghost.” But oddly enough, it was her arrival in sunny California that seemed to trigger countless echoes of her dark past.
ECHOES OF THE PAST
In a lot of ways, turning the Queen Mary into a hotel made sense. Economically, it was much less expensive than building a new one. This was a ship designed for long-term accommodations, so converting it didn’t require reinventing the wheel. And given that the ship had transported over two million passengers during her career, there were a lot of people interested in staying aboard a ship they’d probably thought they’d never see again.
Former passengers could see a lot of familiar elements on the retired Queen Mary. The indoor pools remained untouched, as did the first-class lounge. They could, in theory, tour parts of the ship that few passengers ever witnessed, including the engine room and the boiler room. It’s a hotel today, but the ship truly is a piece of living history.
