by Jean Fischer
“Two days before that they’d sailed past the Cape Lookout Lightship, and a crew member reported to the lightkeeper that they had lost both of their anchors, but they’d gotten through the worst of the storm.
“And something was strange about that. Usually a ship’s officer makes the report. But on that day the lightkeeper didn’t see an officer on deck with the men. Not the captain or a mate or even an engineer. So the officers might have already been missing by then. And the ship ran aground so near the Hatteras Lighthouse that the crew would have been better off to wait for a rescue than to jump ship. The ship didn’t seem to be taking on water or anything.”
Bailey nervously folded the pages of a brochure. “So maybe the crew member was a ghost?”
“No,” said Mr. Jones. “But the crew member might have been up to no good. The officers might have been tied up on board or thrown overboard or even killed.”
Gramps had been listening and looking through the book about the Carroll A. Deering. “What’s your second theory?” he asked.
“Mutiny,” said Mr. Jones.
“What does that mean?” Sydney wondered.
“Mutiny means the sailors take over the ship,” said Gramps. “If the sailors didn’t like the captain, they sometimes found a way to get rid of him.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Jones. “Captain Willis Wormell was the captain of the Carroll A. Deering, and he and his first mate, a man named McLellan, probably didn’t get along. Some folks think there was a mutiny at sea. Something strange must have happened because it should have taken the ship about twelve hours to get from Cape Fear to Cape Lookout, but it took six days!”
“Why so long?” Bailey asked.
“No one knows,” Mr. Jones answered. “It’s part of the mystery. But some of the ship’s charts were found in the wreck. After the ship got past Cape Fear, none of the entries in the charts were in Captain Wormell’s handwriting. Three sets of boots were found in the captain’s cabin, but none of them were the captain’s. Some folks think he was killed and thrown overboard.”
“Was he?” Sydney asked.
“No one knows,” said Mr. Jones.
“Boy,” Bailey said. “There sure is a lot of stuff that no one knows. So it still could be aliens, right?”
“I doubt it,” said the curator. “Plenty of things point to a mutiny, but there’s no evidence, and if you know anything about solving a mystery, you know you need evidence.”
“Oh, we know that!” said Sydney. “Our group of friends, the Camp Club Girls, have solved several mysteries now.”
Gramps smiled. “The girls and their friends from summer camp have quite the reputation for solving mysteries. You wouldn’t believe some of the adventures they’ve had.”
“I can only imagine,” said Mr. Jones.
“I suppose it could have been mutiny,” said Sydney. “But without evidence, we can’t make that conclusion. If McLellan killed the officers and the crew, he had to do something with the bodies, and they were never found. Were there any signs of a fight on board?”
“No,” said Mr. Jones. “Wormell was a big man and could have put up quite a fight. And both lifeboats were missing, and that doesn’t make sense if McLellan was the only one left on board.”
“That is weird,” said Bailey. “But there’s not enough evidence in either of those theories to convince me the crew members weren’t abducted by aliens.”
“Is there evidence to convince you that they were?” Sydney asked.
Bailey bit her lower lip. “No,” she confessed. “What’s the third theory?”
“Pirates,” said Mr. Jones.
“Like Blackbeard?” Sydney asked.
“No,” Mr. Jones replied. “He died long before then. But pirates still sailed in the sea. One theory is that pirates took over another ship named the Hewitt, killed everyone, and then threw a tarp over the ship’s nameplate. So, if anyone saw the ship, they wouldn’t know which one it was.
“And shortly after the Carroll A. Deering passed the Cape Lookout Lightship, another ship sailed by—”
“What’s a lightship, anyhow?” Bailey interrupted.
“A lightship is a special ship equipped with a really bright light,” said Mr. Jones. “Lightships are used in places where a lighthouse can’t be built. They’re moored off the coast in places that are dangerous for ships to navigate.” He found a picture of a lightship in the book on the table and showed it to the girls.
“Maybe the signals we saw were from a lightship?” Bailey said.
“Signals?” said Gramps.
“We think we saw someone flashing a white light in Morse code early this morning,” said Sydney. “It was in the ocean straight out from our house at around four o’clock.”
“What were you girls doing up at four o’clock?” asked Gramps.
“Watching for UFOs,” said Bailey.
“Oh girls,” said Gramps, shaking his head. “There are no such things as UFOs … Mr. Jones, please tell us more about the Hewitt.”
“Well, that second ship, the one that was following the Deering, was hailed by the lightship at Cape Lookout. Usually, someone on board would shout a report, like the crew member from the Deering did. Only, this time, the ship sailed right on by without reporting. The lightship keeper said he couldn’t find a nameplate on the ship, so no one knows, but it could have been the Hewitt.”
“Another unknown,” said Bailey.
“The theory is that pirates killed everyone on the Hewitt and then stole the vessel. After that, they attacked the Deering, killed its crew, and stole anything valuable. Then they transferred their treasure to the Hewitt, steered the Carroll A. Deering in the direction of the shoals, and jumped ship.”
Sydney was fidgeting with her cornrows again, like she often did when she was thinking. “But what about the bodies of all those sailors? They were never found.”
“They never were,” Mr. Jones agreed. “And some of their remains would have probably appeared sooner or later.”
“Except that we found one of their bones on the beach,” said Bailey.
“What?” Gramps exclaimed.
“I stepped on a bone in the sand, and Sydney said it was part of a dead sailor.”
“I did not!” said Sydney. “I was telling you a ghost story. The bone was probably left from someone’s barbeque lunch.”
Mr. Jones chuckled. “It sounds like you girls are having quite the time up there in Corolla.”
Sydney remembered what she had been thinking about before Bailey had mentioned the bone. “What happened to the Hewitt?” she asked.
“Well,” said Mr. Jones. “That’s another great mystery. It disappeared around the same time the Carroll A. Deering was found stuck in the shoals. It was never heard from again.”
“Another ghost ship!” said Bailey. “It sounds like there’s no more evidence to support those theories than mine: I still think they were abducted by aliens.”
Mr. Jones sighed. “I guess I can’t argue with you, Bailey. But I don’t believe in UFOs.”
“Me neither,” said Gramps.
Bailey looked to Sydney for support.
“I don’t know,” Sydney said. “We’ve seen and heard some strange things lately and haven’t found any logical explanations.”
“You’re the Camp Club Girls!” Mr. Jones said. “Be good detectives, and see if you can find an explanation for your UFOs. If nothing else, you’ll come up with some good theories. Who knows, maybe fifty years from now, people will discuss your UFO theories the way we just discussed the theories about the Deering.”
The girls thanked Mr. Jones for his time. Then they went to explore the rest of the museum.
Bailey was excited to see a lighthouse exhibit, including a model of the Cape Hatteras black-and-white striped lighthouse. She enjoyed looking at the exhibits for each of the lighthouses on the Outer Banks, including the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, in Corolla.
“Hey, Kate would be interested in this,” said
Sydney. “When the lighthouse we climbed was first built, it didn’t have electricity. The lighthouse keeper had to rotate the lens at the top of the tower by hand so the light appeared to flash.”
Bailey looked at a diagram of the lighthouse showing all of its parts. “If Kate had lived back then, she’d have found some sort of high-tech gadget to make it easier. Hey, if there was no electricity, where did the light come from?”
Sydney read the caption under a picture. “It came from a giant oil lamp,” she said. “The lens was rotated with a system of weights, sort of the way a grandfather clock works. The lighthouse keeper or his assistant had to crank the weights by hand every two and a half hours. Look, here’s a picture.”
Bailey studied the old, yellowed photo of the lighthouse keeper cranking the weights. “Captain Swain!”
“What?” said Sydney.
“It says here, ‘Captain Nathan Swain Rotates the Lens on the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, 1910’. Sydney, that’s a picture of him. It’s Captain Swain!”
Sydney looked carefully at the photo. “It does sort of look like him,” she said, “but it can’t be, because this picture was taken one hundred years ago.”
“It’s him,” Bailey insisted. “He’s a ghost.”
“What are you girls so interested in?” asked Gramps. He had been looking at another exhibit across the room.
“Just this picture of the Currituck Beach lighthouse keeper,” said Sydney. “He looks like someone we saw there the other day.”
“There’s a whole book about the lighthouse keepers over there,” said Gramps, pointing across the room. “Maybe you can find him in there.”
Bailey and Sydney found the book Lightkeepers of the Outer Banks on a table near the exhibits. Sydney looked in the table of contents and found “Currituck Beach Lighthouse.” She turned to page 87 and found a list of lightkeepers beginning in 1875. Sydney read them aloud, “Burris, Simmons, Shinnault, Scott, Simpson, Hinnant, another Simmons … Here he is—Nathan H. Swain! He was the lighthouse keeper from 1905 until 1920.”
“Is there a picture of him?” Bailey asked, looking over Sydney’s shoulder.
“No,” she answered. “But there’s a footnote.” She turned to the back of the book, and there she found a photograph of an old newspaper article, “‘Captain Nathan H. Swain Retires as Keeper of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.’”
There was a picture, a close-up of the captain wearing his uniform. Sydney caught her breath. “It’s him!”
“Oh my,” Bailey said. “He really is a ghost!”
Theories
After their day in Hatteras, the girls were relaxing in their room. Sydney was on the bed studying a photocopy of the Captain Swain article. She even used a magnifying glass to look at his picture better.
“This photo is a little blurry. It sure does look like our captain,” she said. “But it can’t be the same man.”
Bailey sat at the desk painting her fingernails with a light blue nail polish called Gonna’ Getchu Blue.
“He’s a ghost!” she insisted. “That explains why he disappeared at the lighthouse and on the beach the other morning.”
“Yeah, but what about this morning?” said Sydney. “We heard him talking with that other guy on the beach—”
“The alien,” Bailey added, blowing on her nails.
Sydney got up and slid open the glass doors letting the warm ocean breeze rush into the room. “Think about this, Bailey. You’re telling me that a ghost was on the beach this morning, and he was talking to a space alien. Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
Bailey tightened the cap on the nail polish bottle. “Okay, so do you have another explanation? If he’s not a ghost, how do you explain that the Captain Swain in the newspaper article isn’t the same guy?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Sydney. “But I’m going to find out.” She sat down on the bed and opened her laptop. “I’m going to email the girls everything we know so far, and if we work together we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Sydney wrote an email to the Camp Club Girls. She included her list of facts:
1. Before Bailey arrived, there were reports of strange lights over the Atlantic Ocean near the Outer Banks.
2. On Bailey’s first night, she saw flashing red lights over the water.
3. The next day, after we climbed the lighthouse, Captain Swain seemed to disappear.
4. That afternoon, we found the mysterious mug on the beach.
5. Early yesterday morning, we saw a UFO. We heard a whirring noise, but then the sound quit. Something rushed past us on the beach with a puff of air. It left waffle-like footprints. Then we ran into Captain Swain on the beach. He seemed to disappear in a hurry again.
6. Later, we went to watch Nate Wright cluster balloon. The words on the Wrights’ bus spelled “Roswell” backward.
7. In the afternoon, the mug started flashing, so we put it back on the beach where we found it.
8. Early this morning, someone out in the ocean was using a flashing light to send Morse code. The message said: “I think we’re being watched from the Lincoln house. Someone is on the deck with a flashlight.”
9. We heard Captain Swain on the beach talking to another guy. The guy said he wasn’t going to put the “vehicle” in the water until Bailey left. He also said the mug was his and that we broke it. He took it with him.
10. Today, we went to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. We found an old newspaper article with a picture of a guy named Captain Nathan Swain. He looks just like our Captain Swain. But the picture was taken 100 years ago!
So, Camp Club Girls, who is this man, and what are the mysterious lights over the ocean?
Sydney and Bailey
Sydney attached a copy of the article with the picture of Captain Swain. “There,” she said. “Now we’ll see what the girls come up with.”
Bailey was looking at her nails, “Do you like this color,” she asked, “or should I try Sparkle Me Purple?”
“I like the blue,” said Sydney. “You know, I just remembered something. Didn’t the captain say he’d climbed the lighthouse before?”
“Yeah,” Bailey answered. “He said, ‘I climbed these stairs a lot back in the day,’ or something like that—which would make sense if he was the lighthouse keeper. I mean, they had to rotate that thingy by hand to make the light work, right? Didn’t they have to do that every couple of hours? So he would’ve climbed those stairs lots of times. He’s a ghost, Syd. Admit it.”
Sydney sat fidgeting with her cornrows. “Remember what Mr. Jones said? We should rule out all the other theories before we decide that he’s a ghost or an alien or a mystery that we can’t explain.” She picked up Bailey’s bottle of blue nail polish and shook it.
“So what’s your theory?” asked Bailey.
“Well, I thought that maybe our captain was the son of the man in the article.” Sydney opened the bottle and brushed some Gonna’ Getchu Blue onto her thumbnail. “But then I read the article again, and Captain Nathan Swain only had one child, a daughter named Nellie.” She held her right hand out to look at the color.
“Any other theories?” Bailey asked.
“Not yet,” said Sydney. “How about you?”
“Maybe he just happens to look exactly like the guy in the photograph and just happens to be a captain too and just happens to have the same last name.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” Sydney asked, wiping off the polish.
“Of course I am,” said Bailey. “There’s maybe room for one coincidence, but not three.”
Sydney next chose a bottle of pale Tickle Me Pink nail polish and began brushing it onto her nails. She was almost done when her cell phone rang. “Bailey, will you get that, please?” she asked. “My nails are wet.”
Bailey got Sydney’s phone out of her backpack. “It’s a text message from Mac. It says: I’M SETTING UP A GROUP CHAT FOR TONIGHT. WE NEED TO DISCUSS THIS!”
“Great,” Sydney said. “We need all th
e help we can get.”
When Bailey and Sydney logged into the chatroom after supper, the other Camp Club Girls were waiting.
McKenzie: We were talking before you got here. Do you know much about your Captain Swain, the one from the lighthouse?
Sydney and Bailey sat next to each other on Syd’s bed.
Sydney: No, we didn’t really get to know him at all. He walked up the stairs with us and helped Bailey get over her fear of heights. Then, once we were up there, he left, or something, and we didn’t see him go.
McKenzie: What does he look like?
Sydney: He’s about as tall as I am and sort of round. He had a gray beard and was dressed like a sea captain. He had on a blue captain’s cap and a blue, heavy jacket with shiny buttons.
“Don’t forget about the dog,” said Bailey.
Sydney: And he has a shaggy black dog about the size of Biscuit. Named McTavish. When we saw the captain on the beach, he wore a dark blue jogging suit with a coast guard emblem on the sleeve.
“And he talks about God,” Bailey reminded her.
Sydney: And he talks about God.
Elizabeth: What does he say about God?
Sydney: He quotes the Bible and says that he and God are talking out loud.
Elizabeth: Then he must be a Christian. And I think that’s your best reason to believe that he’s not a ghost.
Bailey borrowed the laptop from Sydney.
Bailey: Why?
Elizabeth: Because when Christians die, their souls go to heaven. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:8 that when we’re absent from our bodies, we’re present with the Lord.
McKenzie: So we know your captain is somehow involved with the lights, right?
Bailey: He had something to do with whoever was flashing the Morse code this morning. But we don’t know for sure that he had anything to do with the strange lights flashing over the water.
Alexis: What do you know about the cluster ballooning guys, the ones with the Roswell bus?
Bailey looked at Sydney and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t really know much about the Wrights except what she’d heard from Sydney, her grandparents, and the Kessler twins. She gave the laptop back to Sydney.
