The Flannan Isle Lighthouse mystery
The Flannan Isle Lighthouse is on a remote Scottish island off the Outer Hebrides. In December 1900, all three lighthouse keepers vanished, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.
AT THE TURN OF THE 20th century, this remote Scottish lighthouse was manned by three men by the names of James Ducat, Donald MacArthur, and Thomas Marshall. But when the steamer Archtor passed by on December 15th, 1900, its light was dark. The keepers had vanished.
December 15th was also the last day an entry was made in the lighthouse log, which mentioned damage to equipment, bent stairway iron railings, and displaced rail tracks. This provided evidence that something had gone wrong even prior to the men’s disappearance.
The Archtor reported the dark lighthouse and, on Boxing Day, the relief vessel Hesperus arrived to investigate. The ship’s captain, Jim Harvie, sounded his horn and sent up a flare, hoping to alert the three lighthouse keepers. There was no response. Disembarking from the Hesperus, relief lighthouse keeper Joseph Moore set off up the one hundred and sixty steep steps to the lighthouse. Three giant black birds perched on the cliffs above him cast their beady eyes on his progress.
Moore found the entrance gate to the compound and the main door both closed, the beds unmade, and the clock unwound. Returning to the landing stage with this grim news, he then went back up to the lighthouse with the second-mate and a seaman. A further search revealed that the lamps had been cleaned and refilled, the table was set for a meal that had never been eaten and a chair had been toppled over. A canary in a cage was the only sign of life.
A set of oilskins was found, suggesting that one of the keepers had left the lighthouse without them. There was no sign of any of the keepers, neither inside the lighthouse nor anywhere on the island.
Something had happened—fast—and the damage, plus the fact a rock weighing a ton seemed to have been moved far from its original location, led many to speculate that a gigantic storm or even rogue waves had hit the island, and the men had perished in a rescue or operational accident. The most plausible theory is that the men were swept away by the sea while down at one of the island’s landing stages, even though it was against the rules for all three keepers to be out of the lighthouse at once.
No bodies were ever found, and over time theories from madness to sea monsters to spies to ghosts to UFOs abounded. The Mary Celeste-style mystery inspired a poem by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in 1912; an early Genesis track in 1968; the Doctor Who episode Horror of Fang Rock in 1977; and Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera The Lighthouse in 1979.
Further reading
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