Episode 22: Liminal Lighthouses
By all intents and purposes, a lighthouse should represent hope. They light the way to safety, and present a safe harbour. But they also are reaped in solitude and often lie at the edge of danger. Even that though, could bring hope.
So what is it about lighthouses, then, that makes them such macabre places? Lighthouses occupy the liminal spaces between land and the sea.
The rest often in the harshest of environments where humans shouldn’t really exist, and where normal rules of society do not prevail. There is no sense of start and stop in a lighthouse, just an endless rotation of light.
They are places of life and death, on the borders of tragedy and safety. They are small confined spaces on the edge of the vast expanse of ocean.
It takes a special kind of person to exist in this unearthly realm and it is the strangeness of this sliver of society that seems to offer such possibilities for intrigue and invention and an endless fascination with the darker side of the human psyche. Lighthouse keeping is not a job for the faint-hearted.
It requires long periods of loneliness, endurance and stress to keep the lamp burning and ships safe in conditions of extreme weather, dangerous hazards and geographic isolation. It is no wonder that in reality some lighthouse keepers did not cope and went a bit mad.
SHOW NOTES:
The Smalls Lighthouse
In 1801 two lighthouse keepers Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith were stationed on the remote Smalls Lighthouse located 20 miles off the Pembrokeshire coast in southwest Wales. Only a few days into their watch Griffith became ill.
Howel hoisted a distress signal on the lighthouse, but due to the stormy weather no boat possessed the ability to approach the rocks.
After a few weeks of extreme suffering, Griffith died. The two Thomases were known to argue with eacchother, and Howell feared they would accuse him of killing Griffiths.
So rather than dispose of the body Howell decide to keep it as evidence. Howell trained as a carpenter before his lighthouse keeping job, so he knocked up a makeshift coffin and, rather disturbingly decided to lash it to the outside of the lighthouse.
During one particularly violent storm the coffin containing became damaged, exposing Griffiths’ corpse. His decomposing and flailing arm flew from the coffin and then began tapping incessantly on the glass.
Passing ships could see the distress signal, but when they approached, they saw what they thought was the keeper waving at them. With the light still operational no one guessed the grim reality. Yet Griffiths remained out there…tap tap tap
For another month the corpse waved in the wind, tapping on the window, the noise haunting Howell inside.
After four long months since the distress signal went up, rescue finally came. When the rescue boat arrived they found Howell in extreme physical and mental distress.He had turned white and was so grossly dishevelled that on his return his friends failed to recognise him. Quite what happened to him after that we don’t know. As a result of this tragedy it was decided that lighthouses should be manned by three people.
This Smalls Lighthouse tragedy has had a major influence on media and drama.
David Eggers’ 2019 psychological horror movie The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattison centered loosely around the basis of this tragedy in a sick and twisted way.There was a more faithful portrayal of these events in a 2016 British Film, also called The Lighthouse. There has also been a radio play called The Lighthouse and an opera called For Those in Peril produced in 2018 based on the story.
But just because this particular lighthouse reached infamy, does not mean it is the only one with a story to tell.
Seguin Island Lighthouse
Off the coast of Maine lies the Seguin Island Lighthouse. Sometime during the mid-nineteenth century a keeper and his wife moved in to tend the light on Seguin Island.
To alleviate their loneliness and boredom, the keeper had a piano delivered. Unfortunately, the Keeper’s wife was only able to play one single song. And she played it over and over again.
Day after day the woman played the same song, slowly driving the keeper to insanity. Wishing nothing but silence from the endless piano he took an axe and threw his body weight into it, splintering the device into endless pieces.
The story then says he took the axe to his wife, before finally ending his own life out there on the lonely rock
Clipperton Island Lighthouse
The lighthouse on Clipperton Island, a tiny Pacific island 1,000 kilometres off Mexico’s southwest coast was the scene of one of the most bizarre incidents.
Clipperton island was home to a small colony of settlers, but when supply ships failed to arrive the men there set off in a boat seeking to find help. They never returned from their voyage, and it is said that all drowned.
This left about a dozen women remaining on the island with just the lighthouse keeper Victoriano Alvarez. Victoriano decided to declare himself king of Clipperton Island.
He proceeded to impose a reign of terror to the now the enslaved women, abusing them physically, mentally, and sexually. After two years of this, one woman, Tirza Randon, managed to kill Alvarez by smashing his head with a hammer. Eventually help and ships finally arrived and rescued all the women from their small island prison.
The St. Augustine Lighthouse
But some of my favourite eerie tales of lighthouses come from somewhere much closer to home.
Long before the British sailed on the mayflower, the Spanish nestled in the northeast Florida coastline. Don Pedro Mendendez de Aviles and his crew landed on the shore in 1565 on the feast day of san Augustin, and being good Spanish catholics of course, naming their new settlement, saint augustine in his honor. Florida has not always been a safe haven for snowbirds, in fact, it used to be one of the least hospitable places in what is now the united states, though I suppose you could argue parts of it still are.
There are potentially more than five thousand shipwrecks off the coast of Florida. And Saint Augustine was no stranger to shipwrecks.
The current black and white spiral lighthouse that sits in St. Augustine today on Anastasia Island is over 145 years old, but it was not the first beacon of safety to be built in the area.
With a shifting tide and loose sands, the Spanish knew that to find safe harbour, they would need a light in the dark, and they built the Spanish Watchtower. Fast forward 300 years from the landing of Pedro menendez to1867 the old Spanish watchtower was fighting a losing battle with mother nature.
Day in and day out the sea continued to batter the land surrounding the tower.
The lighthouse had just been put back into action after a period of darkness during the American civil war, but there fear lay amongst the locals the light would die again soon if something was not done. Everyone knew The Old Spanish watchtower would not last long.
The Pittee Children
The superintendent of the St. Augustine Lighthouse Project, Hezekiah Pittee, had three daughters, Mary who was 15, Eliza aged 13, and little Carrie who was only four years old.
Hezekiah also had a son, named Edward
The children had turned the contruction site into a playground, as one would expect going in to work with dad every day. And as kids do, they would often bring the other worker’s children in on their games an general childhood shenanigans. One day they invited a 10 year old African American girl to join them.
The girls had the habit of taking the railway cart that was used to transport supplies from the ships at the port to he building site, and transforming it into their own type of victorian era roller coaster.
When they invited their new friend to join them, this was the fun activity of the day. Hopping in the railway cart, riding it down to the water, and doing it all over again. The only thing stopping the cart from flying into the water at the end of the track, was s small wooden board slid into place. But on July 10, 1873 that little wooden board was not where it was supposed to be.The girls hurled towards the end of the track, but instead of stopping as they always did, the cart toppled over on top of all four of them as they flew into the water. Dan Sessions, an African American worker on site, saw the incident and ran over, pulling the cart off from the girls..
By the time he managed to clear them, three of the four already drowned.
The only survivor was the four year old, little Carrie.
The tragedy hung heavy over the site and Hezekiah and his remaining family returned to Maine to put his daughters to rest in their hometown. Researchers have never been able to locate the grave of the unknown African American girl who was with them. But even though the family retunerned in body to Maine, it is said the spirits might not travelled with them.
James Pippin was the last man to live in the lighthouse station as Keeper. Like all the previous keepers who came before him, he started off living in the Keeper’s House, but eventually opted to move to the smaller coastal lookout building. His reasoning? The big house was haunted. In fact, he refused to stay another night in it.
When the Keeper’s house was rented out to tenents in the 1960s, the man who lived there swore he woke up one night to a small girl standing beside his bed. When he blinked again, the girl was gone.
One night, a lone lighthouse staffer went about his duties closing up for the night. As he did so, he heard giggling at the top of the tower. Assuming a stowaway was hidden up there, he climbed back up the steps, only to find it empty. As he descended the tower, he heard the same giggles coming from below.
In the 1970s, the Keeper’s House burned down, but as renovations to restore it went on, many unexplained incidents happened within the home, particularly in the basement - which was the only part of the original building that did not burn.
More recently at the lighthouse museum, during the day, a guest was exploring the maritime hammock trails. As she did so she came upon a young girl sitting on a bench reading a book.
She was dressed very strangely, though perhaps not that strange for st. Augustine, as many people like to dress in period clothing for reenactments. The girl was wearing a victorian dress. As the began to ask the girl a question, another group came up from the opposite direction. The group distracted the woman only briefly and she looked away for only a moment. As she turned back the the bench she found the little girl no longer sat there.
In a similar instance, a woman on a ghost tour approached another woman to complement her daughter’s behavior on the tour. But the lady stood confused, she had no daughter. The other woman, also confused told her a little girl stood by her side on the tour for most of the evening. After checking with the guide, he confirmed that no children had been scheduled or on the manifest for that evening, and none had joined the group at any point.
The Man
