Welcome to the Lighthouse Where People Disappear

hey 42 here there's something inherently creepy about lighthouses half of them seem to be haunted and many have borne witness to terrible tragedy in the form of wrecked ships and drowned men this spooky quality has made lighthouses a hollywood mainstay and only dilapidated victorian mental asylums come close to matching them for the coveted title of most commonly used creepy building in horror films but why exactly is that i mean when you think about it a lighthouse is basically just a very large very well-made camping lantern and as far as i'm aware nobody's ever soiled themselves whilst contemplating the terrifying mysteries of the humble hurricane lamp i suppose it's got something to do with all that isolation business stick a single blinking camping lantern on a barren rock somewhere in the middle of a storm tossed sea and it would certainly gain a fair few creepiness points especially compared to one just sitting on the shelf in your local supermarket add a battered taciturn old man into the equation and i guess we're starting to get somewhere it isn't so much the buildings themselves but the sense of extreme loneliness and seclusion we associate with lighthouses that get some of our most primal fears going factor in their proximity to another place where scary norway seems to go down the ocean and you basically have yourself a recipe for guaranteed scarce considering all of this i can only imagine that when the captain of the steamship arctur sailed by the flannen isles part of the outer hebrides off the northwest coast of scotland on the 15th of december 1900 he felt a deep sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach that's because despite the inclement weather the lantern on the flannen isles lighthouse was unlit it was an accident waiting to happen being a good citizen of the sea the captain reported the issue to the northern lighthouse board when he made landfall three days later of course this was a time before mobile phones had been invented even your regular old stationary phones were extremely uncommon and so the only way to find out why the lighthouse wasn't operational was to send someone out to physically check on it a ship called the hesperus was dispatched to the flanan isles fourth width but bad weather typical of the region and let's be brutally honest here the entire country delayed the vessel in the end it arrived on the 26th of december a full 11 days after the captain of the actor had spotted something was a miss with the lighthouse no record survives of what those on board the hesperus thought they'd find when they reached the island and it's difficult to make assumptions after all plenty of things can go wrong in such a remote spot there should have been three men tending the flannel nails lighthouse at the time james duckett thomas marshall and donald macarthur perhaps the lighthouse keepers had been laid low by illness or maybe they'd run out of paraffin or some other key provision required to keep the lamp burning hell maybe they'd simply gone on strike after deciding living on a rock in the middle of nowhere wasn't worth their meager salary but whatever they expected the relief team on board the hesperus found none of these things what they found instead was well nothing james duckat thomas marshall and donald mcarthur had vanished no doubt feeling a little creeped out at this point the relief team began to search the island for some sign of what could possibly have happened to the free men but what they found far from providing answers only serve to raise more questions and decidedly unsettling ones at that from the outside the lighthouse looked completely normal aside from the obvious fact its lantern was unlit the gate to the compound was closed as was a door to the lighthouse itself but unventuring inside it became clear nobody had been there for several days the lighthouse was almost eerily quiet and the reason for that soon became apparent all the clocks in the building had stopped years later stories circulated that the relief team had found unfinished meals laid out on the table and a fire burning merrily in the half people also spoke of mysterious logbook entries detailing colossal ground shaking storms so violent they've left the seasoned lighthouse keepers in tears despite the fact no storms had been reported in the area on the days in question all very spooky but in reality these details were added after the fact by over-enthusiastic locals keen to embellish this tale which is all a bit unnecessary if you ask me this is one story that needs no extra spice after finding nothing much of interest in the lighthouse itself the relief team began to comb the island for clues the largest of the flannel isles eileen moore isn't particularly big so the search didn't take too long and whilst it turned up no trace of the missing lighthouse keepers it did uncover a few curious anomalies the west side of the island showed considerable storm damage so considerable in fact that a team sent to carry out an official investigation some days later reported that it was hard to believe such carnage could have been caused by just wind and waves alone we're talking solid iron railings that had been bent and twisted a lockbox that was smashed to bits and the boulder weighing over a ton that had been shifted from its long-term resting place there was even damage to a small railway line that had been installed to help lug provisions up from the shore the iron tracks had been torn clean out of the concrete they'd been set into now sure anyone who's ever visited the atlantic coast of great britain we'll know just how violence the sea can be in that part of the world but some of this damage the smashed lotbox for example had been dished out some 35 meters above sea level and minor damage was found at twice that elevation to say this was confusing would be something of an understatement short of a tsunami tearing through the island chain that the rest of the world just happens to have missed there didn't seem to be any plausible explanation for what could possibly have caused such severe and widespread damage it was clear that something catastrophic had happened on the island and recently but what that something was i mentioned tsunamis a moment ago and whilst it's hard to imagine a genuine tsunami going unnoticed in the north atlantic even in 1900 another kind of gigantic wave just might have snuck under the yet to be invented radar a so-called rogue wave which has nothing to do with the american indie band i hasten to add a rogue wave is pretty much what it sounds like a random huge wave that's far bigger and meaner than its piers measuring at least twice the so-called significant wave height of the waves around it these freaks of wave nature can come out of nowhere and they're thought to have sunk some of the biggest and most robust ships ever built rogue waves differ from tsunamis both in how they're formed and what they look like to keep things simple tsunamis are caused by displacement of some kind usually a huge underwater earthquake that shifts the ocean floor but sometimes landslides or volcanic activity rogue waves on the other hand are caused by yeah we don't know exactly how they're caused in fact for a long time oceanographers didn't even think they existed believing them to be nothing more than the tall tales of salt adult mariners and it just so happens that the largest rogue wave ever measured out in the open ocean was tracked a mere 300 kilometers away from the flannen isles so i think you can see where i'm going with all of this stranded out in the north atlantic on a tiny island our poor lighthouse keepers were washed away by a giant rogue wave a monster that reared up out of an already wild sea in the middle of a storm and swept clean over the flannel isles but wait a second as i've said the subsequent investigation of the island found damage as much as 60 meters upon the cliffs and 60 meters would be one hell of a wave in fact the wave i just mentioned the largest ever officially recorded out in the open ocean was a smidge over 29 meters tall a big boy indeed that's about the height of a nine story building but not even close to 60 meters but here unique features of the island's geography may hold the key the shores of many of the flannel isles are popped marked with what are known as geos essentially narrow inlets gouged out of cliffs by untold years of unprovoked aggro from the north atlantic ocean the landing point for ships on the west side of eileen moore is built into one such geo which happens to end in a sea cave when particularly large waves hit the island from the west they rush up the geo and into the cave before exploding up and outwards with incredible force if a rogue wave were to hit the island from just the right angle well that might go some way to explaining the insane amount of damage that was found and more importantly if anyone happens to have been standing nearby at the time they surely would have been swept out to sea by the sudden unwelcome appearance of tens of millions of liters of frigid sea water as for why anyone would choose to be standing outside in the middle of a storm well recent investigations have revealed that one of the lighthouse keepers thomas marshall had been fined five shillings for allowing some of his equipment to be washed away in a storm not long before he disappeared if the weather had started to worsen it's conceivable that he and his companions would have wanted to ensure the gear down at the west landing point was secure placing them smack in the danger zone if a rogue wave struck the one slight issue with that theory aside from the fact it's pure speculation obviously is the fact that lighthouse protocol at the time clearly stated that one of the men should have been tending the lamp at all times but that little kink can be explained away easily enough by simple human instinct most people will be prepared to bend the rules a little in a life or death situation perhaps whoever was tending the light saw a monster rogue wave darken the horizon or maybe he simply saw his colleagues washed out into the sea and tried to save them perishing in the process this theory also fits nicely with one of the other small details noted by the relief team who found the lighthouse keepers missing in the first place one of the keepers oil skins was still hanging on its hook by the door oil skins are large waterproofs worn by many who work at sea and no lighthouse keeper worth his sea salt would ever have ventured out into the north atlantic storm without one that is unless he felt his friends were in sudden danger and every second counted as far as theories go it's a pretty good one it does an excellent job of explaining all the many peculiarities of the case but of course there's no way we'll ever be able to prove it too much time has passed and too little physical evidence remains if it was ever there in the first place that lack of finality has unsurprisingly led to a slew of other slightly more outlandish suggestions being put forward over the years locals at the time spoke of giant seabirds snatching the men away and of monstrous sea serpents rising up out of the depths looking for something to eat on their lunch break some believe the men arranged to leave the island in order to make a new life for themselves elsewhere or perhaps that they were abducted by spies naturally alien involvement has also been mooted no we re mystery is complete without aliens showing up to fill their demanding anal probe quota of course this being a lighthouse there is one other popular theory i should mention that one of the men probably donald macarthur who had a reputation as a volatile individual snapped and murdered his colleagues before throwing their bodies and his own into the churning waves without any way to reconstruct an accurate timeline of events it's hard to come to any definitive conclusions for all we know the storm and wave damage could be a red herring distracting our attention away from other more sinister goings-on but whatever happened to those men it's a pretty safe bet it was nothing good another reason then to avoid lonely out of the way lighthouses just in case you needed one thanks for watching check out my new podcast random interesting facts available on youtube spotify apple podcast and anywhere else you get your podcasts link in the description below thanks

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 610,240

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Id: fd0XrPVTbpw

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021