Haunted Cosmos - Christmas Special: The Lighthouse & The Sea

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Hello dear listeners, we interrupt your regularly scheduled Haunted Cosmos content to take some time to celebrate the Incarnation of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! Merry Christmas!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Normally, you would getting Episode 9 of Season 2 in your feed today; but, it's Christmas so we pushed it back a week. Tune in next Wednesday, January 3, 2024, to hear all about the next strange and spooky topic we cover. In the meantime, enjoy a sneak peak into our weekly patron-exclusive show, The Dusty Tome. If you like this episode, consider becoming a patron! You will gain immediate access to a catalog of 40+ shows just like this one, with new ones releasing every Wednesday (except today cause, again, Christmas time). Sign up using this link.Enjoy your holiday and consider the profundity of the Incarnation: the strangest thing that has ever happened in the world. Support the show

Hello, Constant listener, and Merry Christmas. We hope that you guys are enjoying your holiday with friends and family as we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord and King Jesus Christ. As you may have noticed by now, this is not the regular Haunted Cosmos show. In fact, it's irregular. Normally today, you would have released to you episode 9 of season 2. I'm still not going to tell you what that is

because I like the element of surprise for those who don't know. But because of the holiday, we're actually going to push it back a week. So you'll hear episode nine of season two of Haunted Cosmos drop next Wednesday, January 3rd. In the meantime, though, we didn't want to leave you hanging. So today, you will get a sneak peek into what our patrons get every single week.

And you'll hear an episode of our patron exclusive show, The Dusty Tome. It's one of my favorite episodes of the show that we've done. It's called The Lighthouse and the Sea. I hope that you all enjoy it. And again, Merry Christmas. And hey, while I'm at it, Happy New Year 2. If you like what you hear of this episode and you're curious to hear more,

we have a back catalog of 40 plus of these dusty tome shows on our Patreon. Sign up today and you'll get access to all of them immediately. And now, on with the show. On the far western tip of the United Kingdom lies little unassuming country named Wales. And on the far western shore of whales, where the constant ocean waves batter against the basalt and dollarite cliffs and a cold spray of white seafoam, lies the small village peninsula of Marlos. The village isn't exactly remote, it's only seven miles away from a more densely packed city

named Milford Haven. But when you're there, it feels like it may as well be the only place on Earth. On three sides, all you can see is the billowing fold of blue and green ocean to the horizon, and if you look back east, you'll see just the rolling green pasture land full of local flocks. idyllic to be sure but it's also a challenging place to live the primary means of income for her residents numbering just 323 people in 2001 is fishing these fishermen build up there and their families livelihoods by catching Atlantic lobster and crab and if you don't fish for these then you probably collect and sell leeches in the marshlands close to town and if you do neither fishing

nor leach collecting you're probably a small-time cattle rancher taking advantage of the fertile grasses. Despite the nearly guaranteed low to lower middle class income that these professions afford, the weather this close to the old world's edge can be, and indeed often is, brutal. Harsh winds battering the seed get collected at the bottom of the cliffs and eventually shoot up to Marlos like a cork charging out of a champagne bottle. The sky can quickly grow ominous and black as it heralds the arrival of a great storm. Sheets of cold rain fly through the air like needle darts from heaven, cutting cold to the very bone of anyone unfortunate enough to be walking around in the storm uncovered. Fishermen are wise to avoid pursuing their craft

when one of these servants of the most high is bearing down upon the area. The raging pressure changes above the water's surface cause great waves to quickly form that can toss a fishing vessel around like it's a child's play thing. To boot, the water is always cold there, reaching its highest temperature in July of each year at 54 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still too cold to enter without a wetsuit. And of course, the last reason a fisherman might want to avoid being on the stormy seas of Marlos is the water surrounding the port is peppered with rocks, tiny aisles rising just above or hiding just beneath the surface like somebody waiting behind a door to scare you, an ever-present looming threat.

Naturally, one would understand how celebrated a lighthouse would be in this place, a beacon of warning and hospitality, and an otherwise merciless cauldron of danger at every turn. Enter John Phillips. In 1775, he began construction on a lighthouse on top of a prominent piece of basalt that rises out of the waves 20 miles east of the Marlos Peninsula coastline. He was himself a merchant and shipowner who found himself near these stormy coasts often, so the benefit to him for this investment was quite personal and immediate. His original plan was to build a lofted lighthouse in Keepers' quarters that stood on nine cast-iron posts, which would allow rising sea levels to flow right underneath the light

any time a storm became particularly brutal. The overall design was well found and supported by all, but the cast iron was abandoned for English oak wood. Surprisingly, this was not in any attempt to reduce cost. Rather, it was actually an attempt to increase the durability of the structure. The wood, you see, would flex and bend more elastically than the cast iron. In this type of environment, that feature of the wood would prove to make it stronger over time than the iron. In 1776, the lighthouse named Smalls Lighthouse was completed.

In 1777, one of John Phillips' sponsors for the build, an instrument maker named Henry Whiteside, visited the tower to see what his money had helped accomplish. He was stranded there for a month. Heavy wind and rain cut off any possibility of restocking or remanning the lighthouse for over 30 days. Whiteside, thinking this might be his death, and by thirst, by the way, wrote an impromptu will and put it in a bottle that was housed inside a small box. He sent the box out to sea in the hopes that it would find a reader somehow someday. Luckily, none of this was necessary, since finally the winds did die down, allowing Whiteside to escape the lighthouse, some more experienced keepers might resume their duty there. His note, interestingly,

did make it, though, against all the odds. Good to know a message in a bottle work sometimes. It is rare and difficult for one to over-emphasize or overestimate the effects of isolation from others. Humans were made communal. God himself said that it was not good for man to be alone, that he needed a helper fit for him. Now certainly, that passage is about marriage and contains many deep truths for us to consider, but one of the things it obviously means is that man ought not be alone. God says it's not good. Some people, especially young men, wax poetic about the poetry and beauty and romance of escaping away into the woods, living off the grid and off the land with a dog for a companion, free from their responsibilities and troubles of our small, modern

world. In my youth, I admit, I certainly indulged my imagination with this possibility. I remember being inspired by stories of men like Chris McCanness, men who really left it all behind and punched out into the wild. Unfortunately, that type of thinking is youthful, foolish, small-minded, even arrogant. I think, despite the surface-level attraction the idea affords many, we all recoil against the reality of being genuinely and completely alone. A great example of this can be found in the enigmatic Donald Crowhurst. He's the type of man who did the type of things that would warn its own episode of our humble show. In 1968, Crowhurst had a sailboat custom built that he would use to attempt a harrowing feat, encouraged by the crippling setbacks of business failure and a fear of squandering

his own personal potential and never amounting to anything noteworthy, Crowhurst, an amateur weekend sailing enthusiasts, would single-handedly, without stops or aid of any kind, circumnavigate the globe on his little boat in an attempt to win the prize money of the first ever golden globe boat race. Or at least that was the idea. He left the coast of England in October of that year and immediately ran into multiple issues. Day after day, and some of the most forgiving and calm seas that he would encounter on the entire journey he struggled to stay on track, battling a leaky hole, finicky electronics, and unreliable mechanical systems on his vessel. His journals paint the picture of a man who was a realist.

He knew he couldn't finish the race, but because of financial commitments he had made before leaving, he couldn't afford to not finish. After all, he had a wife and four children to consider. In a stroke of undeniable genius and intense focus, he faked his log book to make it appear as though he had actually. done the race. This is a very impressive feat, when in reality he had just sat in the calm mid-Atlantic seas for some months, waiting to join in with the back of the pack of other racers as they made their return trip to England. He wouldn't win. He didn't want to cheat his way to a win,

but he would finish. He needed to make everyone think that he had finished. Eventually, the time came for him to join that final pack of sailors. As he did, he learned that by some dark twist of Providence, he was actually in the running to finish the race in first or second place. This was due to a mixture of other racers dropping out and his own logs showing an impressively fast overall time on his attempt since he had started some weeks later than everyone else. Faced with the dilemma of cheating beyond his conscience, of lying to everyone about what he'd done, or putting he and his family through complete financial ruin and social human. And social humiliation and ostracism. He was truly at the end of an ever-shortening rope.

But the underlying factor in all of this, the variable that people fail to consider, is isolation. For nine months, Crowhurst had been completely alone. A radio transmission here and there, sure, but for all intents and purposes, he had been in solitary confinement on a floating one-man prison for nine months. His diaries record this. descent of one man's mind into complete madness. Philosophical babbling gave way to some argumentative discourse he had between himself and a dark entity he called the game. Eventually, it appears, the game won. Whether it was a construct of Crowhurst's worsening mind or some dark visitor on the high seas, we'll never know, though my money would be on the former, if I'm being honest.

Crowhurst's last log entry was on July 1st, 1969. His boat was found soon thereafter with no substantial damage. Whether on purpose or accident, Donald Crowhurst and his mind of madness stepped off the edge of his boat and drowned in the vast blue of the Atlantic. His body was never recovered. All of this is just to say that prolonged isolation wreaks havoc on us all. Nobody is immune to its effects. not even a well-adjusted and zealous engineer from the UK.

But what about lighthouses? Well, that same lighthouse I mentioned earlier, Smalls Lighthouse, the one Henry Whiteside got stuck at for a month, holds another story, a much darker one. A two-man team had taken over Manning the Tower, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith. And despite having the same name, these two men could not be more contrasted to one another,

where Howl was oil, Griffith was water. It was publicly known by local villagers and other frequenters of pubs throughout the Pembrokeshire region of Wales, that the two men were not friends. And it wasn't some apathetic carelessness for the other. No, the two men actively thought antagonizingly of the other. One can imagine how frustrated and befuddled they each were when, upon orders from the Lighthouse Administration of England, an entity called Trinity House,

the two men were shipped together out to that little island off the Marlos coast, slated to manage Small's Lighthouse for the stormy season. Days are long amidst unwelcome company. And the two Thomases continued to consider one another unwelcome company. But the two also had a sincere sense of duty and a strong work ethic that allowed them to at least keep the peace. They were not friends,

they never even became acquaintances. but at least things were not always so quarrelsome. As sunrise after sunrise came and went, like a monotonous commute to work every day, the men operated as a machine and were content to give one another what space could be afforded in the small living quarters otherwise.

After some time, though, Griffith began to complain that he wasn't feeling so well. The exact nature of Griffith's condition is something unfortunately lost to history. Some believe the man was subdued by a mild heart attack or stroke that eventually took its toll on the aging lighthouse keeper. Others believe his bane was some ailment that had been lying dormant under the skin for many years, waiting to come alive and strike at the man when fate called him, like some sort of genetic deficiency that only reveals itself after a certain age. Though not the man's friend, Howell understood a number of things regarding Griffith's condition.

The first was that, friend or not, the man needed help, and Howell was all he had. The last vestiges of human decency may still bud like a flower in late spring when pushed to extreme circumstance. The second, a more selfish but still practical realization, was that if Griffiths succumbed to whatever this was, Howell would be left to pull double duty until help and substitutes could arrive. He would be forced to lose too much sleep. He'd be pushed to the very edge of exhaustion.

if he had to manage this light all alone. Lastly, and this one really is purely selfish, but still not unreasonable. Howell knew, that everyone else knew, how little the two of them liked each other. If Griffith died and they could never determine the cause of death, Howell would be almost certainly accused of murdering the man. The days passed and Griffith worsened, despite his partner's best efforts to help the man. Recognizing the state of affairs growing more and more desperate, Howell began trying to signal for help to passing ships, essentially asking them to remember them in port and tell the authorities to send relief to the lighthouse.

But help did not come. Whether it was tired sailors not seeing his signal or the ongoing nasty weather was to blame for the lack of rescue for Griffith, Howell didn't know. And it was likely a mixture of both. After all, the weather at this time was genuinely bad for the area and it went on and on. on and on. Finally, Griffith breathed his last and died. Howell, now confronted with the responsibility to man the lighthouse single-handedly, considered what might be done with the body of his fallen colleague. Remember, he knew that everyone else knew about Griffith and his rivalry with one another. While the most natural first step in solving his predicament would be to give Griffith a dignified, albeit small, funeral and burial at sea, he understandably feel feared that doing so might make him seem suspicious in the eyes of authorities when they performed

their inevitable investigation later. After all, relief had to come sometime, right? Howell, therefore, did not cast Griffith's body into the waves, instead opting to keep the corpse in the living quarters with him to ensure preservation. For a while, this worked well enough. Though the frequent sight of the dead man made Howell unsettled, the heavy workload was distracting enough to make up for it. For days, Howell busily ran the lighthouse alone, with little more than a second thought for the macabre story he was now in the throes of. But then there was the stench. Have you ever walked into a room in your house with headphones on? The distraction of one of the major senses tends to make one loose focus on otherwise notable things, especially when one is in,

an environment they're comfortable and familiar with already. Many people say that the cancellation of one sense acts as a catalyst to heighten all the others, and they're quite right for saying this. But what we have here is not an example of one sense being discarded, rather incredibly used and worked and therefore distracted. So anyways, you walk into your living room to get something, song or podcast or audiobook demanding at least part of your mind's attention. and you think everything is completely normal.

Then you turn to leave the room and find your wife or child or dog has been standing right beside you the entire time and you never noticed them. It startles you. You jump out of your skin for a moment, even though nothing new happened. How silly this must look to an observer, and yet it's something almost everyone can relate to. This is akin to what happened to Howl, when the strong odor of Griffith's rotting corpse

finally pushed its way into his mind, demanding to be noticed. Nothing had really changed. Even the odor wasn't sudden, but rather a gradually worsening process. And yet somehow, that stench reached its critical mass and howl, as if woken stupor by cold water poured over his head, began to break. He read the writing on the wall. Help had not come yet in the weather, far from improving, was only growing more and more volatile with each passing day. Pushed to act by the sheer force of the rotting smell, Howell searched for a more long-term solution to his problems. He had to keep the body.

He had to make sure he could clear his name if it ever came to that. But he could no longer keep the body inside. Though he blamed the smell, the psychological effect of staring into the lifeless eyes of a dead man for so long and so frequently would later prove to have already begun poisoning Howell's mind. He hung by a thread and could not take it anymore. He built a rudimentary coffin for Griffith out of spare lumber and driftwood collected during a few hours of the storm's repose.

He placed Griffith inside, covering himself in the forceful odor that had driven him to these lengths in the first place, and lashed the coffin on one of the railing structures outside. near to the light's main balcony. He could not just leave the coffin outside on the ground, because then waves could easily come and take it, rendering all of his efforts useless. Finally, the gruesome task done. He sat alone in the lighthouse and waited for his mind to clear

of its impending and already beginning madness. He continued in his work and felt hopeful that this new twist in the story would finally be sustainable for him. But the storm picked up yet again. In a horrible turn and roll and billow of dark providence, the wind whipped across the coffin on the outer deck, beating it back and forth as if the air itself had a personal vendetta against it. After hours of being churned by the storm, the lashings around the coffin holding the corpse loosened enough for gravity to demand a readjustment. The coffin slipped

slightly out from the cords holding it, and then caught again, this time somehow in a more secure position. The shoddy strewned together nature of the coffin structure strained under the new stress and sought relief. It found it by sending many of its pieces flying, giving the storm an offering of itself as a final plea for mercy. But the body remained. Lashed now to a few of the coffin's remains and then directly to the railing, the body bobbed and dipped with the changing winds. it hung down below the deck right in front of the living quarters window. Howell had heard, and now he was seeing the whole thing. As if waving at him from beyond the grave with a rotting and bony arm,

the wind for the next four months moved the dead man's arm in front of the window Howell was forced to look through. Griffith's body was yet again in full view of Howl at any moment of rest, and whenever the wind blew just right, which in this weather was quite often, The body's arm would move and beckon Howell to come out and join him on the rails to face the storm together. Any hope Howell still had of regaining his mental fortitude was now snuffed out like a spark under a mountain of sand. He descended into two things, his work and utter psychosis. For four months he waited for the storm to stop so relief would come.

For four months he kept the light going, as if the madness itself drove him to a sudden. ignore the most obvious thing he could do to demand attention from the shore. Sure, he hoisted the flag that signaled distress, but if he had just stopped the light, maybe they would have tried to relieve him earlier in a more emergency-fueled way, but he didn't. And every day he was forced to watch his dead rival wave at him from his open air and stormy grave, mocking him into further bitterness one last time. Howell would eventually be relieved, though he considered it then a rescue. The relief vessel was shocked to find a dead Griffith and an empty, hollowed, clean, almost

vegetative howl to greet them. The whole endeavor had taken such a profound mental and physical toll on the surviving man that none of his friends recognized him anymore. For almost six months in total, Howell had been the only living man, on a small piece of rock in the Atlantic that was constantly bombarded with the ocean's attacks. His only escape from the elements was a small living quarters, about 20 feet in diameter. His only company, that he could do nothing to avoid in such a tight space, was the dangling corpse of a dead man just outside of his window.

Upon hearing of the incident, the lighthouse authorities immediately changed protocol, demanding a minimum of three men per lighthouse crew at all times. But Howell knew the truth. Numbers mattered not. If Providence turns dark for you, you will ride the waves where it takes you, and you will be at God's mercy, unable to tread water forever. As more and more people found out what Howell had gone through, the plot actually thickened, and the shadow over Howell seemed to grow darker and darker in hindsight.

As it turns out, early attempts at relief had actually been made due to the distress flag being hoisted. But of course, Howell never knew of these attempts. But why? The relief crews stated that the landing conditions were always extremely poor due to the weather. In the hopes of confirming whether the situation was dire enough to try and land anyways, they drifted as close to shore as they dared and shouted for someone to inform them further, but they never heard any reply. Instead, eventually one of them would look up to see the silhouette of the silhouette of the of a man on the rails of the main deck, and the man was waving in the wind.

The relief crews took it as a sign that no immediate landing was necessary, that all was well. So they turned back for the safer waters off the coast of Wales. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content

as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly livestreams with Brian and myself. So go to Patreon Patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.