History Daily - Saturday Matinee: Our Weird World

Episode Date: March 15, 2025

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we dive into a Scottish mystery from 1900- The Eilean Mor Lighthouse and its three lightkeepers who disappeared without a trace. Link to Our Weird World: https://johnhinsonwrites.com/ Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

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we're headed to Scotland. But that doesn't make any sense. And neither does the story we're exploring today, the mysterious disappearance of the Ellen Moore Lighthousekeepers. In 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished without a trace from a brand new lighthouse off the Scottish coast. Speculation has been rife as to what happened to these three men, but we have an episode from the podcast, Our Weird World, to help us sort it out. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow Our Weird World.

We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. Welcome to Our Weird World. I am your host, John Henson, and a little bit different today. First of all, thank you to Lindsay and all the fine folks over at History Daily for inviting me to share today's story with you guys on your feed. Just a really great community that they have built over there. And I'm really honored to be a part of it and to be able to share a story with you guys today. A little bit about me. I am based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I have been doing this podcast since around the pandemic. This was a classic pandemic project and been going for over 250 episodes now. My format a little bit different than History Daily. Episodes every Monday. But again, in kind of a similar fashion, I'm trying to find forgotten, strange, weird stories from history that have been overlooked and forgotten. I touch on a variety of topics as well from the paranormal to serial killers, a lot of serial killers. We even have a month dedicated to serial killers. I call it serial killer September because I like alliteration.

And so all kinds of stuff. I have a very fast-paced style about me. So if that's your thing, hopefully you'll enjoy this episode. But we're kind of around St. Patrick's Day. And so while I don't have a necessarily specific story about St. Patrick's Day, our story does come from Scotland and some Irish influence here. So kind of tangential, maybe somewhat adjacent. I think it works. But I'm telling you the story today of the Ellen Moore Lighthouse mystery.

Kind of a mix. Maybe there's some true crime involved. Maybe there's some paranormal involved. It's a mystery. We don't know. So let's dive into it right now. So a little bit of background. Sometime in the 6th century, Irish Bishop St. Flannan built a chapel for the shepherds who regularly brought their sheep to graze on Ellen Moore, an uninhabited part of the Flannin Isles in the outer Hebrides of Scotland.

These chain of very rocky islands, I think, on the north or maybe just straight eastern side of Scotland. Although the shepherds often use the chapel, none of them actually ever spent the night on the island because there was this common fear of spirits that allegedly haunted the area. Now, fast forward several centuries to the late 1800s when the Northern Lighthouse Board of Scotland commissioned a lighthouse for the island and then lit it for the first time on December 7, 1890. Over a year later on December 26, 1900, the Hesperus, a small transport ship, was traveling to the brand new lighthouse after several reports came in that it wasn't working properly. As Captain James Harvey reached the landing platform, he was surprised that no one came out of the lighthouse to greet them, as was customary. Even after blowing his horn and shooting a warning flare, still no one came out of the lighthouse, even though it was supposed to be fully staffed. Joseph Moore, who was with Captain Harvey and was preparing to be a replacement lighthouse keeper, got out of the ship, got onto the dingy or the lifeboat or whatever they have,

and rode himself to shore, ascended the stairs up the rocky outcropping of the island that led to the lighthouse, and walks up, tries to figure out what's going on. He soon realized that the door was unlocked and that two of the three oil-skinned coats belonging to the other inhabitants of the house were missing. More then walked into the kitchen and found half-eaten food and an overturned chair as if someone was in the middle of lunch or dinner but then hurriedly left the room. After searching the entire lighthouse and not finding anyone, like this place is absolutely abandoned, which is weird because it's an island.

Where are they going to go? So more goes back down to the ship to Captain Harvey to report everything that he found. The crew then on the rest of the boat decided to go back and search the entire island, but no sign of anyone was ever found. So, man's-suosituan auto-vacutus corvah

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the board superintendent of lighthouse keepers, investigated the lighthouse for himself. He gets this report. He's like, oh, yeah, that's not. right? Terrible accent. Get used to it. So he goes, he goes to the lighthouse. He goes to Ellen Moore himself to investigate. The first thing he looks at is the Keepers Log. And inside it, he found a series of very unusual entries beginning on December 12th. It started with second assistant Thomas Marshall noting severe wins and that the principal keeper, James Ducott, had been very quiet.

He also noted that third assistant William MacArthur had been crying, which was especially strange since MacArthur was a known brawler and an experienced mariner. So, like, this is like the toughest of the tough dudes, right? Like, why would he be crying in a lighthouse unless there's something crazy going on? Maybe it's these very nondescript anonymous spirits that have long haunted this island. We don't know. The next day's log for December 13th noted that. that a storm had been raging for several days and it was still going on and that the men had been praying throughout the night. Again, Mirhead, the superintendent who's investigating, he found that very strange because the Ellenmore Lighthouse was only a year old.

It was state of the art for whatever state of the art was in 1900 and stood 150 feet above sea level. So like even if the waves were fierce and the ocean was angry and all that, like they were protected from all that. So maybe the gusty winds could have freaked him out a little bit. But again, these are like hardened sailors and bar fighters. Like these are tough dudes. And so it would take a lot for them to get spooked and scared. Now, to make this Keepers log even stranger, there weren't actually any reported storms. in the area at the time.

The only storm noted in meteorological reports from other logs around Scotland occurred on December 17th, two days after the final entry in the Ellen Moore Lighthouse log, which claimed, quote, storm ended, sea calm, God is over all. So, Mirhead, the investigator, he's really confused by this. He also wondered why all three lighthouse keepers had left their post, despite clear rules prohibiting. them from doing so, and why one of them had gone out in the middle of winter without a coat. Because remember, two or a couple of those oil-skinned coats were missing.

After investigating the other landing platform on the island, so there were at least two. So the first one is where the Hesperus landed, but there was apparently another one, I guess, maybe on the other side, on the opposite side. They investigated that landing platform, and Mirhead noted several ropes that were normally held in a crate above the platform, were instead strewn all. over the rocks below. He also noticed that the railings were bent. The iron railway that transported goods from ships up to the lighthouse to make it easy for him, that had been ripped out of the concrete and a rock, a boulder, really, weighing more than one ton had been misplaced or displaced.

In his final report, Muirhead really didn't know what had happened, but he surmised that the crate holding these ropes had broken and that the three lighthouse keepers had gone down to retrieve the ropes, had been hit by a massive wave, and just had all been swept out to see. And that's great. That logic tracks. You know, I'm generally on board with that. But despite that theory, and this is why people have kind of blown this up, none of the bodies ever washed ashore.

Critics were also confused by the one keeper who left his coat and how all three of these men who were allegedly very experienced mariners could have all. been caught by surprise by a wave, especially since all reports from nearby islands noted very calm seas during those days. You know, between, you know, December, I guess it would have been like 13th when the last Keepers log at Ellen Moore was done and then the storm on December 17th, right? So it's four days of calm seas. Couldn't have possibly happened.

So instead, people who probably had way too much time on their hands and not enough real problems in their life began believing a variety of obviously very plausible theories, you guys. Here were some of them. They were captured by foreign invaders. They had arranged for a ship to come and take them away so they could fake their own deaths and start new lives. A sea monster had attacked them because, you know, Loch Ness monster is not just for Loch Ness. They had been abducted by aliens or a ghost ship, the Phantom of the Seven and hunters had arrived on the island and killed them. Sure.

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Since this incident, subsequent lighthouse keepers have reported hearing strange voices with the

wind, oftentimes calling out the names of the three keepers who vanished from the lighthouse.

Conversely, it was later discovered that the log books allegedly seen by Mirhead were completely

fictitious, and added to this story several years later. So remember all that time I just now wasted going through the various details of, oh, the direct quote of, you know, Storm is calm, God is overall, blah, blah, blah, you know, the one dude crying or that they were praying throughout the night. None of that was real. None of it. Some dork added it to the story several years later. and then everybody like you probably just did believed it,

didn't fact check it whatsoever and let this legend grow. Whether there were actually any entries, mysterious or explainable, in the Ellen Moore Lighthouse logbook, is actually unknown. We don't know for sure what their logbook actually said. Today, most people believe that kind of what happened was that one guy got washed out to see

and then the others heard the emergency happen that would kind of explain why the half-eaten food was left on the table and it looked like people rushed out. So maybe the rest of them then rushed out to try to save the one guy who got swept out and they all drowned trying to save him. Alternatively, they believe that maybe a fight broke out among all of them along the cliff edge and then all three just beat each other up and fell off the side to their deaths.

Or it was probably a sea monster. All right, there you go. The Ellen Moore Lighthouse mystery. Still, I mean, still technically a mystery, if only because people in subsequent years added to the story and made what really happened almost impossible to actually figure out now. But that story in the books,

that's how I like to close story time. and I say that very specifically because the Ellenmore Lighthouse mystery is literally in the books. I get these stories, obviously, from a ton of research, but then I write books. I have a series called the 100 Stories series. There are 10 editions of the lesser known history of humanity and then some other several spinoffs with like paranormal serial killer editions. I do have two versions of the North Carolina history, just because that's where I'm based. And so if you prefer to also read your history instead of just consuming it

audibly, I guess, that would be the way to say it. But if you are, if you do, like I have several books that I have published. They are, you can find them on my website, john hinson writes.com. And this story is in the third edition of the 100 stories paranormal edition. So the spinoff of that. The other thing I like to do on my show is to kind of quickly recap with a segment called What Did We Learn? We learn. Number one, Ellen Moore, this rocky, a little island on the Hebrides of Scotland, and I killed those pronunciations. All right. Here's the thing about me that you guys don't know, but my crowd does.

I don't do like a ton of work on the finer details. I feel like Lindsay, the people over here at History Daily, they really put in the extra work. All right. I'm just here to tell you guys stories, all right? I make sure that the details of the stories are correct, but maybe if I mispronounce a place or a name, that'll slip through every now and then. And, you know, some people can't handle that and that's okay. I get it.

I'm not everybody's cup of tea. I'm not even my own cup of tea a lot of the time, you guys, all right? But it is what it is. Number two, three lighthouse keepers on this island mysteriously just disappeared. And because people added to the story over time, it just, we don't know. We have no idea what actually happened. We don't know if there was actually anything in the Keepers log for the Ellenmore Lighthouse. And so this story will likely forever remain a mystery.

And then number three, people had some really dumb ideas. about what happened. Some people thought aliens abducted them. Some people thought a ghost ship came and killed them. Because apparently there's just ghost ships sailing around Scotland. I didn't know that. Or, again, I mean, look, you think it's a joke, but it's sea monsters, guys, clearly. What did we learn?

So that does it. Thank you so much for checking out this episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Hope you learned something new. if this is something that you're interested in, new episodes drop every Monday. So you can listen to history daily first and then flip on over and check out whatever nonsense

I'm ranting and screaming about after that. We're on all the major podcast platforms and you can check out john henson writes.com for all of the other information about me, the books that I've published, and anything else you want to know about me if you're curious. I don't know why you would be, but hey, I'm flattered.

So that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I like to tell my audience to keep telling all their friends about the show, growing it through word of mouth. It's the best way to do it. And to also do the word. This is a podcast.