Lore - Episode 23: Rope and Railing

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

There are places in the world that we rarely see. Our busy lives never take us there, and as a result, they don’t come to mind when we think of chilling tales and frightening lore. But they exist, and despite their inherent light, they too hold a deep darkness. ———————————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is the world we all know with its streets and houses and the bustle of everyday life. And then there is the other world, filled with places that are set away from the center of our lives, places that most of us rarely interact with. Mav yards are a good example of this, and maybe even hospitals. We go there for specific reasons, but only rarely, if we're lucky. But standing at the farthest edge of society, in a place it has held for thousands of years, is a structure we rarely give a second thought to. Not because it's unimportant, or because it's irrelevant, but because it's literally

on the edge of our world. The lighthouse. There are few buildings that harbor such powerful meaning and purpose in our world. Without fail, though, they have stood watch for millennia, right on the border between safety and danger, between darkness and light, between hope and despair. And yet, by their very nature, they are isolated and nearly forgotten. Since the earliest known accounts, right up to modern times, the purpose of these buildings has changed very little.

They cast a light into the darkness, so that sailors might better understand where they are and what's ahead. They rarely waver. They frequently save lives, and they're universally understood. Which is why we have such a hard time believing that, even there, in the narrow walls and never-ending stairs, stories have taken root. That shill the mind. There doesn't seem to be a lighthouse in the world without some whisper of unusual activity,

some tale of tragedy or a rumor of lost love. Often times, those stories speak of dangers from the world outside. Others, though, hint at something worse, a darkness that's right inside the walls. Because every now and then, horror is born, or the light is the brightest. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. For thousands of years, sailors around the world have used coastal lights to avoid risky waters and locate safe harbor. In an age before GPS, electrical lights, or anything more complex than celestial navigation,

the lighthouse was often the only thing standing between a ship's crew and certain death. One of the oldest lighthouses in the world is the Tower of Hercules in Spain. It dates back nearly 2,000 years, and is the oldest known functional Roman lighthouse. It illustrates the simplicity of a design that has changed very little over the centuries, a bright light held as high as possible with room in the building for a caretaker or staff. And it's that last bit, the staff, that sits at the center of nearly every whispered tale of lighthouse folklore. After all, without people, there would be no tragedy.

That's our legacy as humans. We bring pain and fear with us wherever we go. Even to the edge of the world. And the staff who lived inside each lighthouse eventually comes to call the place their home. It's the center of their life. Occasionally, though, it also becomes their final resting place. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories of unusual activity inside the walls of lighthouses all around the world.

One such place, the Hecate Head Lighthouse in Oregon, has a reputation that goes back decades. There is a long forgotten grave on the property that belonged to an infant. According to local legend, the baby was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper and his wife. And when she died, the mother fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. Since the 1950s, nearly every keeper on duty has reported unusual activity inside the lighthouse. Screams have been heard in the middle of the night. Cupboards that were purposely left open were often found closed and objects have been seen to move in front of people. In the 70s, a groundskeeper was washing the windows of the house, inside and out.

And while he was in the attic, he turned to see a silver-haired woman floating inches above the floor. The man, clearly frightened, bolted from the attic and refused to return. And so he was given permission to clean the outside of the attic window by way of a ladder. In his effort to rush the job, though, the man broke the glass. But rather than go back into the attic to clean it up, he left it. Later that night, the lighthouse keeper was pulled from sleep by the sound of glass moving across the floor above him. When he checked the next morning, he found that the glass had been swept into a neat pile. Another lighthouse, this one near Fairfield, Connecticut, holds an equally chilling history.

Three days before Christmas in 1916, keeper Fred Jordan set off for the mainland in his rowboat, leaving his assistant Rudy in charge of the light. Rudy watched Fred row off into the distance, which turned out to be a good thing because Fred's boat capsized about a mile from the island. Hoping to rescue his friend and boss, Rudy climbed into a second boat and rode after to help. Unfortunately, though, strong winds had pushed Fred far from the location of the accident, and Rudy was never able to find him. Two weeks later, Rudy claimed to have seen Fred's ghost inside the lighthouse. According to his entry in the logbook, a light descended the stairs right in front of him and then began to act strangely. It moved toward the keeper's quarters, disappearing into the room.

When Rudy caught up, the light was gone, but the logbook had been opened. Rudy checked the date on the page, and it was the date of Fred's death. In 1942, two boys were fishing near the lighthouse when their boat capsized in an eerie echo of Fred Jordan's accident. Thankfully, though, a strange man happened to be there, and he pulled both of them to shore on the island. Telling them to walk to the lighthouse for help. Once there, the current keeper of the light welcomed them in, gave them both warm drinks and allowed them to dry off. They told the keeper of the man who had helped them, but he knew of no one else on the island who could have done such a thing. And that's when the boys saw an old picture on the wall and recognized their rescuer in the photo.

That, they were told by the keeper, was Fred Jordan. There are countless stories like these, scattered all around the world, like the debris of a ship that broke upon the rocks. Ghosts of the past have a way of finding us, it seems. Sometimes, though, it is us who create the most frightful experiences, not some otherworldly force. More often than not, it is people, not ghosts, who haunt lighthouses. The Smalls are a collection of raw, lifeless basalt rocks that stretch out into the Atlantic, roughly 20 miles from the coast of Wales. The first light built there was small and rough, not much more than a house lifted high above the water on half a dozen or so oak and iron pylons, which allowed the waves and wind to pass through. It had been financed in 1776 by a man from Liverpool named John Phillips and constructed by Henry Whiteside.

To show just how much faith he placed in the structure, Whiteside himself lit the flame and tended the light for the first winter. But this wasn't a room at the Hilton, believe me. It was a simple one-room shack, affixed to the top of a platform with a lightroom above it. A rope ladder and trapdoor allowed access from below, and a narrow gallery and railing circled the perimeter of the building, which allowed the keepers to step outside and do repairs. It was required that the trapdoor remain closed at all times, unless someone was entering or exiting the house, because the door itself constituted the majority of the walking space of the room. It was, for all intents and purposes, a treehouse strapped to a small rock in the cold Atlantic. But it served its purpose, and Whiteside survived the winter without incident. He even devised a system for passing messages to the mainland, using the cliche paper note in a glass bottle method.

After his short time in the lighthouse, Whiteside passed the torch, literally, to a pair of men who would be the professional keepers of the light. And that's how the smalls lighthouse operated for over two decades, with a pair of men living in isolation, 20 miles from the mainland. Whites would go by without contact from others. During the winter, that silence could even be months long. Now, I'm an introvert, so I have to admit that the idea of weeks and weeks of silence, with piles of books and lots of writing to keep me busy, sounds like heaven. But during the winter of 1801, things were far from utopian. Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith were the lighthouse keepers at the time. According to what we know of the two men, Griffith was a young, tall, powerfully built laborer.

Howell, on the other hand, was a small middle-aged craftsman who had worked for years as a cooper, making barrels. Both men were from Pembrokeshire, were married, and had families that lived on the mainland. But the thing people remember the most about them is that they didn't get along. In fact, they hated each other, and everyone knew it. It was said that during their infrequent visits to the mainland, the men could be seen in local pubs arguing constantly. The fights covered a wide range of topics, and witnesses claimed that there was nothing the men could agree on. Sometimes their shouting would get so out of control that the pub would actually empty just to get away from them. But not once were they ever seen to come to physical blows.

People expected it, though. During the winter of 1801, the weather contributed to their intense isolation. Relief keepers couldn't dock at the island. Supply ships tried to reach the rock but failed, and because of that, fresh water and food began to run low. They tried to use Whiteside's method of sending a message in a bottle, but no one ever answered. Most likely the work of those same storm-tossed waves that kept away the supply ships. One thing they didn't run out of, though, was fuel for the light, and so Howell and Griffith stayed busy. After all, those same storms that kept supplies and human contact from reaching them was also threatening the ships that passed through the Smalls.

Their duty took precedent. It was most likely in the service of that duty that Thomas Griffith took ill. Some reports say that it was a sickness that laid the big man low. Others make mention of an accident and of how Griffith slipped and hit his head one day while working in the house. Regardless of the cause, every record of the event agrees on the conclusion. After weeks of failing health, Griffith, so young and fit and full of life until then, tragically passed away. And just like that, Howell found himself completely alone. Stranded on a rock in the Atlantic with only a corpse to keep himself company.

Howell had a problem on his hands. Well, two problems, actually. The biggest of those was that he and Griffith were known to quarrel constantly. So he didn't have the freedom to simply toss the man's body into the sea and trust that others would consider him blameless. No, he needed to make sure everyone knew that Griffith's death was not his fault. And so he kept the body, which led to his second problem. With no burial, the body would be left exposed to the elements leading to decomposition. It probably didn't take long for Howell to look around the small room he shared with the corpse to understand how bad of an experience that would be.

And so he began to plan. Taking apart some of the storage cabinets in the room, Howell constructed a makeshift coffin. He knew his way around a hammer and saw and managed to build something that worked. But Griffith was big and Howell was alone and, well, he was in a hurry. When he finished, he took the large box, along with Griffith's corpse, outside onto the gallery that surrounded the house like a porch. It was cold outside, and that would help delay the decomposition. But it was also harsh there. Waves crashed against the lighthouse constantly.

And so as a precaution, Howell tied the box to the rails. The winter storms had other ideas, though. And one night soon after moving the coffin outside, a great wave washed up and smashed the box to pieces. All the wood and nails and rope that Howell had cobbled together to contain the body of his dead partner disintegrated and fell onto the rocks below. All of it, except Griffith's body. According to the reports from those who rescued Howell months later, Griffith's corpse had managed to get tangled in the rope and railing at the edge of the gallery. Even though waves continued to wash over it and the occasional seagull approached for an inspection, nothing knocked the body free.

Which meant that rather than spend the coming weeks in peaceful retreat, Howell had a front row view of his partner's decomposition. I have to imagine that there were many moments when he regretted his decision. When he had to fight the overwhelming urge to rush outside, cut the ropes and kick Griffith's body down to the waves below. It certainly would have ended the nightmare that he found himself living in. But it also would have stirred up the suspicion and judgment that he was hoping to avoid. And so week after week, month after month, Howell lived in the small room of the lighthouse, hending the flame and maintaining the building. All while the rotting corpse of Griffith stood watch outside.

He later spoke of how one of the body's arms hung loose and would swing and wave toward him. It sounds like the sort of tale Edgar Allan Poe would scratch onto the page at night, echoes of the telltale heart thumping monotonously in the background. But for Howell, this was reality and it drove him mad. When a rescue boat finally landed on the small rock almost four months after the death of Griffith, they discovered the rotted corpse on the gallery and an emaciated, shell-shocked Howell inside. He was alive, but the prolonged exposure to the side of the corpse had wounded him deep in his mind and his soul. It was said that even when he was finally on the mainland and brought to the care of his family and friends,

many of them failed to recognize him. Howell was alive, but there was very little of him left inside. Like an abandoned lighthouse, his flame had gone out. Everyone loves a good ghost story. There is mystery and horror in moments that put you on the edge of your seat. They're great around the campfire or the kitchen table and they have a way of uniting people. Fear, after all, is a universal language. But not every scary story has a ghost at the center of it.

And while many frightening tales from the lighthouses of the world contain some element of the supernatural, perhaps it's the stories without them that frighten us the most. Isolation, loss, guilt, and hopelessness are emotions that can happen to any of us, no matter where we live or what we've been through. Maybe that's what makes the story of Thomas Howell so chilling. It could literally have happened to us if we had been in his shoes. And everything he experienced would be just as frightening and traumatic to you or I as it was to him. Alone and isolated in tight quarters with dwindling supplies.

The rotting corpse of the man he hated, swinging in the wind and rain outside the window of his bedroom. And no sign of a rescue ship on the horizon. Day by day, week by week, month by month. It's a horror that would drive any of us mad. Ironically, though, help had tried to reach him. Ships sailed, people watched. But every time they came close, they turned back, satisfied that everything was all right. It wasn't the light that convinced them, though.

It was something else, something that multiple ships and witnesses confirmed together afterward. Every time they got close, they could see, high up on the gallery surrounding the light, the shape of a man. But he wasn't calling for help or beckoning them to come dock on the island. No, according to those who saw him. Take pride in your home with the new Swiffer Power Mop. The new Swiffer Power Mop gives you a mop and bucket clean in just half the time, leaving you more time to enjoy your home with the ones you love most. Swiffer is proud to sponsor iHeartRadio's Can't Cancel Pride 2023,

an evening honoring the LGBTQ plus community and celebrating organizations creating a more inclusive and equal world. Learn more at Can'tCancelPride.com. This man did nothing but lean against the rail and wave over and over again. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts. Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place. The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.