Why did three lighthouse keepers vanish without a trace in 1900?
There was only thing to greet Captain Jim Harvie when his boat docked at a barren lump of rock in 1900 – a lighthouse.
Harvie blew the boat’s whistle and shot a flare as he came near the isle on that Boxing Day. No response.
His crewmate Joseph Moore stepped out onto Eilean Mòr, an island to the north-west of Scotland, to seek out the three lighthouse keepers they were there to replace.
But instead of James Ducat, 43, Thomas Marshall, 40, and Donald McArthur, 28, Moore found the lighthouse empty.
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Two of the three waterproof coats were missing, the beds were unmade and there was uneaten food in the kitchen.
The lighthouse’s lamp, meanwhile, had been refilled and cleaned.
‘A dreadful accident has happened at Flannans,’ Captain Harvey wrote in a telegram to the Northern Lighthouse Board, which oversees the lighthouse.
‘The three keepers, Ducat, Marshall and the occasional, have disappeared from the island.’
What happened to the men is one of Scotland’s most enduring mysteries.
Where are the Flannan Isles?
The Flannan Isles, as a workplace, would not get glowing reviews. Seven rocks claw out of the frigid North Atlantic Ocean, smacked by waves taller than houses and winds up to 150mph.
Tales of pre-Christian human sacrifices and tribes of pygmies living in the northern stretch of the islands have been documented.
A tiny, stone chapel sits on the largest of the islands, Eilean Mòr, once a religious site and burial ground.
The crags’ eerie nature was so well-known that the shepherds who would take their sheep to graze there would always be home by sunset, fearful of the spirits said to lurk at night.
In 1899, a lighthouse was built on Eilean Mòr.
Who were the missing lighthouse keepers?
Ducat was a veteran lighthouse keeper, having entered the field in 1878, according to records. His wife, Mary, was the daughter of two keepers.
Officials asked the Breasclete local to be the principal keeper with former seaman Marshall as his assistant.
The pair were stationed at Eilean Mòr for a year, with part-time keepers arriving for support every few weeks.
MacArthur, from the nearby island of Lewis, was called about six weeks before the incident to be their newest occasional.
‘Severe winds, the likes of which I have never seen before in 20 years’
This is what Marshall jotted down in his logbook on December 12, some three days before he would never be seen again.
‘Stormbound 9pm. Never seen such a storm. Everything shipshape. Ducat irritable,’ he wrote, adding that they ‘prayed’ the bad weather would end.
On December 15, the final entry read: ‘Storm ended. Sea calm. God is over all.’
Yet Mike Dash, a historian who researched the case for more than 20 years for the Fortean Times, concluded that the entries were a hoax.
‘They don’t fit – they contain personal details that would be irrelevant in a normal logbook,’ he told Metro.
There was a real logbook as all keepers had one at the time, according to the Northern Lighthouse Board, which had its last written entry on December 13.
The American pulp magazine True Strange Stories printed the first recorded mention of the fabled entries in 1929, according to Dash.
‘Editor John Spivak admitted in his memoirs to frequently inventing details to make his stories spookier and more compelling,’ he added.
An ‘extra large’ wave swept the men
If you ask Robert Muirhead, the Superintendent at the lighthouse authority, what happened to the men was clear-cut.
When investigating the disappearance, Muirhead found turf had been ripped from the tops of cliffs 200ft above sea level.
While a supply crate about 100ft above sea level had been smashed open, leaving ropes tangled in the rocks.
Muirhead concluded that a storm hit at dinnertime, prompting Marshall and Ducat to head out to secure the tools on the western landing.
An ‘extra large’ wave dragged the men into the sea. When they didn’t return, MacArthur ventured off to find them and suffered the same fate.
The keepers’ death certificates say they died ‘probably drowning’.
Could the men have been murdered?
Keith McCloskey, an author who has written about the mystery, however, doesn’t buy this.
McCloskey, who lives in Hungerford, visited the Flannan Isles and spoke with the descendants of the keepers as part of his research.
Those who knew MacArthur described him as a burly sailor with shaky mental health, McCloskey told Metro.
‘He was extremely volatile, prone to violence and was a heavy boozer,’ the 73-year-old retiree says.
McCloskey suggested that MacArthur brawled with the men, perhaps rattled by weeks of being ordered around by his superiors as the ‘dog’ of the group. He threw them – and then himself – into the choppy seas below.
‘When you’re cooped up with two other blokes in a small place like that, the differences come to the surface very, very quickly,’ McCloskey said.
‘My friend, a lighthouse keeper, says the test of how you got on with anybody in a lighthouse was, would you go for a drink with them?’
Loneliness and isolation can negatively impact our mental health, Dr Michael Swift of the British Psychological Society told Metro.
‘Even for those who tolerate solitude well, extended periods without meaningful human contact place the mind under significant load,’ he said.
‘What the research consistently shows is that connection is not just a social nicety but a stabilising force for mental health and, when it is disrupted, the psychological impact can be far-reaching.’
Today, the Flannan Isles lighthouse is one of more than 200 automated lighthouses still shining in Scotland.
With its steps long since washed away by the waves, the lighthouse stands as a monument to the three men, whose families may never know what happened.
Ducat’s daughter, Anna, told The Times in 1990 that the last time she saw her father was when he picked her up in the garden to kiss her goodbye.
‘I always wondered,’ Anna recalled, ‘if he had some kind of premonition that he would never see us again’.
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